2011 has been game changer for SEO where I have seen sites loose 80 to 90 percent of Google traffic. So let me share what I think will be best SEO strategy in 2012 but before that let me review my site traffic in 2011.

Go4Expert traffic from Google is near its all time high.

MBAGuys has lost some of its traffic but the changes done to the site has actually allowed it to remain where it is now.

SEO Strategy in 2012

According to me Google bot is trying to be as HUMAN as possible. +1 currently has very little impact on Google SERP’s but I expect the impact of Google+ and +1 to go higher in 2012. This means focus more on getting more people to your site and let them get engaged with your site content (read make them click on +1 button).

Links always has been the dominating aspect for Google SERP’s but I think it will be diminishing in value to +1 when ranking pages soon.

Unlike twitter, Google is making sure Google+ and +1′s are not spammed. According to me twitter is more of spam and automated posts than real human posting.

So my one SEO in 2012 will be to focus more on getting people engaged. what you think would be the right SEO strategy in 2012? Share your views in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Google traffic down? Things you should do.
2. Effective PPC Marketing Tips – Things you should do.
3. Internal Linking & Organic SEO

Online Reputation management is a very common term used by SEO experts these days and so I am going to give you real live example to help you not only understand online reputation management but also enhance your online reputation.

What is Online Reputation?

When you search in Google for the term Apple, as expected you see everything about the Apple Inc and nothing about the Apple as fruit.

Couple points to notice in the screenshot above.

1. Apple beats Wikipedia for the term Apple.
2. Apple Inc page of Wikipedia beats the Apple page of Wikipedia

Online Reputation Management

The goal of online reputation management is to suppress the negative mentions (or other mentions) by pushing them lower on search engine results pages and push positive mentions higher on search engine results page to decrease the negative visibility of the person, company, business or brand.

Now the same reputation management effect is happening to my Sharekhan PMS Review.

I rank pretty well in Google for the term – Sharekhan PMS review.

But I was pretty much in the first 3 results even for the term Sharekhan PMS but over time my article is being pushed down. Currently is on 9th spot. I don’t care much but the ranking for the term Sharekhan PMS but this is how you should be working on getting your online reputation managed. Well done Sharekhan.

How to Manage Online Reputation?

The answer to the question how I am being pushed down the search engine results page will help understand how you can manage your online reputation.

1. I am seeing lot of one page websites are being created. Domains like www.sharekhan-<keyword>.com. Just to mention few domains –  http://www.sharekhan-india.com/, http://www.sharekhan-pms.com/, http://www.sharekhan-tradetiger.com/, http://www.sharekhan-firststep.com/ …
2. Those domains are not hosted on the same server as the main site but mainly on different shared hosts. Different IPs and different hosts. You can even make whois private if you want. Note: Sharekhan uses BlueHost which is one of my recommended shared hosts as well. See iPage Review.
3. Apart from secondary domains some sub-domains are also created to boost the number of results in the search engine results page. Have some sub-domains for your site that makes sense.
4. Build links to positive reviews that are ranked in search engines but not very highly ranked. Find positive reviews that are on second or third page of search engine results page and try building links to those sites to boost their ranking higher to improve your online reputation.
5. Create keyword rich content for the authority website in the niche. This content can rank well in Google almost instantly because of the authority of the website.

Do you know of other ways to improve online reputation? Please share them in the comments.

More Related Posts:

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2. Common Marketing Mistakes
3. 10 Tips on How to Promote Facebook Pages

Search Engine Optimization is no longer just confined to

• Create unique content
• Get bunch of backlinks

Definitely the above things needs to be done but then you have to add one more factor of Social Media to your SEO efforts these days and so tracking your social media efforts is very important.

The most used statistics tool by webmasters is definitely Google Analytics but in Google Analytics you don’t have the Social Media Tracking added as default option and understandably so but using the advance segments you can track all your social media traffic in Google Analytics very easily.

Create Social Media as Custom Segment in Google Analytics

Under Advance Segments Create a New Custom Segment. Advance Segments Link can be found just under the navigation menu.

Add an OR condition for each social media site as source of traffic.

Give a name to the segment and save it. Once saved you can compare your custom segments you just created with the default segments provided by Google Analytics.

