A Blog For Bloggers
YouTube recently added the Interactive Transcript feature, which uses speech recognition technology to automatically generate the transcript.
This is a easy clue that, Google would use this data to list videos for the keywords used in the video.
Though the transcription isn’t accurate, it surly helps in SEO, if done correctly.
This is a guest post by Crystal J. Briscoe. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.
When you think of setting up a WordPress blog it is very important that you follow certain things to get your website to a good ranking with various search engines. There are many factors that you need to focus on in order to improve the search engine ranking of your WordPress site. Here are some of them you need to consider.
Search engines keep changing their algorithms from time to time in order to prevent spam. Therefore, you need to remain well informed on updates from Google and check fluctuations in site statistics. The title of your post is considered as a most important thing in search engine algorithms. This is the thing that a visitor looks for in any search engine page while conducting a search.
You need to be innovative while creating a title and ensure that it makes sense. The title should include the keyword while clearly explaining what the reader can expect to read in the content. Quality content improves search engine ranking to a great extent. Make sure you do not overuse the keywords in your content as it is an issue with search engines.
Simply rewriting the content from one single source is not considered as rich content by top search engines. It can also be considered as content spinning. They don’t mind if you refer to various sources as long as you include a few more things to add more value to the content. You need to provide the readers with something fresh which they won’t find on other sites.
Once you start publishing superior content on your WordPress blog, you won’t just be able to target prospects but will also see an increase in inbound relevant links. You can provide readers with links to various other quality blogs. Don’t force the links, but let it flow naturally in your content so as to enhance user experience. Linking to superior sites is considered as good sign by search engines.
However, you need to make sure you keep a proper balance between top-quality content and outbound links. By offering valuable information through outbound links, you will not just take your WordPress blog to a higher level but will also gain respect and trust from the reader.
Make sure your pages do not take long to load. This will help you attract more traffic as visitors don’t like browsing pages which waste time in loading. Using WordPress super cache plug-in saves a lot of time as you can store an actual static page. Hence, no time is wasted when anyone requests for a page download.
You also need to focus on niche. Visitors won’t appreciate it if you try to distract them from their topics of interest. If a visitor has to go through a number of links to actually get to what he needs, he would rather start looking for another site for information and loosing even a single visitor makes a difference. It will definitely affect the ranking of your blog.
As and when the search engine algorithms change, you need to make changes in your strategies accordingly so that you do not lose your ranking. To draw significant traffic to your site, you need to have a lot of quality content. SEO optimization is an ongoing process and it might even take around a year before you see good results.
People are covering all different niches in order to attract more and more traffic to their sites. If you do not do constant analysis, things can go wrong within no time. The competition for page rankings is so fierce that you won’t even realize when your WordPress blog will lose the search engine ranking.
Crystal J. Briscoe has been blogging since 2005 & contributing in many websites since its initial career. He is Professional Writer and also technical guru, overloaded with a wealth of experience, and even more degrees, at present busy in 000-068 Exams, He get pleasure from Blogging.
“Action is the foundational key to all success” Selftest Engine Provider of IT certification material.
After a long time of discussion online and offline, finally Google came to the rescue and confirmed that Google does not use Keywords meta tag in web ranking.
What does this mean ?
Now you can stop worrying about the keywords that you insert in the meta tag. Stop worrying doesn’t actually mean, to stop using meta tags! To be in the safer side(as we don’t know how other search engines treat meta keywords), it doesn’t hurt at all to use proper meta keywords.
And Matt cuts has clearly indicated in the above video that meta description is still valid and Google considers it while showing the snippet of description, if its nicely/meaningfully done.
Avoid the Confusion
Do not confuse this with “using the proper keywords” in the article. Using keywords in the article will get you up in the search ranking(if done properly) — If not UP, your article will be shown for the keywords, that you are using in the article. But as always, play safe. Don’t try to inject irrelevant keywords into your article. This will do more harm then any help, in the future.
Do not believe in people who call you and tell that – they will get your website in the first place of Google search ranking. Many of these guys still think that Google use the keyword tags to assign ranking and that they can trick!
