Copyright 2008 Mike Paetzold

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

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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.

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Technorati Tags: improve seo, Mike-Paetzold, seo, wordpress seo

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 day today 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.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blogger, hub pages, increase traffic, linking, seo, squidoo, wordpress

Today’s question:

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.

That being said here is what I am using today.

• All In One SEO
• All In One Bookmarking
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Simple Tags
• Smart Update Pinger
• WP tags to Technorati

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.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: plugins, seo, seo plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugins

Special guest post from Alex Syseof

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.

Technorati Tags: alex syseof, search engine optimization, seo, simple tags, tag, tags, technorati, wordpress

Today’s question:

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.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: edit sitemap, google sitemap, seo, xml sitemap

Today’s question:

Mike we all know that the headline or title of your post is crucial component for attracting visitors to your site. If I was posting a ‘How to’ post like: How to get bigger biceps, would I want to include one of my top keywords in the title ie: Body Building – How to get bigger biceps? Also wanted to know your thoughts on using “parenthesis” in a blog title that we know people are searching for ie: “How to get bigger biceps”. Will using the parenthesis help you in SE results if someone types in that exact phrase. Thank you

One of the reasons I use a plugin like All In One SEO is because of the importance of a headline. The problem is that you have two constituencies. Your readers and the search engines.

If you have this then you can take care of both by having two headlines. One for your readers – one for the spiders.

Here is an example from my blog at Mike Paetzold Recommends. The post is about Marlon Sanders new product Evergreen Traffic System.If you click that hyperlink you will see that the title of the post is “She’s back and Marlon found her“. That was written for my reader’s to create some curiousity. Check the bar on the browser and you will see a different title – “Evergreen Free Traffic System“. This ranked on the first page of Google for evergreen traffic system on the same day but probably would not have shown up in the top 50 if I had used just the post title.

Now as to your question on quotes.When someone uses quotes in a search query that is to only return results where the words show in that exact order. Not that they are in “quotes”.

The other part of the question is about your keyword choice. You will have a much easier time ranking highly for “bigger biceps” which in a quick check has 41,000 resuts versus “body building” which has 8,900,000 results searching both in quotes. If you start ranking for all those lower keywords you will eventually rank for the more competitive words too.

So to summarize I would probably have used a title like “5 ways to get bigger biceps faster” for my readers and changed it for the title tag to “Bigger biceps – 5 ways to do it faster” for my title tag.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: headlines, search engine optimization, seo, title tags, titles

With all the changes in WordPress in the last few months the plugins I am using have been changing too. I get quite a few questions so here is a list of the plugins I am currently using for SEO and why.

The biggest change when version 2.3 came in was swapping out SEO Title Tag and Ultimate Tag Warrior to All In One SEO.

All In One SEO – this has replaced SEO Title tags in my repertoire and has some nice added features like custom descriptions and keywords added into your meta tags. The title tag is by far the most important but the others sure can’t hurt.

Google XML Sitemap – Since the major search engines have now agreed on a format for xml sitemaps this is even more powerful than before. You can automate the notification of all of the search engines but you will need to sign up for their various webmaster accounts for best effect.

DoFollow – Since adding this I have seen an increase in comments but it does create the need to moderate your blog tightly. The increase in content and trackbacks offsets the outgoing links to this point.

Now there are lots of other plugins I use but these are the prime plugins for SEO. Some of the others are for incrased traffic, ease of use and even to allow me to podcast easily.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: plugins, seo

Neat philosophical discussion that Dr. Mani started o his blog titled “Is Search Engine Optimization ETHICAL ?”

He covers whether it is ethical to use black hat techniques and it is a really interesting discussion.

Check out the dilemna he creates. You might feel strongly one way ot the other but how much does intent play into the equation?

Check it out and let me know what you think. I left my opion in the comments there.

Mike Paetzold

P.S. The replay of Tuesday’s call is available but it will be coming down early next week.

Technorati Tags: ethics, seo, white-hat-vs-black-hat