www.diyara.com

It all began in the late 90’s. I wanted to put some news on my website. A diary. A list of forthcoming events. Let the visitors see my human side (I don’t have one, but that’s another story).

I started with simple HTML. One page, with sections for every post. Simple.

Then I heard about ‘blogs‘ and ‘blogging‘. Being smart, I picked Wordpress, the most popular software. How clever, I thought. If you get the WYSIWYG editor going, anyone can put up a web site. Very democratic.

This encouraged my to post my outermost thoughts; on politics, London, and sinusitis. As a webmaster, I watched to see Google index them. “Here we go”, I thought, “soon, my jewels of extrospection will belong to the ages!”.

Except Google didn’t like my blog. It wouldn’t index much beyond the front page. Why, why, why?

Duplicate content? I set it to put only one post per page.

No improvement.

I looked at what Google was indexing. Then I looked at the blog HTML. Soon, all became clear.

In sum:

- Wordpress was still duplicating my content, and

- It had no proper META tags, and

- There was a lot irrelevant HTML, and

- The layout obscured the content.

I had a quick search on Google to find search engine optimisation tips. There is a plugin ‘head META description’ ( http://guff.szub.net/plugins/ ). But I didn’t use that, oh no.

For some reason, I got the notion that a complete theme would be the ticket. I tried modifying an existing one myself. Better, but not perfect. Google was starting to index more pages, but they all had the same title. My missives to an uncaring world were being ignored.

So I got someone else to do one, based on my criteria, which were:

- Grab a META ‘title’ from the blog post ‘title’;

- Grab a META ‘description’ from the blog ‘excerpts’;

- Put a ROBOTS ‘noindex’ tag in non-content pages.

But that wasn’t enough. For best SEO results you need to configure Wordpress brutally. You have to be _mean_ to it. You have to _man_ enough.

I did a bit of research and came up with to following tips.

WARNING: They are extreme. If you already have good rankings, making radical changes to your URLs may affect them. In my case:

- Moving my blog http://www.ttblog.co.uk to the root web directory (oh dear)

- MOD_REWRITING its URLs (eek!), and

- Removing a 301 redirect (crazy!),

… caused my PageRank to go to 0. BUT, page indexing was unaffected.

This is temporary, I hope, as Google sees it as ’suspect’ behaviour. I had radically changed my site.

Here are the tips, for real _men_, who can look in the face of internet death and laugh:

1. Activate permalinks by going to ‘Options/Permalinks’. You may have to enable Apache MOD_REWRITE on your web account.

1a. Shorten the permalinks code to just the %postname% variable. Don’t bother with the date codes. This keeps your URLs short.

2. Point your blog in the uppermost directory possible. http://www.ttblog.co.uk is better than http://www.ttblog.co.uk/wordpress/

So a typical post would look like
http://www.ttblog.co.uk/Im-hard-as-nails-me/
rather than
http://www.ttblog.co.uk/wordpress/2006/08/03/Im-hard-as-nails-me/

3. Under Options > Reading > Show at most ‘1′ post
This is so duplicates of your content don’t appear on your site.

4. Then install an SEO’d theme.

My blog posts are now being indexed beautifully. The Google ’site:’ command returns all my posts, and little else.

For my next challenge, I take on Windows XP, and turn it into an operating system. Come on, you devil, I’m ready for you!

T. O’ Donnell ( http://www.tigertom.com/freeware/upload/index.php ) is a web developer and tough guy living in London, UK.

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The world of blogging moves really fast. As fast as millions of people can write code, plug-ins and content. About 75,000 new blogs are added everyday. Bear in mind that most of them are of the ilk “My Cat’s Philosophy” and really aren’t readable and provide no value to anyone but the indifferent cat blogging community.

Alright, we all know that our daily routine should include a shower, a shave and maybe even brushing our teeth before we do our daily blog posting. In the world of blogs, content is king, regardless of whether you brush your teeth or not. Hopefully you’ve optimized your blog, the content is valuable and every post is pinging out the RSS world. People are now taking notice.

Here’s 5 more ways you can improve your blog and create value for your company or cause and better the user experience.

Get People to Participate
Help out your content building strategy and your traffic strategy by encouraging people to participate. Here’s some tips:

Keep People Participating

Keep the Spam off your Blog
Once your blog is off and running, pinging out of control and people are participating, it’s important to keep the spam off your blog. Nothing is more annoying to the user than having to sift through non-appropriate content. Dealing with articles and postings “Awaiting Moderation” can become cumbersome, so try to “nip it in the bud” when it comes to every Romanian or Indonesian blog spammer that comes along. If you’re using WordPress the Askimet plug-in works great, it comes with the free 2.0 download, but you’ll need a WordPress API code (free).

Make Sure Your Bloggers Can Contact You
Don’t expect everyone of your readers or group to want to post their “personal” comment on your blog. Some people actually still do value their privacy! Make sure there is an easy way for them to contact you directly, especially if you’re answering questions or hoping that someone will ask you for a custom proposal. One more time Dagon Design has a great plug-in for a Contact Form (Formmailer) and it has a visual security code that keeps the spammers away. It’s easy to configure, free and comes ready for WordPress and in a standalone PHP format if you use another blog program.