And track vital statistics for your social media campaigns.

Update: In old Google Analytics interface you will find the Advance Segment Option is in the left panel. Rest is pretty much same as new interface.

What are the other ways to track social media traffic? Share in comments below

More Related Posts:

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2. How to Track AWeber Conversions with Google Analytics
3. Email Marketing Vs Social Media Marketing

Guest post by Lior Levine who works for MA in security program in Tel Aviv University, and also advises for their MA in Political Science program.

Out-of-the-box LinkedIn profiles are relatively search engine friendly but to get the most out of your profile you need to put a little more work into it. Don’t worry it’s nothing too technical and you won’t need a Degree in the dark arts of search engine optimization to make your profile a whole lot more SEO friendly. The following 8 tips are more than enough to get you moving in the right direction.

1. Blog Regularly

You can blog on LinkedIn and you should blog on LinkedIn. Google loves blogs as it stands and it adores blogs that are updated on a regular basis with lots of useful and unique content. Now that doesn’t mean you need to update your blog twice per day (although if you did that would be awesome in terms of SEO) but if you can post something new once per day you’re ahead of 90% of the LinkedIn posse.

Stuck for blogging ideas? Checkout some of the better blogging tips by Shabbir.

2. Profile Keywords

The search engines will scan through your profile and what you’ve written there does matter. You need to find the keywords that best represent either your skills or the services provided by your company and include them in the content on your profile. Try to avoid what’s called keyword stuffing where you try to force keywords into your profile in an unnatural way – just sprinkle the relevant keywords around into your content and you’ll see the benefits in short order.

3. Tweak Your URL

LinkedIn provides you with a dynamic URL which means that instead of containing keywords or relevant information about you it is simply a string of numbers which has almost zero SEO benefit. All you need to do to change this is go to Profile -> Edit Profile and look for your Public Profile link on that page and click on the Edit button just beside that and then click on Customize Your Public Profile URL on the right hand side of that screen. And hey presto now you can add some relevant keywords to your LinkedIn profile URL.

4. Related Groups

Join groups that are related to your industry and participate in them – having the name of the group associated with your profile won’t do any harm. Plus you’ll find useful keywords in these groups to include in your profile content. It’s a win-win for you either way.

5. Interact

Answering questions for other users on LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to provide a link back to your profile. Could search engines like Google simply filter these links out? Of course! Do they? Well nobody is certain but every links does help – despite what Google’s official line on that is.

6. Specialize

The Specialties section in your LinkedIn profile is another ideal place for including keywords because there is a lot of evidence to point to the fact that Google does index this particular part of LinkedIn regularly.

7. Optimize Your Headline

Search engines tend to read a page of text from the top down and left to right – the same way a human reads text so you need to make sure your headline includes a number of your main keywords used in a natural way. Again don’t stuff keywords in there – it has to look and sound natural to both human visitors and search engine spiders.

8. Customize Your Anchor Text Links

The defaults for the links to your company website or external blog are the usual “My Company”, “My Website” and “My Blog” so why not customize these to include relevant keywords for your sites? LinkedIn has a lot of Google TrustRank so these links will count in SEO terms.

You can get a whole lot of SEO benefit for just spending maybe an hour or two tweaking your LinkedIn profile and from where we stand it’s a very worthwhile effort to make.

More Related Posts:

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2. Make Your Elance Profile Stand Out
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I get this query quite often from new webmasters and online entrepreneurs – How do I build links to my website? This guide will help you understand what link building strategies webmasters use building links.

This article is really long (over 2000 words), but I am sure you will get your money’s worth . I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later reading.

Why Link Building?

Link Building is a process of creating more and more inbound links to ones own website. The site or web page that has more incoming links has more authority in Google organic search results than the site or web page that has less incoming links given all other parameters for ranking the pages for a particular keyword remains the same.

In short if you have more incoming good quality links, you have more authority of ranking higher in Google organic search results. Period.

So if you want to rank your site higher in search engine’s organic listing you have to work on getting incoming links to your site.

Apart from search engine benefits links offers lot more benefits if done in the right way. It helps in getting quality traffic from relevant sites and help create awareness, visibility and credibility of your site.

