WordPress SEO

The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

I started writing my beginner's guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It's time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.
Note: this article hasn't been updated yet since the beta release of my WordPress SEO plugin, but that plugin does cover a lot of the stuff needed below, so do check it out! When that plugin goes into a more stable development mode, this article will of course be updated.
If you're more of a visual type, try this WordPress SEO video. It's an hour long presentation I gave at A4UExpo London, that covers most of what's in here too. If you'd rather have me figure out what you should be doing, feel free to order a full site analysis by yours truly.
As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices. If you don't have the time to do this kind of optimization yourself, consider hiring us to do it, check out our WordPress consulting services.
As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot, check out the table of contents for some quick jumping around.

1. Basic technical optimization

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there's a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.

1.1. Permalinks

The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.5, you'll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the "custom" setting into /%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to /%category%/%postname%/.
Once you've done that, you'll want to install the Redirection plugin, and make sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, making sure both URL Monitoring select boxes are set to "Modified posts". Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO'd permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.
WWW vs non-WWW
Another good thing to configure now you're on that screen anyway is the Root domain: Add WWW / Strip WWW one. Make a choice, and set it here, don't enable both, some search engines still can't handle that. And enable the redirect index.php/index.html one too, it won't hurt you, and might even do your WordPress SEO some good.
URL stopwords
The last thing you'll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is install the SEO Slugs plugin, this will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won't get those ugly long URL's when you do a sentence style post title.

Optimize your Titles for SEO

By default, the title for your blog posts is "Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title". For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:

• Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
• People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

For more info on how to craft good titles for your posts, see this excellent article and video by Aaron Wall: Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles. I prefer to do this with HeadSpace, as that makes it very very easy. You should check your header.php though, and make sure that the code for wp_title(); contains two quotes, so it looks like this: wp_title('');. This makes sure you have absolute control over the title and don't have any annoying separator in there.
After that, go into the HeadSpace settings, and make them look something like this for your posts and pages:

For the other pages, I have the following settings:

• Posts / Pages: %%title%% - Blog Title
• Categories: %%category%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Tags: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Archives: Blog Archives %%page%% - Blog Title

With HeadSpace, you can also write optimized titles for each post specifically, overriding the settings here. This way you have absolute control over your titles, and can make sure your WordPress titles are actually helping your SEO.

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

Give each category a decent description, and use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that you actually want to rank with. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what's in the page they're clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.
Automated descriptions
In my opinion, auto generating descriptions is a load of bull, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you're thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet... If you don't use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.
Auto generating a snippet is a "shortcut", and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).

1.4. Optimize the More text

Another neat featuer of HeadSpace is that you can use it to optimize the more text, so if you use a more tag on the frontpage, you can replace the default "Read more" link with something meaningful for every post. It's small things like that that make your WordPress SEO the best.

1.5. Image Optimization

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you're helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what's otherwise hidden to them.
You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don't have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image's alt and title tag:

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

You'll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like "Home > Articles > WordPress SEO". They are good for two things:

• They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
• They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt single.php and page.php in your theme, and use my breadcrumb plugin.

2.2. Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an

, and nothing else. Your blog's name should only be an

on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an

.
These are easy to edit in the post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they're not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don't have to download them most of the time.

2.4. Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

1. Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I've highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
2. Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend WP-Super-Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.

Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I've recently switched to VPS.net myself, and they've proven to be better than anything I've ever seen in hosting, if you want to know more be sure to read my article about WordPress hosting.

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you're not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you're allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.
The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren't necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren't helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you'd only want on sub pages.
Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

Once you've done all the basic stuff, you'll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:

1. date based
2. category based
3. tag based

Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author//, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs.
In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages outside of the single page where it should be available. We're going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things.

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

Install my robots meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all archive pages, like this:

Now the search engine will follow all the links on these archive pages, but it won't show those pages in the index. Not everybody will agree on this policy, and others will tell you to just show a snippet of each post on the archive page. That'll also work, but in my opinion completely throwing them out is better.

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don't think you need author archives, use the robots-meta plugin to disable the author archives. Also, if you don't think you need a date based archive: disable it. Even if you're not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO...

3.3. Pagination

Thirdly, you'll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts...
There's an easy fix. Jaimie Sirovich wrote Pagerfix, a plugin that helps you make your pagination look like this:

To reach that, install that plugin, and change this section in f.i. your index.php:

Into this:

Do that in your index.php, your archives.php, and all other archive templates you might have.

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You'll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand. If you're using the meta widget, you might want to enable the option in robots meta to replace that with one that has nofollowed links.

4. A site structure for high rankings

Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They're diluted by one simple thing: comments.

4.1. Pages instead of posts

You've probably noticed by now, or you're seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually... not a post. It's a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a "daughter"-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that's where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.
That's why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you've changed.

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

• create a new page with updated and improved content
• change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
• publish the new page under the old post's URL, or redirect the old post's URL to the new URL
• send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you've updated and improved on your old post
• wait for the links to come in, again;
• rank even higher for your desired term as you've now got:
  • more control over the keyword density
  • even more links pointing at the article
  • the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it's content and ranking

Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you'd lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone's benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that's exactly what you got!

