Blog Seo – What’s it all about? We are going to suppose that your motive for blogging is to get your blog read  by as many people as possible and the first way to do that is to have a blog that people will want to read, and  then, to have a blog that people can find.

• How to Have a Blog That People Want to Read

The key to this is to concentrate on a specific subject, so that your blog is focused, and to be passionate about your subject.  It makes enormous sense to write about something you are interested in yourself.  You can be passionate about that, and you will likely know quite a lot about it already.  It will be easy to be knowledgeable and interesting on that subject.

• How to Have a Blog That People Can Find – Keywords

Plan your blog posts, so that each post is about a particular angle of the subject, and each post will then go to building up a resource of information about the whole thing. The subject title itself is called the keyword.  So if your blog is all about old furniture, then your primary keyword will be “antique furniture”.  Make this the title of your blog, and use the keyword whenever possible, including in the URL, the post titles and page links, and any advertising you do.

• Long Tailed Keywords

Build up the blog by writing posts about particular aspects of your keyword, such as collecting, sourcing, selling, restoring, maintaining, whatever. These secondary subject headings are called “long tailed keywords” (LTKs).  When your main subject is established, then start writing about as many relevant long tailed keywords as you can. This will reinforce the authority of your site. The more authoritative your site appears, the more search engine traffic will arrive.

• BLOG SEO

Having a site that is clearly organised by subject matter, and is tightly focused on the prime keyword, is an ESSENTIAL part of Blog SEO.  Good navigation is essential too, so provide a subject index, and organise it carefully. It is a good plan to internally link your posts to each other, and to the home page and keyword.  Links add [search engine] authority to keywords.

• Site Authority

It is also good strategy to go on and write posts that deal with another aspect of the same thing. For instance, you might write posts about Chippendale chairs, early American chairs, and unrestored chairs, this is likely to give you multiple results in the SERPs [search engine result pages] whenever a surfer looks for antique chairs.  You will have gained site authority, and extra chances of the reader clicking onto your site, because you will have more than one page showing up in the search. This is GOOD!  If you can get other “expert” sites to link to your site, that will help site authority too. Site authority begins with an organised body of factual and relevant information on a given subject.

• Post Layout

Set out your posts using the basic rules of good writing, and use plenty of white space, small paragraphs, clear headings, and at least one graphic – more detail here!  It is very important that your posts are easy to scan and read, because surfers tend to skim each page looking for points of interest, and will only start actually reading if their interest is caught. Big slabs of text are off-putting, and hard to read, especially if scrolling is required!

• Basic Blog SEO

To have a blog that people can find, you need to pay attention to fundamental Blog SEO, which consists in having an informative, interesting, and factual site that is properly laid out, is well indexed; and has lots of relevant internal and external page links.  There are thousands of articles written about “black hat” [questionable] ways to boost your Blog, but the above list will get you a reliable set of readers who are likely to bookmark your site as a good place to return for more information.  More importantly you will soon achieve “Google Trust Rank”, and your site will never be penalised by any of the constant  changes in search engine criteria. So there you go – you now know exactly How to Blog, and how to apply Blog SEO

Build More WordPress Traffic

If ‘getting traffic’ is the name of the game for real Word Press bloggers, then applying the Word Press No-Index plugin to tags, categories and archives is to ‘score an own goal’. The theory behind this is to prevent any ‘duplicate content penalty’. Right, but is that really a good idea?  Seems paranoiac to me to wilfully rob your self of useful links

• Google Trust Rank

This site, and my other blogs, enjoy the accolade of Google Trust Rank. Usually, when you look at my listings in the Top Ten SERP’s for my keywords, you will see see another listing indented (Double Indexing) under the first result and also you will note a little box with a plus sign (+) in it. Click this and you may find 5 more SERPS. For those terms it regards my sites as ‘Authority Sites’. I see that Google is displaying here URLs that are Tags, Categories, Archives, and so on. This is not duplicate content, but different URLS, and varying anchor text, but the result is SEVEN SERPs in a row.  How good is that? For any surfer clicking the box, I have the top seven SERPs on a keyword, I have beaten out the opposition and I AM STOKED!

• Don’t Use No-Index on Tags, Categories, Etc

To exclude Tags for instance  using a no-index plugin is oxymoronic: what the heck are tags for, if not to offer a keyword focused extra source of listing and to be displayed in the SERPs? My top performing page this week is commentluv-guarantees-premium-keyword-backlinks and I can see in my CPanel stats that search spiders have used 6 different URL paths to that same page, all contributing traffic.  Activating the No-Index Plugin would therefore be shooting myself in both feet!  That is NOT the way to Build More WordPress Traffic!