So let me try to explain all the method of getting links to your site. Some of them are White hat, some grey hat as well but I have tried to avoid any black hat method of link building in this guide.

So let us begin.

1. Guest Posts

Backlinks from related authority blogs can help new websites get lot of boost in search engines and guest post is the most effective way to get your site linked from authority blogs. Guest posting happens between a blogger and a webmaster (webmaster can be blogger as well promoting his blog instead of a website) where webmaster writes unique content to be published on the blog and this makes him a “guest blogger” on the authority blog. When webmaster writes unique and good articles for free for their blog, blogger’s are more than happy to give you a backlink in the by-line in return for the content.

Guest post by guest blogger mutually benefits both aka the blogger and the webmaster. Blogger gets new and unique content for his blog and webmaster in return for his quality content not only generates related links to his own site / blog but also gets exposure of his website to the audience in the same niche.

The idea for guest posting is not confined only to the link and search engine benefits but also the exposure in the niche using the authority of the blog.

2. SEOLinkVine

What if the best blog in your target niche does not accept guest posts or is not really keen on publishing your content? Many people outsource the process of finding related blogs to publish articles but what I prefer is use services like SEOLinkVine which helps building links to your website by allowing you to submit your articles to related blogs and get thousands of high quality, one-way in content links pointing to your website. Needless to say, SEOLinkVine costs much less than outsourcing option and provides lot more control on the incoming links. It can help you save time and effort needed to finding blogs and getting them published and still maintaining the same quality.

3. ReviewMe / LinkWorth

What if you don’t prefer writing content for minor niche blogs? One option is you have is to outsource your content generation to other freelancer or the other option is you can ask the blog owner to write content for you and link to your blog. Sites like ReviewMe or Linkworth can help you find niche blogs and ask them to write content and review for you and link to your blog.

There are many advantages of using sites like ReviewMe and Linkworth. One of the advantage is you can get started building links to your site for as low as $5 per link but remember if you try getting links for least possible price level, you may end up getting links from blogs that have no actual readership and are online just to make those $5 per review. Ideally use ReviewMe or Linkworth to find blogs that have good readership and get your site out to the audience along with the link. Don’t opt for cheapest links on such sites because that may not help and can even work against you.

4. Link to Authority Sites

Yes you read it rightly. I am talking about linking to authority sites and blogs without asking anything in return from them. The only reason you are not linking to authority sites and blogs without anything in return is because you think it will help your site readers and users. As the webmaster of linked site notices in the stats (every webmaster looks at the stats) about your link driving him not only traffic but also giving him search engine benefits, they can return you the same favour any time soon.

5. Article Directories

If you are looking for better links from your content, article directories is the right way. Yes I agree that there are highly spammed directories out there but there are definitely few that are very well moderated and are worth looking for. My favourites are Ezine articles and Go Articles. EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com have very strict article submission guidelines. For new authors they manually review each article which decreases the spam considerably and so if you submit good content, you can get a great link in return.

I outsource this tasks to freelancer’s and I pay them for each article published (reviewed successfully by Ezine) for me under my account.

Many webmasters prefer to replicate the same article to multiple sites and get lot more incoming links instead of just one link but I don’t prefer doing that.

6. Buy Links

Google’s don’t recommend paid links and so buying links is grey hat method of link building.

Contact webmasters and ask them if they want to have your site link place on their page for a payment. You can always have few paid links from great domains and authority sites to your boost your link building efforts but make sure you don’t over do with paid links as it is one of the non-recommended things by Google.

7. Online Profiles

Many social networking websites like Twitter / Digg / LinkedIn allows adding link(s) to your site from your profile. You can create new profile for each of your site, link to your own site and generate few extra links.

I am not suggesting you to spam those sites with fake profiles with a link but what I am suggesting is – you can always create a new profile for each of your site like I have twitter profile for each of my site - For MBAGuys.net, For Go4Expert.com, For CodeItWell.com …

8. Forum Signature

Majority of forums including Go4Expert.com allows you to add signature to your posts. Signature is small piece of information that you want to include at the bottom of all your posts. Many forums allow you to include pictures and links to your site(s). Each post that you contribute in forum adds a backlink to your site.