4.3. Linking to related posts

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.
There's a load of these available, but I just use the one that comes with the Simple Tags plugin, as I've found that the easiest and best one so far.

5. Conversion optimization

Get those readers to subscribe!

A lot of bloggers still think that because their blog is a blog, they don't have to optimize anything. Wrong. To get people to link to you, they have to read your blog. And what do you think is easier: getting someone who is already visiting your blog to visit regularly and then link to your blog, or getting someone who visits your blog for the first time to link to your blog immediately? Right.
That's why conversion optimization is so vitally important to bloggers as well: they need to learn how to test their call to actions on their blog so that more people will subscribe, either by e-mail or by RSS. (Ow btw, if you haven't subscribed to this blog yet, do it now!)
One of the things I've found to be very important, and more bloggers seem to have found this, is that a BIG RSS subscribe button is very important, as is offering a way to subscribe by e-mail. I even offer daily and weekly e-mail subscribe options, using aweber (aff), and have found that people tend to really like those options too.
Another thing to be very aware of is when people might want to subscribe to your blog. If they've just finished reading an article of yours, and really liked it, that would be the ideal time to reach them, right? That's why more and more people are adding lines like this to the end of their posts: "Liked this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!"
Another great time to get people to subscribe is when people have just commented on your blog for the first time, for which purpose I use my own comment redirect plugin. Which leads me to the next major aspect of WordPress SEO:

6. Comment optimization

Get those readers involved

Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogs. As Wikipedia states:

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Comments are not only nice because people tell you how special you are, or that you made a mistake, or whatever else they have to tell you. Most of all they're nice, because they show engagement. And engagement is one of the most important factors of getting people to link to you: they show you they care, and they open the conversation, now all you have to do is respond, and you're building a relationship!

6.1. How you get people to comment

The easiest way of getting people to do anything is: ask them to do it. Write in an engaging style, and then ask your blog's readers for an opinion, their take on the story etc.
Another important things is your comment links. Is your comment link "No comments »"? Or is it "No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome »"? Feel the difference? You can change this by opening your index.php template, search for comments_popup_link() and changing the texts within that function.

6.2. Bond with your commenters

Another thing to do is thank people when they've commented on your weblog. Not every time, because that get's annoying, but doing it the first time is a very good idea.
Justin Shattuck thought the same, and created the Comment Relish plugin which sends an email after someone has made his first comment. This email is a message you can enter yourself, with for instance your feed URL, and in my case, a newsletter subscribe URL, etc. Note that some people think this is spam, and that laws in several countries might prohibit the use of this. I can't tell you, because I'm not a lawyer.
Another option, which is a bit less obtrusive / spammy, is to install my comment redirect plugin. This plugin allows you to redirect people who have made their first comment to a specific "thank you" page.

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

Now that people have joined the conversation on your blog, you should make sure they stay in the conversation. That's why you should install the subscribe to comments plugin, that allows people to subscribe to a comment thread just like they would in a forum, and sends them an e-mail on each new comment. This way, you can keep the conversation going, and maybe your readers will be giving you new angles for new posts.

7. Off site blog SEO

If you've followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you've got a big chance of becoming successfull, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn't. Go out there, and talk to people online.

7.1 Follow your commenters

There's been a movement on the web for a while now that's called the "You comment - I follow". They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to "reward" your visitors. Now I do agree, but... That get's you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog... What I do advocate though, is that you actually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.
If you think that's a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That's a group of people you have to take care of!

7.2. Use Twitter

Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the "cool" people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.
To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.

7.3. Find related blogs, and work them

If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you'll need to rank is to be a part of the community.

8. Conclusions on WordPress SEO

This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your blog. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There's a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you'll have to actually do most of it.
If you want to keep updated on the latest news about WordPress, and hear more tips as I come up with them, then subscribe to my WordPress mailing-list right now. If you need help implementing all the tips in this article, or want me to review whether you've done a good job implementing it all, order a full site analysis!

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Get keyword ideas using the Google Keyword Tool

Search engines use keywords to identify which sites match a particular search phrase.  SEOs need to identify which keywords are searched for so that they can use those keywords and get found by the search engines and eventually by their target audience. 

For example, if you want to optimize a website about “computer tips” you should see how many searches for the keyword are being submitted to Google monthly so you can have an idea if readers are looking for you or not. You can do that by going to external Google Keyword Tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter the keyword or phrase that you want to analyze then click Get keyword ideas:

You will see a tabular report of all related terms along with the search volume generated for the previous month and the average search volume.

In this report you will see if you are using the right keywords based on the Google search database. If you think you should target “computer tip” instead of “computer tips” then think again because the difference on the performance of each phrase is about ten times for “computer tips” (22,200 VS 2,400).