Whats your stand on meta keywords, meta description or meta tags in general ?
This is a video + presentation from Matt Cutts at WordCamp San Francisco 2009.
Matt Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google where he specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) issues.
Matt Cutts blog is a number one source for many webmasters and SEO guys. Hope
This is a video + presentation from Matt Cutts at WordCamp San Francisco 2009.
Matt Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google where he specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) issues.
Video:
Matt Cutts blog is a number one source for many webmasters and SEO guys. Hope this video and presentation from Matt helps.
Source:Mutt Cutts blog
Problems:
1. Search results showing only the Title of the blog, instead of article title/heading.
2. Trackback also Displaying Blog Title and not Headline of Post.
Keep these problems in mind, while reading this article, as you may get confused in the middle, as you might not have come across such a problem.
TrackBack:
TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.
Pingback:
For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.
Quick Solution: If you have similar problem as told above, just goto All-in-one SEO plugin settings page and uncheck “Rewrite Titles:” option and save the changes. Now test your blog using spider-test(for more info regarding the use of this tool, read the full article) tool. The changes made will not be reflected immediately in search results page. So resubmit your site map using Webmasters tool and wait for some time.
Effects of the problem: Creates more problem!
1. Google Search Ranking decreased significantly.
2. Webmasters tool started showing hundreds of duplicate titles in the “title tag issue” section.
3. Organic traffic almost declined, as the users didn’t find the title to be meeting their search criteria.
4. The pings sent by our blog seemed to be spammy. As it showed our blog title instead. It seemed to be like, I am trying to promote my blog or just linking to grab the attention.
Detecting the problem:-
First conclusion: Problem was with our blog
If we had problem with only search engine indexing, we might have thought about changing the XML file(that we had submitted to search engines). And to look into Webmasters tool etc. But the second problem confirmed us that, the problem was 100% with our blog and not with search engine indexing.
Second conclusion: Problem was with our theme
Preliminarily everyone thinks that the problem will be caused by the plugins. We removed all the less useful plugins and retained only the must and best once. But the problem still persisted!
We changed the theme, linked to one of our article(inter linking) and published it. Now when we saw the Trackback, it was showing the heading/title of the article. That means the problem was with the theme.
Started hunting for the code responsible for the problem, inside the theme:
We started building the theme again from the scratch. Built-it. Installed it. With full relaxation, published an article, with an linkback to one of our article. To our surprise the same problem started appearing again. i.e., the title of the trackback was showing the blog title(“Technotip.org”), instead of showing the article title/heading!
Tool that came to our rescue:
The tool is spider-test, which shows the source code of a page, all outbound links on the page, and common words and phrases found in the page copy. In simple words, it shows how the search engines see a webpage.
When I saw one of the article of our blog using the tool, it showed “Technotip.org” as in the title tag, while the original source code was still showing the article title in the title tag.
The final Solution found:
Now I started changing things one by one and saw the title tag using the above tool. At one point of the test, the title tag showed the tite of the article. That is when we unchecked the “Rewrite Titles:” option is All-in-One SEO plugin. After the problem was solved we resubmitted the sitemap in webmasters tool. And every article of our blog got re-indexed and now the ranking for different keywords are restored.
We had previously asked other bloggers who are using WordPress and All-in-One SEO plugin, for All-in-One SEO plugin settings. They have checked the “Rewrite Titles:” option and everything is working fine for them. And we are using minimum number of plugins and non related to title tag, so I don’t think any other plugin was conflicting with All-in-One SEO plugin.
Many people with similar problem:
While searching solution for this problem, I came across many forum posts and saw that many people have and still have the same problem with their blog. So I decided to write about it. Hope this article and the tool mentioned above will surly help them detect and solve the problem.
All-in-one SEO plugin is a wonderful tool and we highly recommend this tool to every blogger using WordPress. The new version also comes with the canonical link option, just with a click. Canonical link option with SEO plugin makes sense, as it helps improve the SEO.