I know many people would argue that the forum posts pages have too many signature links which actually dilutes the benefits from forum signature link. I agree with that but if you are really helpful in forums you not only get links to your site from signature but you also drive lot of good quality traffic to your site. See the stats for my friend’s blog. He is active member on one of my forum and that forum drives him really good quality traffic.

9. Blog Comments

There is a lot of misconception about blog commenting, nofollow and dofollow blogs.

A nofollow blogs are those which add a rel=nofollow to the commenter’s website links and Google don’t follow the rel=nofollow links. This means Google does not transfer PageRank (not the toolbar PR) or anchor text benefits across these links.

So people prefer to comment on blogs that don’t add the rel=nofollow to the comment links. Those blogs are termed as dofollow blogs.

In general blog comments (nofollow or dofollow) can help you build good number of links to your website but you should understand that if your blog is about health and fitness and if you are commenting on web development dofollow blogs, obviously the amount of traffic will be very little but link benefits will be close to nothing. The most important aspect of blog commenting is to find authority blogs in your niche and be active on the blog. The authority blog in the niche will always be nofollow blog so the idea is to comment on authority blogs and not find dofollow blogs.

10. 3 Way Link Exchange

Google does not recommend link exchanges i.e. link to me and I’ll link back to you but if you make link exchanges such that you create two sites. Site A and Site B. If anyone links to your Site A, you link them back from Site B. This way Google can never detect your link exchanges provided you use a different hosting for both of your sites. Link exchanges worked in 2005 but are a very outdated technique that search engines are well aware of but 3 way link exchange is a work around for link exchange.

Note: When doing link exchanges try to vary your anchor text as well as the url based on the profile of the website that is linking back to you. As an example if I want to do a link exchange for my MBA Forum I would ask the webmaster to link to the part of the website that is most relevant to his site. For example if the site linking to me is a CAT Exam site I may ask them to link to my CAT Exam forum instead of home page.

Apart from that I will not insist too much on the anchor text for each exchange but would prefer to have the link live. All links help your rankings in general, so don’t be afraid to get links that looks like http://imtips.co/

11. Free Websites

There are many sites like Blogger, Hubpages etc that give you options to create pages online. You can sign-up with those type of sites, write whatever you feel like, and link to your main site.

I use DevHub (See my Devhub Review) to host my extra domains and add links to main site. See http://shabbirbhimani.com/ where I drag dropped my twitter and RSS feeds along with ways to contact me but the most important part is linkroll i.e. sites I own. This looks very natural to Google.

12. Reviews

You can write honest reviews about a product and you can end up being linked from the product website itself. As an example I Reviewed BuySellAds from a publisher point of view and see how I got featured on BuySellAds Blog

Or my vWorker review is linked from vWorker’s official Wiki Page.

The above examples may give you the feeling that positive reviews can generate lot of links but that is absolutely not true. See my ShareKhan PMS  review (Financial Portfolio Management Service review of a top Indian share market broking house) generated lots of links from fellow bloggers like Manshu of OneMint or Manish of JagoInvestor and many others.

13. Interviews

If you interview fellow bloggers and publish the interview on your site, there are very high chances that the blogger would link to your site. On the contrary if you are approached by any blogger to be interviewed you should positively respond to it because it can get your blog not only good traffic from the other blog but also valuable links. See how DailyBlogTips has my link on his blog for answering few questions about my Adsense experience.

14. Create Great Resource

Last but not the least is to have good great content which builds link naturally to your site. I am sure you liked this post or else you may not read to this length. So why not link to this post from your blog or site and share the link with us.

Final Thoughts

Avoid building links too fast using spammy resources. You can’t control who links to you, but make sure you avoid getting yourself linked from spammy sites. Share your feedback about the article in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Link Bait – Be Odd & New
2. Building A Blog or Building A Forum – Which One is Easier?
3. Effectively Build Links to New Website

More and more people are becoming self proclaimed search engine optimization (SEO) experts and most of these so-called SEO experts know nothing about SEO in general. As an admin of an SEO forum I often come across such SEO experts and so I have shared 10 Biggest SEO Myths Among So Called SEO Experts.

Have you come across such SEO Experts? Share your experiences in comments below.