Also take note of the advertiser competition information, the longer the bar the more fierce the competition:

If you are a starting up a new web site and the competition is strong, it is a good idea to start with keywords with less competition then work on those higher volume keywords later.

Another cool feature of this tool is that it can show you the average cost each time a user clicks your ad on the associated keyword.  To add the estimate cost per click (CPC) column on the report, go to the dropdown selection labeled “Choose columns to display” then click “Show estimated Avg. CPC”.

You should see the CPC column on the report:

Isn’t it a very convenient way to analyze your web site’s earning potential?  This way you can earn more money by targeting keywords with higher CPC.  Well, that is of course if you can make them come to your website.  We will show you how to do just that in the future articles as we go into more in-depth SEO tips.

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How to write blog post titles while keeping SEO in mind

How many times do you happen upon a post written by a fellow blogger whose title makes you wonder what the post will actually end up being about? Note that many times that you do run across these posts, they do not have a high PageRank or get very much traffic unless they have been Dugg, etc. And even if they do, could they get more traffic

if their post title was optimized?

When I first starting writing for my blog in March of this year, I didn’t even know what the term SEO meant and hence wrote post titles that would make a seasoned blogger cringe! Even though I have read it over 100 thousand times, it seems that a lot of bloggers out there still don’t understand how important it is to write a good title for each post.

And what’s more baffling is that everyone intrinsically knows how important titles are because each person reads a newspaper on a daily basis. For example, if you were to whip open the New York Times web site right now, the top headline is as follows:

“New Stem Cell Method Could Ease Ethical Concerns“

. 

Now that title makes sense! It’s also very search engine

friendly since it’s short, yet has enough keywords that it would show up in a long tail search. Now consider what you would think if you were to read the following headline:

“Medical Ethics”

If that were the title for the above article, do you think it would be as easily searchable through Google as the first title? HELL NO. And you may read this and laugh and say that “Awww come on man, that’s retarded, that title is not even close to being a short form of the original title, it’s not close at all!” Well I would agree with you, but that’s a major problem with many blog post titles, they have nothing to do with the content!

As a technology blogger myself, I find this issue to be even worse among our niche because most bloggers are writing about software, computers, technology, and other items whose names don’t have anything to do with their ultimate purpose. 

For example, here’s a couple of blog posts that I feel are really bad post titles because they lack keywords, do not describe anything, and are just plain useless to the search engines.

Bad Post Titles

“Unlocker for Windows” – This blogger is writing about a piece of software that you can use in Windows to get past errors like “Access is Denied” when trying to delete or move files. Does anyone search on Google for UNLOCKER FOR WINDOWS? Of course not, someone is searching for “cannot move file” and “access is denied”. A better title for this would be “How to unlock a process for access is denied errors in Windows” or something similar. 

“iConcertCal” – This article was Dugg, but still who is ever going to find this product with this kind of title? The software monitors your iTunes library and lets you find concerts in your local area. A good title would be “iConcertCal – Find local concerts in your city via your iTunes libarary”.  At least write something!

“HeatEatReview” – This is a great site that reviews all kinds of frozen dinners, etc so that you can buy the best stuff from the store. But who the hell is going to search HeatEatReview! Even some simple text after the name of the site will be much better.

“Joox.net“ – Can you guess what this site is all about? No idea? Well obviously since Joox is not even a word! This site allows you to watch some old and new movies in DivX quality. Would it not be better to write something like “Joox.net – Watch Hollywood DivX movies online for free”???
So what is considered a good title? Well, you’ve probably seen most of those already, but I thought I would mention a few anyway.

Good Post Titles

“Stage6 – Upload video clips, share, watch, download videos” – This site is similar to the Joox.net site mentioned above, but look at how much more descriptive the title is. It has all the keywords that it wants to rank on included in the title. No one knows what Stage6 means and nor do the search engines!

“Photojojo – The best photo tips, DIY projects, and gear in the whole wide world’ – Can anyone possibly be confused by what this site is all about? Not even a search engine! Good keywords and pretty straight forward.

“Dealing With Website Plagiarism: When Someone Copies Your Blog Content” – If someone were to steal your blog content, what would you search for first? Probably something like “blog plagiarism” or “blog content stolen”, etc. This article will probably show up higher since the keywords will match in the title.

Conclusion

So when writing post titles, always try to think from a searchers perspective and what they would type in if they were looking for this product or service. Yes, backlinks and the content of the post matter a lot and I’m not denying that, I’m just saying that if ALL OTHER FACTORS WERE EQUAL, the post with the better title would win out.


Also, I’ve noticed that if someone is not paying attention to writing correct post titles, they are probably also missing important keywords in the body of the content. If you’re not sure what keywords to use, check out keywords tools such as Google’s Adwords tool or Keyword Discovery.

Any comments or thoughts? Post a comment! Thanks! 

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30 Real Ways to Make Money Blogging

Looking for ways to make money with your blog can be frustrating.  Either you don’t have enough traffic or you are not sure what to do.  That is why I have put together this list of 30 Real Ways to Make Money with a Blog“.