Eventhough I could somehow detect the problem and even its solution, I am not sure about the reason why “Rewrite Titles:” option in All-In-One SEO plugin causing problem to some themes! If anyone knows about this, then please please share it with us.
I know this is a small thing to many people out there, but I am writing about this for the beginners. I had also faced lot of problem in changing the permalink, when this blog was hosted in Yahoo! server.
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.
To change the permalink structure, first you need to grant permission, to access the .htaccess file(It should be in writable mod). To do that, log into your hosting account using any FTP software...we recommend using "FileZilla". As it is a FREE software and a good featured one and yet so simple to use.
Ask for the host name to your hosting support team or search in their blog. Username and password will usually be the same as the username and password of your hosting account cpanel.
After logging into your Hosting account through “FileZilla”, goto the folder, where you have installed your wordpress theme, select .htaccess and index.php files and then right click and select “File Attributes”..Now change the Numeric value from 644 to 666. This would grant the writing mode to those two files.
And there is a .[dot] in the beginning of the file name .htacess, that file many not be visible. In this case change the settings to show all the files. or you can ask about it to your web host support team.
Now you can simply log into your wordpress account and then click on the “settings” tab, and then click on the Permalinks tab.
There choose which ever format you want your permalink to be.
If you don’t like any of those, then select the “Custom Structure”, as shown in the above image. Now specify whatever structure you want…
Make sure to end your permalink structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) so that each permalink points to an individual post.
Now choose any one of these or the combination’s of these and put it in the “Custom Structure”, and make sure to end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% .
Ex:-
/%day%/%postname%/
Now press “Save Changes” button. Thats it. You have setup the permalink structure of your choice. Congrates!
And now don’t forget to change the file permission of .htaccess and index.php files to 644 again, for security purpose.
If you still face any problem with this, then it would be better to contact your hosting provoider.
And you may also feel this plugin interesting to redirect the older permalink structure to the new one’s without any hassle.
For more details about this click here.
You could also be interested in reading Permalink contribution for duplicate content.
We have heard of people copying our content and lot has been discussed about how to fight against it.
But today we are going to see, how our own blog will be penalized for having the same content accessible from two different URL of the same blog.
For example, if you are showing the full content of your post in all the locations like, Homepage, Archives page, and in single content page(single.php), then there is all possibility of Search Engines thinking that these contents are duplicate. Thus there is a high chances of getting penalized.
Daniel Scocco has a nice video to illustrate this concept. So take a look, before we deal with the permalinks contribution for creating duplicate content.
Today lets take a look at some other ways, from which your wordpress website may get penalized for having duplicate contents.
This applies for those people who are using the permalink structure which includes “Categories” ( /%category%/ ).
Previously I had this http://technotip.org/%category%/%postname%/ permalink structure. I had thought that, having the category name in the URL would help the search engines, as they might consider it as a keyword to that article.
But later I realized that, there is a huge drawback from using such permalink structure. I realized this, when I typed the URL of one of my article wrongly and was still able to access that article.
I had an article at http://technotip.org/SEO/killer-seo-list/ and I had typed the URL wrongly as http://technotip.org/general/killer-seo-list/ , but to my astonishment, the article just showed up. With confusion in my mind, I just had a quick search in Google, to see that the wrong URL http://technotip.org/general/killer-seo-list/ was also indexed. Now I really started worrying, if all other posts had the same problem. So searched again for other posts, but everything was OK with other posts. Then why this problem with http://technotip.org/SEO/killer-seo-list/ ?
I just went to my wordpress Dashboard and saw that I had got a link back to the wrong URL http://technotip.org/general/killer-seo-list/ from some blog and Google had indexed it(as the article was accessible at that wrong URL, so no fault of Google here).
Now I continued the search, and saw some other blogs using the permalink structure similar to my blog. Now I just changed the Category name and tried to access their posts, to my wonder, they were also accessible. And many of those sites did not have the nofollow or noindex in their category section. Thus, those sites are in danger, of getting penalized.
