I have been discussing comments for the last few posts and today lets talk about finding blogs to comment on.
Now there are lists and various posts showing you exactly which blogs are do follow and some people swear by those. If all you are looking for is back links maybe that makes sense but not to me.
Worrying about the do follow or whether or not they use Comment Luv may make you better for SEO purposes but I prefer to find blogs that are on my topic.
Those blogs are much more likely to have people clicking through to my blogs and possibly becoming regular readers.
So even though I would prefer to only comment on blogs that do follow and use Comment Luv the topic is more important.
To do this I go to Google News. Put in my topic and add the rss feed to my Google Reader. This way I see all the newest information on my topic. I can use this to find very current posts on topics I am interested in.
As I find blogs that show up regularly and frequently I add their feed to my reader. Just checking my reader a few times a day and I can find all of their newest posts and go comment.
The closer you are to being the first comment the more people that will see your comment. The more that see it the more traffic you are likely to get.
This is also a good way to find information to share with your Twitter followers too and if you add in Friend Feed you can automate your Twitter posting to build an even better relationship with your Twitter followers.
Twitter Time Saver will show you exactly how to automate that into an easy to use system.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
Just released the recordings and transcripts from last weeks call on WordPress SEO. It is available at WordPress SEO Call.
Here is what was covered
* What plugins are absolutely necessary?
* What settings make a difference?
* What types of posts will help me the most?
* How often should I post?
* What are tags and how do they help?
* What linking strategies work the best?
* Why is MyBlogLog a must use site?
* How can RSS feeds help my SEO?
* And even more including all the questions attendees had
In addition to the note sheet all attendees will receive a pdf with all of the links mentioned, how to’s with screen captures so you can apply these items right away.
Best of all we will continue until we have answered all of your questions.
You must be registered to get the call details so go sign up right now.
One of the biggest questions that comes up here is how to generate more traffic to someone’s blog? To help people with that Steve and I will be doing a call on SEO For Your WordPress Blog. Proper set up and SEO are one of the best ways to increase your traffic.
We will answer these questions -
What plugins are absolutely necessary?
What settings make a difference?
What types of posts will help me the most?
How often should I post?
What are tags and how do they help?
What linking strategies work the best?
Why is MyBlogLog a must use site?
How can RSS feeds help my SEO?
And even more because you will be able to ask any question you have on this topic too?
You can get access to this call for free on September 23rd at 7 pm.
Copyright 2009 – Mike Paetzold – All worldwide rights reserved
Here are 3 easy ways to improve your WordPress blog and get better search engine rankings for your blog.
There is no doubt that the Big G likes blogs and one of the reasons so many people have switched from static websites to blogs. The interlinking inside of the blog is a great help but there is one thing that has not been addressed even in the latest version of WordPress.
Talk to anyone that does seo and invariably they will all agree that your title tag is the most important part of your on site optimization. (And getting any three seo experts to agree on anything is rare.)
Unfortunately, WordPress by default uses your blog title as the title tag across the board.
So the first easy change is…
Add a plugin to change the title tags. This way each page will use the post title as the title tag and you even can use a custom title tag.
The plugin I currently use for this is the All In One SEO plugin but there are many others. One of the things with WordPress is the constant influx of new plugins so this might change in the future as it has in the past more than once.
The second easy change is…
Your images. Make sure when you add images you are using the alt tags and naming your images with keywords. Since the advent of uiniversal search Google is often showing images in the main results. Not likely to get a click on image12896.jpg but if your image was named keyword.jpg it would be more likely.
The header image is a prime example. Most themes call the header image header.jpg or header.gif or something similar. Why not rename it to one of your prime keywords?
**Caveat – You will need to change it in your css file too or it will disappear and you won’t have a header. Just search your css file for the name of your header and change it each time you find it.
The third easy change is….
Use the built in tagging structure in WordPress. Either display the tags with each post or use a tag cloud in your sidebar or footer. This creates new tag pages on your site and will often result in indented rankings for that topic in Google.
This gives you two listings for the same post inside the search engines.
Now I do like to use the Simple Tags plugin as it allows me more functionality than the native tagging inside WordPress. Again though plugin recommendations are always subject to change because of the fluid nature of their development. The key is that you use a plugin when it will improve the functionality and take the time to tag each of your posts.
You may use and reprint this article as long as it is posted in it’s entirety and all links and the resource box are included. If you are an affiliate for the book you may substitute your affiliate link for mine.
There are three easy things you can do to improve the optimization of your WordPress blog. You will want to do this because it will improve the speed your blog gets indexed and help you to rank higher for your keywords. The first is adding the proper plug-ins, the second is to change the permalinks, and the third is to claim your blog.
Adding plug-ins
There are a couple plug-ins that you should use on every WordPress blog. One of them is All-In-One-SEO.. You also need to add the Google-XML-Sitemap plug-in along with a tagging plugin. There are multiple tagging plugins and the pluses and minuses of each would be a complete article by themselves.