This post isn’t your average directory of money making tips either, it has summaries for what each element is, how to use it, and where to find resources.  The blog earning tips are also divided into Beginner, Novice, and Problogger based on the differing qualifications and needs of each.


Making money online is mostly about customizing a monetizing formula for your blog.  Depending on your skill level, network, and current traffic levels your blog has a variety of options.  So find your blog’s formula below to maximize your earnings.

 

Beginner

You know who you are… Low levels of traffic, relatively new blog, little or no internet experience, no design or seo skills, and probably a sense frustration over the lack of earnings.

Some of the options in this section are better then others and matter of fact all of them can be used no matter what level you are currently at.  Novices can use any beginner level monetization methods and Probloggers have the luck of using everything and anything they see fit.

PPC – Pay Per Click is an advertising program in which ads are placed on your blog and you are paid whenever your visitors click on the ads.  It is the most common method bloggers use to make money online.  It involves almost no effort and is so incredibly easy that many blogs have too much advertising on them.   Money is maximized as traffic levels increase.

 Resources: Google Adsense Chitika Yahoo! Bidvertiser Adbrite

CPM - Cost Per Thousand (“m” is roman numeral for thousand) is an impression based advertising system.  This means advertisers place ads on your blog and you are paid based on how many times the ad shows up.  This can be profitable for blogs with big traffic, and can start to bring money to even the smallest blogs.  All you need is pageviews to increase this monetization method.

Resources: Value Click Tribal Fusion

Money Widgets -A very simple advertising system is easily integrated into your blog’s sidebar with widget advertising.  Just embed the widget into your sidebar and watch the ads begin.

Resources: The Newsroom WidgetBucks ScratchBack SmartLinks

In-Text Ads – You know what these ads are.  You have probably seen them all over small blogs and websites on the internet.  They are links with double-lines below them.  While sometimes useful for blog owners pockets, they eventually irritate and annoy most readers into leaving the blog and not returning/subscribing.  In-text ads should be used with caution.

Resources: Kontera Vibrant Media

Parked Domains – Have a few domains you are planning on using soon but are not ready to start?  Parked domains serve the purpose as advertisement and traffic redirection.  This is perhaps the easiest way to make money, although in small doses, online.  Just get a domain name and use the very easy parked domain programs.

Resources: Parked Google Parked

Donations – We have probably all seen the little button that says “donate” in someones sidebar.  It is an easy and perhaps out-of-date way to try and earn some revenue. Many programmers use this still, but very little revenue is earned through the donation feature.  For example have you ever donated?  But still it is simple and if you don’t mind the button then go ahead and try.

Resources: Paypal – it really is the only major ‘donate’ resource around!

Affiliate Marketing – Perhaps the most lucrative process for earning money online is by using your blog to recommend useful and relevant products to your readers.  The best examples are seen by the many bloggers linking to different themes, ebooks and other products.  The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you are only marketing the product and not selling it.  Just make sure the product is relevant and not over-used.  Read more.

Resources: ClickBank Commission Junction Azoogle Ads Link Share

Text Link Ads – As your blog builds reputation and traffic your posts/pages become great places for links.  Many people will even pay you to put their link on your website or page.  While it has earning potential, be leery of this form of revenue as it may be detrimental to your blog in Google’s algorithm.  So study it out before you make your decision.

Resources: Text-Link-Ads Text-Link-Brokers

Feed Ads – An easy way to increase the advertisement on your blog is by adding them to your rss feeds.  The simplest way is to get Feedburner and set it up for your blog.  Once you have done that then click on the monetize tab and Google Adsense will be added to your feeds in almost one-click!

Resources: Feedburner BidVertiser Pheedo

Paid Surveys and Polls – It is just what it says it is.  You fill out surveys and polls or place them on your blog for others to fill out and earn money.  In doing this option be careful to find survey or poll companies that have credible backgrounds as this is a source for scammers.

Resources: VizuAnswers

Pop-up Ads – These pesky and annoying advertisements may be great for some of your niche blogs or sub-domains.  Not worth putting on blogs you actually want to build a community on, pop-up ads offer decent revenue to blogs looking to exist but not grow significantly.  But be aware that it is annoying to the reader.

Resources: Adbrite Tribal Fusion PayPopup PopupAd Adversal


Audio Ads – “You are a winner”, “You may have just won a free Ipod”, etc. These audio ads can be very targeted to your traffic and very successful or completely useless.  For instance, many surfers do not even have their sound on while they surf to avoid such advertisements.  I would recommend not using this sort of advertisement for long-term projects.

Resources: NetAudio

Article Marketing – A two-edged sword.  You get both quality backlinks to your blog and its posts while also creating earning potential.  I use Squidoo and Associated Content personally and earn enough money to support my blogging efforts and some advertising.  It’s also very easy through the simple resources available to you.  Using this blogging income source is both potentially lucrative and excellent marketing.