More Related Posts:

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In my complete guide to WordPress SEO an important setting is of permalinks and you can opt for many different permalinks options in WordPress very easily. Let me discuss what permalinks options we have in WordPress for SEO and which one is voted as the most SEO friendly. You can see some of the default options in the permalinks settings.

But let us look at what other options we can opt for.

Directory Structure Permalinks

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%postname%/

I use it on my Stock Market Blog

Static pages Permalinks

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%postname%.html

I use the same here at IMTips

Hierarchy Permalinks with category

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%category%/%postname%.html

In my opinion, it is the best permalinks structure but if you have multiple categories for a post, only one can show up, the one with the lowest category id and the post will be accessible through each category in urls which can create issues with duplicate content.

Hierarchy Permalinks with Tags

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%tag%/%postname%.html

Remember if you have more than one tag per post you can have the same issues as above.

Hierarchy permalinks for Multi-Author Blog

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%author%/%postname%.html

Unless you have more than one blog author it is very useful or else it does not make much sense to be using this Permalinks.

Finally your Vote

For more refer official WordPress permalinks documentation.

More Related Posts:

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3. Create your own URL Shorten-er for WordPress

This guest post is by Sadik of Oracle Forum.

SEO is a term which is thrown around a lot. Most new site owners are spending considerable time and effort into optimizing their sites for search engines and specifically for Google. Some unlucky souls also end up hiring one of the hundreds of scam SEO experts shelling out several hundred dollars. I am going to talk about Search Engine Optimization in general in this three part series and vBulletin 4 in particular.

Why vBulletin 4?

I own and administer several vBulletin forums. I could also talk about WordPress or Joomla but vBulletin 4 is a good case in point. Good case in point because, although being the forum system which powers most of internet communities, the vBulletin 4 series is a SEO nightmare. The fault is not really within the vBulletin application framework, but the lack of Search Engines consideration in the view (frontend) layer, meaning, the templates.

vBulletin 4 Suite consists of the forums, the CMS and the Blogs. Before we delve into the technical details of search engine optimization for VB4, let us take a moment and understand the nature of SEO itself.

What is SEO?

I am not going to present you any rocket science here. Search Engine optimization, quite simply, means ensuring that,

1. Search Engines find your site’s pages
2. Search Engine can make out from your HTML output, what the page is about, and what the content is.

Let us look at Point 1.

Why can’t search engines find my site?

Search Engines follow real life methodology of making someone famous. If I was to be known, someone needs to mention me. The more famous a person who mentions me, the more famous I will get. So my chances at fame are much higher if Angelina and Brad Pitt were to mention me, compared to Jane and Joe (whoever they are).

So Search Engines will find you, quite simply, if people link you. SE will give you more importance if well established, highly ranked sites such as New York Times or BBC were to link you compared to smaller sites. But each reference counts and the more the better. This point is entirely about Off-Site SEO. We are however going to talk more about On-Site / On-Page SEO.

Beginners will obviously find it difficult getting other people to link them. So it helps if you are a multi-site owner. You can link your new site from your established site(s). Also adequate care should be taken to have good inter-linking of pages on your site itself.

Now Let us turn our attention to Point 2, the main subject of these posts.

vBulletin 4 and On-Page SEO

Assume that you are writing a simple program to automatically read a web page. What will you need to do?

Two things,

1. Find out what the page is about, that is, topic of the page.
2. Find content within the HTML code written on the Topic.

That is what every search engine aims to do, no matter how complex the search engine algorithm. Since we have taken the example of vBulletin 4, let us get into a little specific detail about the two points above with respect to vBulletin 4. I am specifically talking about,

1. Optimizing the title of the article / thread / Blog for search engines to know for sure the topic.
2. Ensuring as semantic HTML output as possible remaining within the boundaries of vBulletin. Like replacing LI elements with DIV, and removing fluff, which is useless bloat which comes with vBulletin, like Forum Jump, post icons, permissions on showthread / forumdisplay pages
3. Presenting the cream content of the article / thread / blog to the search engine in an easily identifiable manner instead of it being buried deep into a crapload of html like hover menus, navbar etc.
4. The Extras, measuring and increasing the forum speed through pagespeed, proper interlinking etc.

In my second post, I am going to talk about all the points above and some more with respect to vBulletin 4 specifically mentioning how you can perform the optimizations on your own vBulletin powered sites.