If you are also using the permalink structure
http://yoursitename.com/categories/postname/ then just change the “categories” name to any name you like(it may be anything that exists or not exists in your category list) and hit enter. You will still be able to access the article.
This can be solved
1. By having the permalink structure http://yoursitename.com/postname/ .
2. Redirect it to the original post.
Changing the permalink of your blog.
Just change the file permission of .htaccess and index.php files in the root directory to 666.
And then login to your wordpress account and click on settings then on Permalinks option and now select Custom Structure and put /%postname%/ and finally click on Save Changes button. This will make your permalink structure as http://yoursitename.com/postname/ .
And redirecting the URL to original URL can be done by a number of plugins out there. Just click here to have a look.
Note: As all those articles are placed in one or the other categories, introducing the nofollow or noindex to your categories section will make the article inaccessible to search engines and finally you will end up with no search engine traffic.
I have heard most of the times that, many blogs have good page ranking in the beginning, but after sometime those rankings will drop and will keep on dropping with time. This is because as time goes and your number of posts increases, the number of duplicate contents are also increased. Thus, search engines penalize your page ranking over time.
The final thing to be kept in mind is that, always remember that your goal is to make sure that your posts or articles can be accessed in full from only one location inside your site.
Following these simple and effective tips will surly yield good results in the long run.
What do you think about duplicate contents.Have you also encountered with the same problem? And do you have any other solution for this kind of problems? or have you encountered any similar problems? please share it with us, in the comment section.
Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask! and other search engines.Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to MSN, Yahoo!
1. Proper URL, which includes the keywords of the post.
Ex:- If you are writing about money making through Internet topic, then your URL would be http://yoursitename.com/money-making-through-internet/
Here the keywords money and internet are important, as these words will be displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
And writing a post about Vegetables and fruits at your place and giving a URL like http://yoursitename.com/this-is-my-second-post/ will surly harm your serp.
2. Have proper, relevant key words in your title.Because this is displayed in the SERP with your site link.Keywords that relate to the post.And having a good title also helps people to know what they can expect after clicking the link.The example at point one also holds good here.
3. Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags) has more weightage in Search engines, so be cautious while choosing them.(This is also very important for those who are using AdSense, to get more relevant ads).
4. Keywords in <alt> and <title> tags of images(<img>) are very important. Search Engine Spiders can’t read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with relevant keywords about them. In this case, the keywords should be about the image and not about your blog or blog post. And some of the browsers don’t respond to this <alt> tag, so you can use the <title> tag. This will get you some traffic from Google image search, if your images are listed in Google Search Engine.
5. Keywords in meta tags — Now a days it is said that, search engines no more use your websites meta tags. But I have observed that, search engines do consider them in the beginning, and after they have indexed your pages deeply, they will just discard the keywords in your meta tags. Anyway,filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it.
Remember, not using meta tags would be better than using them to trick Search Engines. If you have irrelevant keywords in your meta tags, then you will surly be penalized by search engines.
6. Use short descriptions near images — this would help search engines to index the images properly, thus your website will be more SEO friendly.
7. Incoming links — Though not in our control, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable. And the longer the link stays in the site, the greater will be its value.And the links from similar niche sites would have higher priority.
And if your blog is related to technology, then the blogs should link to you with proper keyword related to the technology and not simply like click here. Because your site is not about click here!
And the site page that links you must not have many outgoing links or just outgoing links. If your site URL is the only one outgoing link from another site’s article, then it would suggest the search engine that your site is of more importance. Thus will get more search juice.
Links from .edu and .gov sites are also said to be more reputable than .com. .biz, .info, etc. domains.And its the hardest to achieve.
8. Unique content — This is the key. You should have very good quality content and something original to say. And, if all the contents in your blog is concentrating on particular niche, then your search engine ranking would be higher.
9. Have comment section in your posts — This would make the contents of the page to get updated whenever there is a comment left. And search engines like to fetch more of those updated contents.
10. Have frequent posts — This will keep Search Spiders busy in your site and coming back more frequently and like a scheduled way.