Resources: Squidoo Hubpages Associate Content

Novice

Now that you are novice you have more experience and a lot more traffic.  Because of the increase in visitors the potential to earn more is also greater.  Here is a few extra things you can include into your earning formula from the beginning level.  Again, make sure to find what is right for your blog.

Direct Banner – With ppc and cpm advertising there is potential to make money, but direct banner ads bring advertising on your blog to a new level.  It takes a little more work but you can find yourself making much more money and doing it pretty quickly.  I use OIOPublisher and it is a premium plug-in that completely rocks.  It even offers affiliate incomes to others who will try to get advertisers for your blog.
  Read more.

Resources:   OIOPublisher , Ad Rotator Plug-in

Premium Content – Great example of premium content is SeoMoz.  They have lots of great content on seo for free, but to get the ultimate seo resources you have to pay a monthly fee.  To make premium content on your blog just creat a post or page usign WordPress.  Then in the publish toolbox click on “edit” on the “visibility” option.  Then choose “password protected”.  Set your password and publish.  The only to do then is create a lead page that explains the premium content and allows people to pay, using paypal or another source to get the password emailed to them.

Resources: WordPress, Paypal

Sponsored Reviews – These are reviews of products through direct contact by the product owner or through a review site.  A good example of a product review is WP Content Robot.  It is easy and you usually get to try out some pretty cool products for free.

Resources: ReviewMe Sponsored Reviews

Sponsored Post -  Like a sponsored review these are posts paid for by others.  What this usually looks like is a post created about a specific website or allowing the post to link to another blog with very specific and targeted keyword links.

Resources: PayPerPost

Theme or Template Sales – To get this money making product going you first need some serious design skills or the money to pay for someone to develop it.  Once a unique design is created premium themes can go from $19 -$200.  There is great earning potential in creating themes and another very advantageous bonus.  When you create your theme a link is put into the footer of the theme with your blog’s url.  So the more themes that are used the more backlinks to your blog.

Resources: StudioPress DIY Themes


Private Forums – Creating a private forum is a great way for bloggers to capitalize on their contacts and build a tight-knit and motivated community.  Some of these communities can be used for social media manipulation and many other “secret” and “exclusive” means.  You can make the fee yearly or monthly if you wish and start to build a steady income through member participation.

Resources: vBulletin Simple Machines Forum phpBB Vanilla

Site Flipping -  The process of site flipping usually involves the creation of design, content, and some traffic to then go and sell the blog.  The easiest way to do this is by forming a partnership and getting someone to design the blog while the other writes content and markets it.  For more about Site-Flipping.

Resources: Digital Point Sitepoint (both are great for selling your site)

Plug-in Sales – Warning: programming required!  If you can develop or know someone who can develop a plug-in for wordpress then you have the potential to make and sell premium plug-ins.  The first step is to find something extremely useful and unique.  Then create an affordable plug-in to assist bloggers in their task to rule the blogosphere.

Resources: How to Create a WordPress Plug-in

Email Newsletters – These are becoming extremely popular.  The purpose of the email newsletter is to build up a mailing list of email addresses and then use the emails you send to drive traffic, sales, or income in a variety of ways.  Creativity is the best way to use this revenue source.  Additionally it is important to start building your email list as soon as possible.  But be warned that most newsletter services of any value cost money (but not a lot).

Resources: AWeber PHP Autoresponder MailChimp

Ebook Sales – Writing an ebook is a great way to establish credibility and expertise in your niche while also providing a handsome income.  The way it works is that you provide a very useful resource – like an electronic book and then others buy it.  The best way to understand the process is by learning how to write an ebook and then how to sell it.

Resources: E-Junkie WP E-Commerce (2 great ways to sell your book)

Freelance Work – Once you have established yourself you can start consulting, writing, designing, and offering other services through your blog.  I have had a lot of experience with consulting and it is a great income and a lot of fun. So use your blog to showcase your skills.  Blogs are the ultimate portfolio.

Resources: Paypal WP E-Commerce (ways to sell your services)

Membership Site – If you have the drive to make great lessons, tutorials, classes, or other content worthy of a membership site then you should definitely do it.  They are all the rage right now and show a great way to earn a regular income.  With new products online, the set-up has never been easier.  I would definitely check out the resource if you have ever thought about a membership site.

Resources: Wishlist 

Problogger

So you are an expert at getting traffic and building your blog.  The next thing you need to do is apply all the right things from the list above and use your traffic to leverage the new moneymakers below.  You’re the expert so get started!
 

Job Boards – Big blogs and bloggers have realized that there is great money in job boards.  A great example of this is Problogger’s job board.  He gets a monthly fee just to post the job opportunity and creates a lot of buzz for his blog with it too.  When you become the place for people in your niche to come to, start a job board.

Resources: JobThread Web Scribe Job Board SimplyHired Job-o-matic Jobbex

Event Sponsors – Having events on your blog is a great way to get more traffic and revenue.  For example hold a blogathon (blogging marathon), contests, featured story, giveaways and other events to bring traffic and get sponsors to pay you for.  A good example would be to have a webinar that is extremely publicized and then to get a relevant company to sponsor the event.  Thus you are getting more traffic and money in one big hit.