Incorporate Your Existing Site
Regardless of whether you’re running a standalone blog or running one connected to your main site. Make sure that you include hard static links back to your order form, about us, product white papers, contact information, etc. in your blog. It’s not hard to do, put it in the Links section, or add direct links in your header and/or footer. Most blogging software isn’t really ready for shopping carts (although there are some plugins out there in Beta that look promising) but that doesn’t mean you can’t have one. With a little creativity in your header, footer and sidebar you can utilize all of the functionality you currently have on your website, or anyone else’s website.

Well, that’s it for these 5, 5 more just popped into my head! The blogosphere moves fast, make sure you’re moving smart! As always, make sure you have a clear picture in your mind, or better yet on paper of what your goals are for your blog in terms of Return on Investment, then find the right plug-ins, partners or programmers to help you achieve those goals.

Happy Blogging!

Christopher Conlan is Managing Director of Kaboodle Ventures SEO Copywriting and The Blog Mill
Blog Templates a firm specializing in affordable Search Engine Optimization and killer blogs.

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WordPress is getting more popular by the day. It enables people to set up a blog, and even a complete website within minutes.
With all the great free plugins and designs out there it is really an easy to use and complete blogging solution.

I get asked for specific SEO tips for WordPress very often. Basically all the ‘usual’ SEO stuff is also applicable for WordPress.
But besides that, there are a few tips for WordPress I’d like to share with you.
Here it goes:

1. Use Permalinks
Be sure to use Permalinks on your blog.
By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. These links are hard to spider for search engines, and therefor your postings aren’t indexed as fast and as good as you want to.
WordPress offers you the ability however, to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives.
You can find this option in your Admin panel. Choose ‘Options’ in the menu and there ‘Permalinks’.
This brings us immediately to Tip 2:

2. Place your titles up front in your URLs
In the Permalinks section you can choose for the ‘Date and name based’ option. This will place the year, month, day and post title in your URL.
For SEO purposes it’s better to have your post title up front. So instead you should choose for the ‘Custom’ option and put in something like:
/%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/

This will give you an URL like this:
http://www.seo-portal.com/section-targeting-for-adsense/2006/07/06/

3. Tags
Tags are a great SEO addition to your blog. They enable search engines to crawl your website more easily and in addition to that, create specific pages for your tags/keywords.
You can install the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin on your WordPress blog. Get the plugin here: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/

4. Page Titles
Make sure you set good titles on your pages. We discussed putting the post title up front in your URL. You should do the same thing for your Titles.
You can do this by changing the < title > tag in your header.php (located in wp-content/themes/your theme/)
You can use the following code in order to get your post title in front, followed by your blog name:

< title >< ? php wp_title(); ? > : < ? php bloginfo('name'); ? > < /title >

5. Choose your Post Titles carefully
Your Post Titles should be as clear as possible. Don’t stuff your titles with keywords you are targeting with your whole blog.
Choose your keywords carefully per posting, and get those words in your Post Title.

6. Autolinks
Cross link to your own posts and pages in your own content. Do this by linking your keywords to the relevant postings.
To facilitate this work, you can install the SH-Autolink plugin.
http://www.rockschtar.de/wp-plugin-sh-autolink/

7. Related Posts
Put links to related posts under your postings. This helps search engines crawling your site and indexing all your postings.
You can get a plugin for this here: http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/

8. Ping Services
Everytime you post or edit a posting or page, your WordPress blog can notify lots of sites that you updated your blog.
Be sure to use this feature!
You can set up this feature in Options >> Writing. You can find a list of sites to ping on the WordPress site:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services

9. Google Sitemaps
Google has a tool for webmasters called Google Sitemaps(http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/). This will help Google index your website, and let’s you tell Google which pages
are most important. If you make use of this feature, you will be able to see for what searches your site was shown in the results.
This helps you optimizing your appearance in Google.
You can use this plugin to automatically create a sitemap for your WordPress blog:

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final

10. Categories
Categories help you organize your content. If you have the permalinks turned on, the category names will appear in your URL.
This is why it is also very important to name your categories carefully; Try to use keywords to name your categories and don’t be afraid to make a load.
WordPress enables you to make use of subcategories and sub-subcategories etc. etc. This way you can narrow down your focus on certain keyword phrases.
Consider the following example:
You have a website about selling photocamera’s. You could organize your articles/postings like this:
fotocamera’s >> Digital camera’s >> SLR >> Nikon
If a user would be searching for “digital SLR camera nikon” the deepest nested category would have a good optimized url for this search as the url would be something like this
www.yoursite.com/fotocameras/digital-cameras/SLR/nikon/

You can make use of the King Categories Widget to organize your categories:
http://www.blog.mediaprojekte.de/cms-systeme/wordpress/wordpress-widget-king-categories/

Chris writes daily SEO postings on his weblog SEO Portal on http://www.seo-portal.com

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