i7o Media

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

1. All in One SEO Pack
In my opinion, this is the most useful plugin of all time. Helps you pick the post titles, keywords, tags and more. It also allows you to noindex the category, tag and archive pages which helps you avoid duplicate content issues.

2. Google Sitemap Generator
This great little plugin creates a sitemap file each time your blog is updated. Search engines love sitemaps. The name is misleading as yahoo, msn, ask and many others will read the sitemap. Very easy to install.

3. Google Analytics
Google analytics allows you to get detailed stats on your blog. How many visitors, where they came from, which pages they visited, where they exited. Possibilities are endless with google analytics, a great free tool

4. MBP Ping Optimizer
This little plugin will control your pinging. You don’t want to be pinging the search engines every 10 secs, this allows you to control the minimum time between pings as well as a ping log.

5. Automatic SEO Links
Allows you to choose a keyword/keyphrase and turn that into a link each time it is mentioned in the blog. You also have the ability to choose nofollow. This will only work for the keyphrase once per post, so you don’t have to worry about having spammy looking links in your posts.

6. Nofollow Case by Case
Gives you the ability to choose which comments don’t deserve follow tags and which do. This helps with comment spammers and allows you to look after the genuine commenters.

7. SEO Friendly Images
It’s important to SEO your images with alt tags – you can actually get lots of traffic from images. This plugin will ensure that your images are SEO optimized. If you forget to add alt tags, this plugin will add them for you.

8. SEO Post Link
When you set a post slug, sometimes they are too long and search engines don’t like that. This plugin will shorten the post slugs i.e http://www.bizboink.com/short-post-slug. The plugin will cut out unnecessary words, you can set it to a maximum number of words or characters

9. SEO Smart Links
Use this plugin for internal linking. By linking from one post to another, you can keep readers on your blog for longer. It can take a while to manually add those links, so use this plugin which will create a link to a certain page when you use a certain word/phrase.

10. SEO Title Tag
This allows you to make your post titles different to your title tags. By default wordpress will use your post titles as the title tag. The post title should be something catchy, but the title tag should be full of related phrases and synonyms which can help capture more visitors in a wider net.

11. Redirection
Whenever you need to move a page to another address(which happens somtimes), you can use this plugin to ensure a smooth redirection without losing your position in the search results.

12. Google Positioner
This plugins allows you to follow which keywords are bringing you visitors from the search engines. This helps monitor your search engine rankings.

13. Related Entries
This plugin allows you to output a series of related posts based on the keywords used in the post. This helps your readers move onto the next most relevant post.

14. WP Backlinks
This plugin allows you to manage reciprocal links with other websites. Whilst reciprocal links are not the best quality links you can get, they are still an important part of the overall SEO in Google’s eyes. They make your links look natural. Be sure to only trade links with related sites with good page rank.

15. Wordpress Global Translator Plugin
Make your blog available in over 41 different languages. Gives you a much bigger audience.

Next time we will be revealing 15 Wordpress plugins to pimp your blog

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

The Fundamentals of Blog SEO

Blogs are the beez-neez as far as the major search engines are concerned. Google, yahoo and MSN especially love blogs because they constantly provide fresh content and blogs have built in software that pings the search engines each time a new post or page is published.

In a way, blogs are SEO friendly right out the box. This is true, they are SEO friendly, but they still require some fundamental plugins and adjustments to make them 100% SEO optimized. This is where you are going to get ahead of your rivals and into google’s favor!

We will discuss the plugins and adjustments very soon, but firstly we need to understand the fundamentals of blog SEO.

SEO Fundamentals

• Consistent regular content: Blogs which are consistently updates with fresh content are recognised by the search engines and crawled more regularly. Obviously fresh content is also adding value for your readers. Search Engines LOVE fresh content.

• XML sitemaps: An XML sitemap is a small file on your website which provides a list of URLs which notifies search engines when fresh content is posted. Each time fresh content is added, the sitemap is updated. Search engines love sitemaps because they only need to spider this small file to discover the new content. Major blogging platforms have plugins available which easily setup and rebuild your xml sitemap.

• Duplicate content: Blogs can face problems with duplicate content, meaning that the same content is on several pages on your blog. This happens because you have category, archive and tag pages. Search engines may penalise blogs for this. With smart SEO, we can noindex these pages and allow the search engines to simply index the main page or post. The mighty wordpress platform has a plugin called “All in One SEO” which allows you to simply check a box and noindex these pages.

• Links: Internal and external linking are important for SEO purposes. Firstly, with linking you can direct your readers to the more important pages on your website. The search engines also follow these links around your websites which helps them find out exactly which pages are most important on your site. External linking to other websites is also looked on favorably by the search engines. Search engines can penalise you for having no outbound links as they like to see “natural” looking websites. It is tough to do though, because you are directing your visitors away from your blog. For SEO purposes, sure google likes to see it, but there are many reasons not to. Its a compromise really. Here is what I do – whenever I have an outgoing link, I will make sure that the link opens in a new window – this way the visitor will still have access to your website on an open browser.

• Anchor text: Super important!! Rather than using anchor text such as “CLICK HERE”, you should be using keywords in the anchor text. We will be covering this topic in greater detail in upcoming tutorials.

• RSS feeds: Each blog contains an RSS feed – this is a huge advantage over a static website. It gives you another chance to retain visitors who subscribe to your feed.

Tomorrow, we will cover 15 wordpress plugins to SEO boost your site and drive organic traffic.

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is just as crucial for blogs as it is for standard websites. We all love getting free traffic from the search engines, but most of us simply don’t get enough because our SEO is just not cutting it. SEO is more than a skill, it is an art and a wholistic understanding of how the major search engines view and rank sites.

• Firstly you need to put yourself in google’s shoes. If you were a part of the google team – what would be your number 1 priority?

“Provide relevant and useful information for google users”

So you need to do that! If you can consistently provide quality content, google will reward you. There are some crucial tips you need to follow in order to be found – we will cover that soon.

• Second thing you need to know : Google is smarter than you and always will be! If you think you can beat the google system, you are wrong!

• Third thing you need to know : Google loves to reward the good guys. If you are providing useful and relevant information, google wants to reward you with free traffic!

I’m sure you have heard of all the black-hat techniques that webmasters use to beat the google system, sure these things can work sometimes and for a limited time, but if you are trying to create a long-term stream of google traffic, you need to be providing quality and consistent information for your visitors.

Now it is just a matter of helping google “find you”.

Tomorrow’s Blog Post will cover how you can SEO optimize your blog to maximize search engine traffic.