Selling or Renting a Single Page – Doing this is difficult but far to under-utilized.  The process invovles building a great blog with good traffic and especially good pagerank and then selling internal pages/posts to anyone willing to pay.  They get a sales page or whatever on a great blog and you get an income.  A good example of this is Pagerank10

Marketplaces – Sitepoint is the best example of a marketplace.  It is just like it sounds, a place for everyone to sell products, sites, domain names, services, etc. on your site.  You get the traffic and links along with commission in many cases while the user gets to buy or sell.  Traffic or a very unique niche is a must to succeed with this income earner.

Hardcover Book - After you have established yourself in your niche as a leading authority you can now publish a book on your topic of choice.  Some publishers even go from blog to book with almost no effort.  So if you are interested in seeing your book in the flesh (paper flesh) then look into these resources.

Resources: Blurb Lulu Self Publishing iUniverse WordClay

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45 Link Building Tips To Help You Promote Your Blog

In an ever changing approach by bloggers to keep up with the Google SERP algorithms, many of us get carried away with our “SEO Techniques.” It’s not a surprise nor a shame, because without this experimentation, we are bound to hit a plateau in progress.

Unquestionably, even here at Blogussion – we try many new things, in combination with the old to help build on the traffic from search engines. Whether it be validating the site using the W3C Markup or just typing a new category-description, Search Engine Optimization is a never-ending process that evolves on a regular basis and it is our duty to keep up with it.

However, in trying new things – we shouldn’t forget that some techniques will never die out and must be practiced as regularly as possible. I would just like to outline 45 tips that will help you build quality back-links to your site, with minimal to no costs!

Quality back-links serve two main purposes. Firstly, it helps crawlers find and locate your site. Once this is accomplished, the search engine crawler goes about indexing your site. The next purpose; back-links help crawlers identify how important your blog really is.

The first purpose obviously only applies to new blogs, but the second one will still be valid even 10 years down the track. These back-links also help the Google Crawler to assign your pages with a Google PageRank. Simply to put, the more authoritative websites that are linked to your site, the more important it is perceived to be.

List of 45. Starts Here.

Getting Links for Writing Content

1. Write content that is useful – Writing resourceful content will always attract links, hands down. If you write an article that is overflowing with useful and resourceful information – people will link to it.

2. Don’t forget trackbacks – This handy feature for WordPress can be great way of returning the compliment for a dedicated link.

3. Remind your readers to link to you – After each posts, just throw in a quick reminder that your article can be socially bookmarked or linked to.

4. Make a Top “X” List – Alex’s post on “100 Lists To Become A Better Blogger” is the most successful post on Blogussion, to-date. This just goes to prove how much people love “lists posts” such as your “Top X [Something]”

5. Debunk a Myth – There’s only one thing better than coming up with an idea, is to prove someone else one wrong. People love opposition and to see a debate bubble up, so don’t be afraid to challenge other people’s opinions.

6. Write with a touch of conspiracy – Just reinforcing tip #5. If you can create that atmosphere of retaliation, it will always raise a few eyebrows.

7. Spread the Love – Dedicate a post or two per week to link to other blogger’s posts that you found useful. More often than not, they will tell their readers “Mr.X linked to my post, how cool!”

8. Trade articles with webmasters – Similar to guest posting, just swap articles with a fellow webmaster.

9. Release a Press Release – This guide shows you how to write + submit a good Press Release.

Freebies/Giveaways for Link-Baiting

10. Hold a contest with an incentive. Contests are great for link-baiting because when people talk about it, there will always be “Check it out here” tagged along with it.

11. Release a free design. If you can make/buy a custom WP-Theme then release it for free to your guests, you can really kick off on a viral market. Just don’t forget the “Designed by [YOUR LINK]”

12. Release a free plugin. This serves a similar purpose as a design, but not so much with a direct back-link. Instead, if your plugin is useful, the incoming links will just grow exponentially.

13. When running a contest, reward your referees that bring the most referrals. This will encourage them to blog about your contest.

Connecting With Communities

14. Become active and post on relevant forums

15. Become active and comment on relevant blogs.

16. Try not to forget your signature on forums, otherwise the whole thing is an epic fail.

17. When commenting on blogs, try to use post URLs instead of just your Blog URL – This can help regulate your links evenly amongst your blog, and not just solely to your front page.

18. DON’T spam communities with your links to your site, offer a reason for them to visit and contribute with a purpose.

19. Submit your blog to directories – These are still helpful when it comes to getting indexed, especially these directories listed here.

20. Search up DoFollow Blogs/Forums – These will carry the most significant back-links.

21. Browse Craigslists and they can provide you with a free or cheap link.

22. Build on your Technorati Profile

23. Become a Sponsor – Whether it be a theme, whole website or a small project; the sponsors always get mentioned.

24. Run for Charity, and request others to help spread the word.

25. DON’T spam. This tip cannot be reinforced enough. A deleted comment will server no purpose.

Directories, Social Bookmarking + Discussion Groups.