So stay tuned…

This guest post is by Sadik of Oracle Forum.

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If you are trying to optimize vBulletin for better user experience, content delivery network can definitely help especially MaxCDN which can help make your site load faster and boost your SEO effort.

MaxCDN plugin for vBulletin is for vBulletin 4+. If you are using vBulletin 3.8 or lesser and have no plans to move to vBulletin 4, you can still use MaxCDN.

If you have any issues you can always post in comments and I will be more than happy to help or else you can even hire me at Elance to get it done for you.

1. Creating Pull Zone in MaxCDN

We will create two pull zones in MaxCDN – One for images and the second for clientscripts.

Images will be pulled from your forumroot/images folder and clienscripts will be pulled from forumroot/clienscripts. Once you have created both the pull zone verify that you are able to browse through the images as well as the CSS files

As an example:

www.mbaguys.net/images/misc/mbaguyslogo.gif

Becomes

mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/misc/mbaguyslogo.gif

Make sure both the URLs are working.

Remember you need to create the CName record for your domain.

Once you have the images being pulled into MaxCDN create the second pull zone for the Clienscripts folder. Nomenclature I follow is <SomeName>1 for Images and <SomeName>2 for clientscripts i.e. mbaguys1.g4estatic.com for Images and mbaguys2.g4estatic.com

Once you have the pull zone part done, we will make changes in vBulletin to use the new image and CSS paths.

2. vBulletin Image Paths

Admin CP > Styles & Templates > Style Manager > and select StyleVars from combobox. Edit the Image Paths to the new URLs

• images/buttons becomes http://mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/buttons
• images/misc becomes http://mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/misc

And so on for all the image paths.

3. vBulletin Replacement Variable

We will need few replacement variables to be configured to change the other Image paths like Post Icons. Visit Admin CP > Styles & Templates > Replacement Variable Manager and create the following Replacement Variables.

Search for Text : src="images/
Replace with Text : src="http://New_Images_CName_Path/

For me it becomes

src="images/ to src="http://mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/

Similarly for Clienscripts Create 3 more replacement variables.

1. href="clientscript to href="http://New_Clientscript_CName_Path
2. src="clientscript to src="http://New_Clientscript_CName_Path
3. url("clientscript to url("http://New_Clientscript_CName_Path

Once you have the above replacement variables in place browse through your forum to see everything is working fine. You can check the source of you HTML webpage to see all the images and clientscripts are being fetched from the new URLs or can wait for few seconds to see the hit reports in MaxCDN as well.

If everything is working fine we will move to custom avatars and other images which needs to be moved to the images folder for it to be using MaxCDN.

4. Custom Avatars and Images

To Move the custom avatars and other user images to be served from CDN all you have to do is move them under the images folder and everything will be taken care of automatically by the replacement variable. Make sure you have the URLs Relative to your forum home.

Visit Admin CP > Avatars > User Picture Storage Type and change the

1. Avatars to be served from the filesystem at ./images/customavatars and URL is images/customavatars relative to forumhome
2. Profile pictures to be served from the filesystem at ./images/customprofilepics and URL is images/customprofilepics relative to forumhome
3. Signature pictures to be served from the filesystem at ./images/signaturepics and URL is images/signaturepics relative to forumhome

Similarly change the Social Groups > Social Group Icon Storage Type and User Albums > Album Picture Storage Type under the forumroot/images folder

Hope this helps fellow forum admin’s. Share your views and feedback in comments below.

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WordPress is the best CMS but there is lot of misconception about SEO for WordPress. Many people think that Installing WordPress is all they need for SEO. Though it is true to some extent you can still improve a lot in WordPress for SEO and convert your blog into an SEO Powerhouse.

If you have just installed your WordPress blog make sure you have your blog privacy settings correct. Under the Settings > Privacy make sure you have visible to everyone, including search engines option selected.

The Theme

The choice of your theme can impact SEO to a great extent so choose your theme wisely. I personally prefer Thesis theme for my blog because it is one of the best WordPress theme from an SEO point of view but you can use any good theme of your choice.

Once you are done with your theme installation, we will move on to get right WordPress settings to help in SEO.