11. Keyword formats — Change the front size, bold, italics etc of certain keywords to highlight those keywords.
12. Duplicate content in our own site — this also hurts our ranking. You must see whether your site is accessible by these two URL http://yoursitename.com and www.yoursitename.com . If this is true, then as soon as possible contact your domain registrar and ask them to redirect it to any one URL.Making your own website (the same website) accessible from two URL will confuse the search engines and there is high chances of getting penalized.
And make sure that, your contents are only at one single place(URL) and not in many places like tags, homepage, archives page etc. Let there be only small excerpt of the post and in all other places other than the main post, and let all other things link to the original article.
13. Have a well designed, well coded website. Search engines see the HTML codes while indexing and not the regular pages, as we human visitors see. So if they find some badly coded things like irrelevant tags, opening tags which are left without closing tags(missing tags) etc will surly contribute a lot to bad search engine ranking.So take care about the designing very much in the beginning itself.
14. Illegal Content may kick you off the SERP.Websites containing porn contents, copied contents and some other contents which violet the search engines polices may get penalized.
15. Black hat techniques to get to the top of search engine rankings will make your site to lose the race in the long run.And if detected by Search Engines, your site will be penalized and in worst cases your website will be removed from the SERP.
16. Choose the domain name very consciously.Include some keywords of your niche in it to get better ranking.
Use hyphens, if you have 2 or 3 keywords to be included.Hyphens are said to be search engine friendly.But note that, use of more than 3 hyphens may confuse your real visitors and finally endup losing your regular direct visitors, who may not comeback as they can’t remember the site URL.
17. Downtime and restrictions — Many web hosting companies have downtime now and then, this will surly make the site not accessible to search engine spiders.And using password protected pages, restriction from robot.txt will make the crawling more difficult or sometimes impossible.
18. Sitemap — It would be a very good idea to have a site map.Let the site map be a old fashioned plain HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format, keep the Sitemap updated always and submit it to search engines.This would ensure that you are in the list of search spiders.
19. Site age — The older the site is, the higher the chances of getting higher position in SERP.
This may be because, an established site is more trustworthy, as they have been around from long time.Search engines hate fly-by-night kind of sites.
20. IP address( Static or Shared IP Address? )
This could matter only for shared hosting or when a site is hosted with a free hosting provider, when any one IP addresses in the Shared hosting is blacklisted due to spamming, adult contents or any other illegal practices then all other sites with same IP address will get affected.
21. And don’t have the wrong notion that, you will be ranked high, as you are a AdSense or/and AdWord customer.This has nothing to do with SERP. It may just boost your earning and not the ranking.
22. Do not sell text-link-ads.Use of nofollow is advised.
23. Have a custom error page…to tell the visitors that, they have typed a wrong URL. Do not just redirect them to the page that matches the keyword they typed.Just display the relevant topics under that page, and let your visitors decide and navigate to whichever post they like.
24. Do not use any keywords just for the sake of Search Engines, like creating links which matches the background of your site(Which are hidden or invisible for the real visitors). This would also be considered as Black Hat technique.
25. Do not end the URL with
.dll
.bin
.exe
.tar
.0 (this is being accepted by Google recently, but still not an ideal choice.
Just go to Google and use this query “[filetype:exe]” (Without cotes) to see whether the file types are being indexed by Google or not.
26. Do not have the link to the same article in the post title in the single.php(in the main post page). It is OK to have link in the title, when we show excerpts somewhere else in our blog(ex:-in homepage, Archives etc).
27. Put the NoFollow attribute to your Feedburner Feed Links, as search engines see same content in your feed content as well as your blog contents and penalize for duplicate contents.
28. Finally, build the site keeping your visitors as your primary importance.Because, Search Engines are always in search of good contents, to give to its users while they search. So follow some basic rules listed above and have a very good, valuable content, and you will see your site ranking going up over time.
Now you must take a look at, Jefferson Graham interviewing Google engineer Matt Cutts on how to get your site to the top of Google with 5 basic, common sense SEO tips…..(don’t miss it)
Please share your knowledge about SEO and share some of the missed out points from the above list, in the below comment section…