26. Write content for Article directories – Publish content for directories such as eZineArticles, GoArticles or iSnare. In the “About Author’s” area, you can leave a link to your website.

27. Build a Squidoo Page – It’s easy and if you have the time to develop it, it can be very authoritative. If you don’t there’s heaps of services out there to help you out.

28. Join Discussions over at Yahoo! Answers – Providing useful answers, along with a link is an easy way to earn a back-link.

29. There’s also Google Groups – It’s almost the same as Yahoo! Answers, but owned by Google.

30. Submit your voice on Digg – First build a solid profile, where you have a network of loyal diggers. If you can hit the Digg front page, you are likely to get linked to by a lot of web-masters.

31. Build on your Twitter profile then link to your site using your “Bio Area.”

32. Tweet about your posts using Twitter, then request retweets from your followers.

33. Offer a “Tweet This Post” link on every post your write, this will make Tweeters easier to tweet about your article.

Direct Link Building

34. Contact your fellow bloggers with a personalized email – asking for an reciprocal link exchange. However, keep this to a minimal and be very selective in who you choose to trade with.

35. Post around on forums asking for reciprocal link exchanges, but yet again be warned on your selection.

36. If you are a part of organizations, clubs or schools – Ask them if they can link to you, because these types of websites are more often than not; authoritative.

37. DON’T ask Darren Rowse, ShoeMoney, Matt Cutts or Yahoo, MSN and Google for back-links. It’s just a waste of time, especially the last three “contacts”

Paid Link Building

38. Buy a Review – Most sites that offer reviews will naturally link to the reviewed product/site.

39. Many webmasters buy links on popular blogs for authority, even though it’s against the Google TOS (Use at your own risk)

40. Rent links from others website – Text-Link-Ads is most likely your best option.

Using Blogussion for Link Building

41 Leave a comment – All our comments are do-follow, so the link you chose as your URL will get link-love automatically.

42. Top Commentators  – As you can see on the sidebar, we use this awesome plugin. Every month, our most contributing members will be rewarded with a link.

43. We use CommentLuv – Every comment you post, will carry a link to your latest blog posts.

44. Link to our posts – We utilize the uses of ‘trackbacks.’ Hence any links to our posts, will automatically be rewarded with a back-link to them! So, Why not share this post with your readers and followers?

45. Buy a Paid Review – We link to our reviewed sites/products.

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Cheap Search Engine Optimization

Before you hire an “SEO specialist” to optimize your site, make sure you’re doing all the quick and easy fixes that make for cheap search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization isn’t an exact science — at least not to site owners. Google wants to display the most relevant content to the given search. Bloggers simply want the traffic from showing up high in the search engine results pages (SERPS). And sometimes those two goals are at odds with each other. Google doesn’t publish their results algorithm and they change it often both to make it better and to keep people from gaming the system. So search is mostly a matter of trial and error and experience. And there is always ongoing debate about what works and how important it really is.

But there are some basic steps you can take to ethically increase your chances of showing up in the SERPS for relevant searches — snd most of them occur while creating each post. In my experience, the following 10 SEO tips are the easiest, most basic, and cheapest methods of optimizing your blog posts for search engines.

 Do Keyword Research

What search terms will be used by those looking for this blog post? While I’ll admit that keyword research is actually a huge, complex topic, you can at least begin to think about what readers will be looking for and try to focus your posts on phrases that might be used to search for them.

Since basic SEO depends upon having a solid understanding of what keywords are and how they work, this is the place to spend some time. The best tool I’ve found for this is Market Samurai. It’s easy to use and reliable and you can download a free trial. (It’s available on both Mac and PC!)

The free tutorials are very helpful for beginners and really explain in depth what to look for in quality keywords.

 

Use Keywords in the Title Tag

Once you know the keywords you’re targeting, use them in the post title.

 

Use Keywords in URL

Formerly called the “post slug,” simply use more of the same keywords in the end of the URL.
Thesis makes this simple. Just enter the words you want to use in the Permalink field just under the title field. I like to use the main keywords separated by hyphens, leaving out common words like “the” or “and.”

 

Focused & Updated Content

Your content shouldn’t just be about the keywords, it should contain the keywords. Try to use variances of the keywords to total around two to three percent of the content. Keep posts on topic and related when possible.

Download a free report explaining how to create compelling content that ranks well in search engines. Read it. Follow it.

Regularly updating your blog with quality posts will teach the search engines that they need to crawl your site regularly for new content. Keep them coming back!

 

Use Keywords in Categories

Keywords used as category names reinforces the keywords.

 

Use Keywords in Tags

Always tag your posts and include important keywords. This also makes it easier for browsers to find something they are interested in.