All-In-One-SEO plug-in allows you to change the title tags for each post. Individual title tags will cause a huge improvement in your rankings over the default WordPress uses of using the same title tag across the whole blog. The site map plug-in creates a compliant site map and updates it automatically for easier indexing on all of the major search engines. Finally proper use of tags will allow you to categorize your posts and get multiple rankings within the search engine rankings..
Change Permalinks
It is easy to change the permalinks on a WordPress blog. Login to your dashboard, click settings, click on permalinks. This will allow you to change your permalinks from a URL of http://yourdomain.com/?p=123 to something more SEO friendly, Using a URL like http://yourdomain.com/category(with your keyword)/post title(again with your keywords there). You can do this by using the custom url with these tags ” /%category%/%postname%/”.There are also other tags available to allow you to create what works best for you.
Google Webmaster Tools and Technorati
You should be using both Google Webmaster Tools and Technorati. Make sure that you submit your blog through the Google Webmaster tools and claim it properly per their instructions. This will be done either by FTPing a special file or creating a special post. Google will now tell you any problems they have indexing your blog when you check back.
Claiming your blog at Technorati also is important. This will allow you to link your tags to Technorati and have them show in your account. This allows you another way to track any problems with the way your blog is being indexed.
In summary, these three steps can improve the optimization of your blog for all on page factors. For me personally, these simple changes have sped up the indexing of my blog significantly and have helped to improve the ranking of the posts too.
Mike Paetzold
About the Author: Mike Paetzold is an avid blogger and recognized expert on using WordPress. You can find even more tips on making your WordPress blog search engine friendly in “7 Tips To Make Your WordPress Blog Search Engine Friendly” or at his blog WordPress Made Easy.
Attention publishers: This article may be used on your blog, website or in your e-zine as long as no changes are made, the copyright and About The Author box are left intact, and all links remain live. Otherwise, no part of these contents made be used in any form – all rights reserved worldwide.
You need to take advantage of the many free services to help get your blog started.
Caveat: The center of your hub should always a WordPress blog or a squeeze page on a domain that you control and own in my opinion.
Now that we have gotten rid of the caveat, lets look at some of the free tools that are available.
Squidoo – my absolute favorite
Hub Pages
Blogger
WordPress.com
MSN Live
For the purposes of illustration we will pick a topic and use a bad word in my vocabulary ass/u/me that you have done the research and found to have profit potential about Turtles. (Turtles are my marketing topic of the daytoday bare with me here.)
You buy a domain, create your blog and start putting content there to draw traffic. You are posting at least daily to get started and more often if Turtles is a very competitive keyword. (Yes, I know I just picked that and have no idea if it is a competitive word. Boo hiss on me.)
Now go to Squidoo and create a lens on your topic. Add your RSS feed to your blog as one of the modules and make sure that use at least 20 tags. (You did keyword research before you entered this market didn’t you?) Add a short text article or two. Grab a You Tube module, a Flcikr module on your topic and add a guest book..
Go to Hub Pages, create a new Hub on your topic and add your RSS feed again. Make sure that you add tags here too. (For both of these you can do a quick re-write of your content to meet the content requirements . Do not use the same content on both sites or what you posted on the blog.)
Create a Blogger blog using your main keyword in the title you sign up with and create a short post about the great article you just found that links to a specific post on your blog with the keyword that post was focused on as your anchor text.
At WordPress.com and MSN Live you will be doing the same basic tasks except you will link to a different post on your blog with the corresponding anchor text for that keyword phrase.
Once a week you will want to add something to each of these sites. When you visit Squidoo you can add a module or just add a few more keywords and re-publish the lens plus the rss feed from your blog will be constantly updated.
Hub Pages will follow the same pattern as Squidoo. I usually add a new content module every other week.
Each week you will link to a new post from each of the free blog services with the anchor text for that post.
This allows you to take 5 minutes extra a day 5 days a week and keep a constant stream of links coming into your interior pages on a regular basis.
Want to take it up another level? Add a commenting and bookmarking strategy along with this you can easily increase the traffic and ranking to your blog quite quickly with very little extra effort. Add in article marketing and you may have to pay more for your server
There are many more of these types of sites that you can use to get even more links. If you have a favorite share with us and leave a comment below.
what plugins, specially SEO does one really need and how to configure them
First one of the things to understand is that WordPress is a fluid environment. New plugins come – plugins disappear. WordPress itself goes through a major change every 3 – 6 months as they constantly improve things. So the list today could each change tomorrow because of changes in either WordPress itself or support from a plugins author.
That is one of the reasons that I have updated the 7 Tips To Make Your Blog Search Engine Friendly three times in the last year. And it will probably happen at least once more this year. It will depend on the changes in the platform.
All of those get installed by uploading them to the wp-content/plugins folder then logging in to your dashboard and activating them.
In order I don’t usually add any special settings to the All In One SEO or All in One Bookmarking.
The Google XML Sitemaps you should take the time to build the first one and may have to temporarily change permissions to get the first build done. If you do make sure that you turn the permissions back once you have successfully built the initial site map.
Simple Tags I don’t make changes unless you want to use the in post linking feature.