Simple SEO for WordPress

There a few really simple things you can do to make your blog ‘bounce’ up the rankings to be that magic Number 1 in the Google SERPs.

• Check your dashboard settings and be sure that in:

1. Settings/Privacy you have “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone” checked.
2. Settings/Writing you have “Atom Publishing Protocol” and “XML-RPC” enabled; and that there is at least one reference like  “http://rpc.pingomatic.com/” showing in the “UpDate Services” window.
3. Settings/Permalinks you need to have “Custom Structure” set as “/%category%/%postname%/”

• Keywords and Key-Phrases

Be sure that your site keyword appears in the Blog Title, in the Blog description, and hopefully also in the URL.  Use it too as your prime category name, and use your next most important keywords as the other category names.

If your site is about various wifi widgets then the ideal URL for your post about antennas should then look like this:

http://widgetfactory.com/wifi-widgets/G3-wifi-widget-antennas/

Your vital keywords have appeared in the URL(widget), in the category (wifiwidgets) and in the postname (G3 wifi widget antennas).  These are worth great karma, and of course even more link ‘juice’ is added when they are used as the ‘anchor text’ in links back to your site.

• Internal Linking

Write your first post with your prime keyword as the subject, and link back to it from your subsequent posts. You can also link from it to “longtailed (subsidiary) keywords” that appear in later posts.  This ‘internal’ link structure (I call this keyword coherence ‘site synergy’) is important because it adds to the ‘authority’ of your keyword and will net you extra SERPs for each search term as your site grows.

• Back-Links or External Linking

Back-Links or External Linking is the single most important factor in your site SERP performance.  The easy way is to find and utilize the value of CommentLuv sites to raise quality keyword anchored links, or you can use one of the tools that locate high PR do-follow blogs. Whatever you do, try for anchored links from ‘authority’ sites – preferably those with good PR.

• Post Structure

Use your keyword (or key phrase) in your Post Title, again (in BOLD) in your opening paragraph; and in the closing par. You can use it once more in a short post, but probably not more than once a paragraph.  If there is an “English” spelling, or alternative spelling (e.g. check-cheque) use that too, as well as any synonyms you know of .  Keep the post on topic for added authority, and you can also link to recognized authority sites. Weave in any associated long-tailed keywords with appropriate links to posts that discuss them.

• Double Indexing and Tags
  

A second post on the same topic with the same keyword in it will get you a “Double Listing” in Google. This looks impressive to surfers, and also pushes one of your competitors off the top 10 page. Don’t forget to add a tag for your keyword in the post, as well as tags for the other important long-tailed (LTK’s) keywords.  Google indexes WP tags as well as post titles and links, so that is an extra result for each keyword. Get this simple SEO for Word Press right and you will  be able to rocket your site to No 1 in Google

The most important thing to do to monetize your site is to have a simple theme that will not distract the surfer from the content, one that offers only one way out – I.E., the link you put there to monetize your site, whether it be Adsense  or Affiliate Marketing, or the link to your own Sales Page.

• Simple (Ugly) WP Themes

My concept here is that by using the (ugly?) default Word Press theme and modifying only three things, you can create totally individual, functional and aesthetically pleasing blogs very fast. This idea (using ugly blogs) is heavily promoted by monetizing Guru “Grizzly” Brears in his authoritative Make Money for Beginners blog, and widely accepted by those in the know. I have been doing this for some time with my new blogs, and have developed a ‘noob’ proof system to do so.

• Fast Upgrades

A blog page consists of three basic elements, the Header, the Body, and the Footer, and in  the default WP theme each of these elements are built on backgrounds; kubrickheader.jpg, kubrickfooter.jpg, and kubrickbgwide.jpg. By editing these 3 pics in your favourite photo program, then saving them to the proper folder [wp-content/themes/default/images] you can change the entire look of your blog without fussing with any tricky CSS or HTML code. A really magical bonus for this is that whenever you update your WP version, you need only re-upload these 3 pics to restore your personalised upgrade.  How about that? – a 30 second upgrade!

• Plugin-Proof  Modifications

By using the default WP theme you are guaranteeing that there will be no complications with plugins whenever WP brings out a new security upgrade, and this seems to need to be done more frequently to baffle those evil ‘exploiters’. Your plugins will always work perfectly with the default theme.

• ‘Check Out’ here!

The other really important thing to do with your WordPress theme is set up your widgets so that only content and your key [monetizing] link(s) are visible ‘above the fold’; that is when the page is first viewed and BEFORE any scrolling takes place – that way, the non-serious, social traffic surfers can exit the page with one click, and hopefully it will be your “pay-off” link! Viola, Payola! Visit Costa and get another slant on  this idea of simple modifications for your Word Press Theme.