 

Use Meta Descriptions

In the Edit Post window in Thesis, there is section just below the content field called SEO Details and Additional Style.” This optional area has great stuff. The custom title tag will show up as the linked title in SERPS and the meta description will be the descriptive paragraph after the title in Google. Put keywords here and a great descriptions to draw readers in.
[Note: I haven't bothered with Meta Keywords for years now. Google stopped using them in it's algorithm due to abuse, so I don't think it's worth your time. Instead, spend an extra minute writing good content.]

 

Use Header Tags Appropriately

Your title will be given an H1 tag. Use other tags (H2, H3, etc.) to appropriate subdivide your post. In the “visual” content input method, this is done easily with the Paragraph drop-down menu. The words in the titles and subtitles are deemed relevant and important to your post.

 

Internal Links

Link to your posts — using keyword anchor text — from other posts on your blog. Interlinking old blog posts not only helps with SEO, but helps readers find other posts on topics they are interested and keeps them on your site longer.

Note that Day #8 in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is all about internal linking!

 

Create a Sitemap

A sitemap is simply a list of accessible pages on a web site. Back in the day, these had to be created manually and were time consuming and easily outdated. Now, they can be created automatically. I use a free plugin called Google XML Sitemaps that makes it easier for search engines to crawl your entire site.

Good luck with managing basic SEO functions. This is the first step to getting the results rank that will get your traffic flowing.

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5 Ways to Skyrocket Your Blog Traffic

One of the major problems many people face is getting traffic to a blog, and the truth in the online world is that traffic is very essential to any online business you do; it is traffic that brings about people that buy.

This post will be talking about 5 ways you can significantly increase your website traffic.

1. Blog Commenting

I just began to realize the power of blog commenting. Blog commenting is a powerful way to get traffic to your website especially if done wisely and on a large scale.
One major thing about blog commenting is that it also helps you build a great brand when people begin to see your comments every here and there.
It is very important to make use of avatars when trying to get traffic to your blog through blog commenting because this will help people take note of you when they begin to see you everywhere every now and then. Being the first person to comment also helps a lot because most people are likely to visit the websites of a few of the first commenters and they rarely visit the rest.

When commenting to get traffic, quality is better than quantity because a lot of bloggers will delete your comment if you write generic comments and readers tend to click on valuable comments more than any other comments because they believe someone with this type of great comment will also have something similar on his blog.

2. Guest Posting

7 of the top ten referrers in my analytics data are from my guest posts and all of them sent me over 150 unique visitors. Guest posting is really effective and the power of a guest post should never be underestimated.
One thing I have come to notice with guest posts is that people prefer quality over quantity; if your guest post is a great one then you will get more visitors from it than just writing anything.
Many people tend to write just any guest post because they believe since the blog is not theirs then their best post should be on their blog, this is not supposed to be because of several reasons. One major advantage of submitting quality guest posts is that it helps you build a relationship with the blogger and his readers but if you just write anything there is a probability of the blogger declining your post, and if he doesn’t his readers will not visit your blog. The better your guest post, the better your result.

3. Blogging Communities

This is one underutilized traffic generation strategy many bloggers don’t use, many bloggers tend to give excuses that they are busy, If you are busy then you might want to be submitting your guest posts to blogging communities every weekend.
Some of the best blogging communities are MMO Social Network and Blog Engage; these two networks have sent me hundreds of visitors over time.
One major thing to consider when trying to get the best from blogging communities is that you have to have high quality posts and you also have to build relationship because people tend to vote up people they know and if you have an high quality post people will be more inclined to visit your blog.

4.  Forum Marketing

There was a time I signed up to the warrior forums and with only 50 posts I had already gotten over 70 visitors to my blog, I didn’t post a link to my blog in my posts, it was in the signature.
You can get great results from forum marketing if it is done properly, one great thing to consider when trying to market your blog through forums is that it is very important to try as much as possible to help others and not just spam people for your benefit.
If your aim is to go to forums to go and spam then within a short period of time you will be banned but if you focus on helping as many people as possible the end result will be you lasting longer in the forum, having more friends and building more stronger relationship and you will also have more traffic and authority.
Some great forums to get started are the Warrior Forum and Digitalpoint Forum.

5. Mailing List

I wouldn’t have put this on this list but it is also a very effective way to get traffic to your blog. I was checking my overall stats today and I discovered that my mailing list has sent me hundreds of visitors, this is a good number because I only sent my posts to them a few times.
One of the major benefits of a mailing list is the instant result it provides, people tend to respond faster because they are closer to their email than any other thing.
I have also observed mails I sent and I discovered that your titles matter, I have had sent emails have as low as 15% open rate and I have also had emails have over 35% open rate but what matters most is the title. If you have a cool and attractive title then you will get more results than having generic titles.
Getting traffic to blogs used to be a difficult task and I started noticing a difference over time. It is the tips in this post that is helping me get thousands of visitors to my 3 months old blog every week, use them to your advantage and you will be amazed at how they work.

It is also important to know that getting traffic takes time and requires constant effort, if you are dedicated to making the effective use of the above tips then in no time you will be getting a lot of traffic on autopilot.





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