Smart Update Pinger does not take any changes unless you have never updated your ping list. You can add to your ping list directly through the settings there.
WP tags to Technorati – I do add the check box in the Open links in a new window. (I hate to have people leave and depend on them using the back button .The rest are the defaults.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Tags in WordPress play a huge role in great many aspects and directly influence your blog performance in such important areas as: Search Engine Optimization, Social Networks relevance and Reader Engagement.
And yet, many fail to realize full potential of WordPress tags and their proper implementation. In this article I would like to address that to some extent…
Tags for Search Engine Optimization
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about tags is – What Are They?Tags are keywords that describe your content, simple as that and yet in that description hides the importance of their proper usage. As keywords they become PART of your url and provide huge boost to Search Engine Relevance.
Using a tag cloud on the sidebar with Do Follow attributes sends search engines to links that include content that includes that tag (keyword) and gives them much needed content. Not only do you get better usage of the archived posts but also boost you rankings.
Interlinking of your posts for SEO using tags is extremely simple. As we all know internal links to relevant content counts by Search Engines not as highly as external links but still counts. Why not take advantage of it? After all – it is FREE SEO Boost!
I personally use “Simple Tags” plugin that uses tags to calculate relevance of the posts to each other and gives you options to display relevant posts under each article. Dynamically calculated SEO relevance that is completely HANDS OFF and on autopilot – Are You Using It?
Social Network Relevance
In this case I’m talking about the Technorati. I know… I know… you might say Technorati looses its power and influence but my personal results indicate that if you do it right – you get some traffic! Key here is getting it right!
First and most important step to this process is obviously to register and claim your blog on Technorati, which I will not cover. But second and yet JUST AS Important is to locate tags within Technorati networks that are most appropriate for YOUR blog. Create a list of those tags and make sure to use at least one of them in EACH post on your blog.
But in order for the Technorati to associate your blog post with one of the tags used – you have to tag that content in a specific format that they recognize. Quite time consuming if you ask me and since I love automating these types of tasks – I installed “Technorati Tags” plugin for WordPress. Just add one line of code to your theme and Voila! Your post is tagged for Technorati re-using your blogs internal tags!
Simple? I would say so and if used consistently it will bring you traffic from Technorati, I guarantee it as long as you picked the right tags and used them!
Reader Engagement
Dynamic and dated format of the blog content is its greatest benefit and at the same time its biggest failure! The older your content becomes – less relevant it becomes in the eyes of the Search Engines but what perhaps is even worse – is in the eyes of The Reader!
You are writing for the people. And while we would like to think that people come and see our blog from it’s front page – my stats shows that over 65% of new visitors land on one of the internal pages! Posts that you might have written in a hurry all of a sudden became the face of your blog and reader finds it irrelevant to his needs – he is looking for a way to click away and never come back!
You have only few options to engage them and hope to retain them by providing MORE relevant and recent content!
Option One: using the “Simple Tags” you present them with a list of tags relevant to the current post articles on your blog. In many cases this will draw them deeper into content.
Option Two: Using Most Recent (latest) articles on your blog’s sidebar. This might help you to present your latest content and engage the reader – provide a clickable link they are looking for and yet, retain them!
Option Three: Tag Cloud. Yep, this one is good not only for Search Engine Optimization but also for reader Engagement. People are getting used to the tags on blogs and realize that Tags are keywords! Clicking on keyword relevant to their search will provide them with access to more content they need! Mission Accomplished.
I hope this quick post helps you see some of the usage of the tools built into your blog and available elsewhere. 2 simple plugins you can install can help you greatly enhance your blog!
Alex Sysoef, is a blogger who shares his knowledge and experience on the pages of his WordPress Web 2.0 Guide blog, wrote this guest post. Visit for even more tips and strategies.
A thank you to Alex for supplying some great tips especially the two plugins that are now part of this blog for testing.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed both here and at Aiex’s blog.
If XML-Sitemap gets corrupted, can we delete it altogether (thru cpanel or FTP) and recreate a fresh one without creating any problems? Thanks
Now I have to make an assumption here and we all know what that ass/u/me word does. If you are using the plugin for WordPress here is what you can do with some caveats.
Yes, you can delete the files with either FTP or cpanel. There will be 2 files. sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz.
Then go into your settings – XML sitempa and manually rebuild them.
The caveat and the problem is that once you have deleted them depending on your server settings the folder your blog is in may not be writeable. If you get an error than you will need to increse the permissions of that folder. Click the rebuild link again. Then return the folder to it’s original permissions. Make sure that the new sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz are set to 666 so that the blog can update them each time you post after that.
It is important that you not leave the folder for your blog set to the permissions necessary to write your original sitemap.xml files as this will leave you vulnerable to hacking.
Make sure that you have submitted the sitemap to Google and Yahoo too if you hadn’t originally.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
For the purposes of illustration we will pick a topic and use a bad word in my vocabulary ass/u/me that you have done the research and found to have profit potential about Turtles. (Turtles are my marketing topic of the day today bare with me here.)