• Example
  

  Adelaide Gift Company (Modded Default WP Theme!)

Here is one of my blogs that use the method I have been outlining here.  It looks dramatically different from the WP default theme, but is really just that theme, with some basic ‘PhotoShopping” applied to the backgrounds.

• Update -

The  maker of this theme I have used for a couple of years has disappeared and the theme would not update to the latest [2.8.4] version, so I have adapted the standard WP default theme to look just like my original Blog.  This again illustrates what can easily be done to the basic WP Kubrick theme. If you have problem updating WP, check out WordPress Permalink 404 Error. I used the simple methods outlined above, but had to do quite a bit of tweaking to the style sheet to get the font colors to look like my original favourite ‘BinaryBonsai’ Business Theme.

The reason why CommentLuv guarantees premium keyword backlinks is that this plugin seeks out your last post and uses the Post Title as the anchor text.  Did you get that? It uses the POST TITLE as the ANCHOR TEXT

• Absolute Best Anchor!

What keyword(s) best describe your post? Well that’s a no-brainer, if ever you heard one! You couldn’t get a better anchor than the title text, because naturally you used the main keyword(phrase) as the post title! You did, didn’t you?

• How does CommentLuv Work?

This is a little WordPress plugin that works on comments so that whenever you leave a comment, it looks up your own last post and inserts a link to it that looks like this;

“Rhys´s last blog post..How To Hide Adsense From Social Traffic.

(See Andy’s CommentLuv site for how to implement this in Blogger, Etc.)

• Page Rank from Back Links

Page rank and authority are computed by Google using the number and quality of the back links to it. So a really major part of blog SEO is getting ‘quality’ back links.  A back link from some blog with anchor text like ‘Rhys’s Blog’ does almost nothing for your post authority, but a backlink that echoes the blog keyword(phrase) is exactly what Googlebot looks for and uses to compute the value of the link. Get enough of them and your page rockets up to the No 1 in the SERPs for that keyword. Enter CommentLuv!

• Turn off NoFollow!

To get the best value from CommentLuv for your visiting commentators you must turn off NoFollow.  This is a built in function of blogs that inserts a rel=”nofollow” code in every comment link.  You need to hunt for the DoFollow plugin, install and activate it. Then your commentators will get the maximum benefit from their comment and link, and hopefully, will return to your blog in the future……  Yahoo and MSN Live ignore the nofollow code, but they hardly send you any traffic anyway, so it is important to set this up so your backlinks will count in the vital place – Google.

• How to Maximize It!

What I do is search for blogs with related subject matter that use CommentLuv, and if they have NoFollow switched off, I bookmark them and regularly visit there to comment. This helps the subject blog with building comment volume and traffic, and it helps me with really top quality back links to nourish that darn picky li’l Googlebot spider gadget. This process is called ‘Link Luv’ by Andy Bailey, the inventor of CommentLuv, and you can visit his site and discover a whole range of stats, etc, which are also available to users. (NB. To check if nofollow is switched on/off: Goto the View Menu and choose View Source. ( in FF highlight the comment link, right-click, and choose View Selection Source).

• Backlink Bonanzas!

Need more info on this back link process? Consult the MMO Guru and check out this post on “It’s all in the back links“, also read this parallel post from Alex on unlimited link Love and you will be well on the road to understanding why CommentLuv guarantees premium keyword backlinks! and helps to Monetize Your Site. Find a great list of CommentLuv Blogs by Shanker Bakshi here

• Updates:

Yep, we do know about KeywordLuv too……

Andy has made this magic improvement where you can now CHOOSE which back-link is displayed – Good one Andy!

Attention Back-link Junkies!!!
All “Drive-by” generic comments  that don’t add to the discussion will be ‘Zorfed’, so please don’t bother wasting your time and my time by posting meaningless fluff.

We assume you already have your Adsense account with Google organized and a ‘Skyscraper’ Google or Amazon (whatever) ad already to paste in.

Open your WPress admin dashboard and navigate to Display(Presentation)/Widgets. You are looking for a widget called Text 1 ( or 2 or whatever is the next free widget.)

If no Text widgets are available in the “Available Widget’ dialog box, scroll down and selct 1 or 2 from the ‘Text Widget’ dialog and when you “save” there will be one or more in the “Available Widget’ dialog. Drag one of these up to the appropriate sidebar box. Click on the little Page Icon, and a dialog will open where you can edit the widget Title and paste in your Google Ad code.