Permalink Settings

Search engines and especially Google prefer better user experience. By default WordPress URLs look like http://imtips.co/?p=123 but as your can see URL of this post is http://imtips.co/wordpress-seo.html. You can get this done by editing the Permalink Settings for your blog.

This not only makes your blog URL’s user friendly but also makes URLs search engine friendly.

Anchor text in Backlinks is still one of the key factors in Google ranking and so anybody copying URLs will also have the keywords in the anchor text.

People when linking to your content may not always link like

WordPress SEO

But more likely will use

http://imtips.co/wordpress-seo.html

And this still has the needed keywords to your liking.

Many people even prefer to add category in the URLs. For using category you need to use the following permalinks structure

/%category%/%postname%.html

Or

/%category%/%postname%/

Caution: If your blog categories are such that your post can have multiple categories for a single post avoid using category in the URL.

All in one SEO Pack

All in one SEO is one of the most used plugin for WordPress SEO but if you are using Thesis Theme you can avoid this plugin but if you are using any other theme this plugin is a must. This plugin helps you customize your home page title, post page title to add your blog title to your post.

Apart from titles this plugin can also add Meta description and keywords to your posts.

A very important point to note is that by default this plugin has Noindex option checked for category, archive and tag pages. The main reason for this setting is many WordPress themes show full post content on those pages and so having those pages noindex can help you save from duplicate content but if your theme does not display full post content on those pages you can uncheck Noindex option. If you want you can even edit your theme to show only few lines of content from your post on those pages and enable this option.

XML Sitemap

XML Sitemap Plugin helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engine’s crawl website much more efficiently. XML Sitemap WordPress plugin helps you create complete XML sitemap for your WordPress including posts, pages, categories, tags and other custom URLs.

Internal Linking Structure

Better internal linking structure can help a lot in SEO and so we will use few plugins to enhance the internal linking structure of our WordPress site.

1. SEO Smart Link – As your blog grows it becomes almost impossible to link to old posts. SEO Smart Links automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts as well as comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog and helps internal linking for your blog.

2. Related Post – Many people argue how related posts can help in SEO but a better interlinking always help in SEO and related posts is a way to link to other related articles from your blog post. When it comes to related posts plug-in there are quite a few of them for WordPress but my personal favorite is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin because it has very intelligent algorithm for finding related posts.

3. Breadcrumbs – Google is integrating breadcrumbs navigation in SERPs and so having breadcrumb for your posts can help your SERP listing look more trustworthy.

Caution: I personally try to avoid breadcrumbs on blog where I have posts falling into multiple categories. As an example this post is under CMS and SEO category.

4. Pagination – As blog grows it contains tons of posts and if you use the default WordPress navigation, Most of your posts can be buried few clicks from home page. Using page navigation means each of your post is just couple of clicks from the home page.

SEO and Speed

WP-Super Cache – We know site speed is a part of Google’s ranking algorithm and WP-Super Cache can help speed up your website considerably. It generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog and then uses html files intelligently to show to your guests.

SEO For Images

SEO Images – Whenever you add Images to your post you always miss ALT and TITLE tag for images and SEO Images plugin adds both of them automatically.

Optimize Category Pages

Category pages are the most overlooked pages SEO in your WordPress blog and you should always do SEO for those pages. With the Thesis Theme, you can easily add custom information to the top of your category pages but for your other themes I will recommend to add category description at the top of the page. See what I do for my blog categories like Make Money.

Backlinks

I have quite a few articles on how to generate backlinks but today I am going to discuss ways to generate more links to your Wordpres blog.

1. Follow Readers – Follow your blog reader’s and visit their blog and comment on it. I always visit the site of person leaving comment on my blog to the extent I can and see if I can share some of my views on some their articles as well.
2. Use Ping backs – You can use pingbacks to notify other blogs that you have linked to them and sooner or later they’re going to return the favour. Edit Settings > Discussion and have the option Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article checked.

Final Thoughts

Feel free to ignore anything you think is not right for your blog. I myself don’t use all of them on all my blogs but they have worked for me or for my clients.

Don’t forget to leave your comments or suggestion for anything you think I have missed and I hope this helps all fellow WordPress bloggers.

More Related Posts:

1. SEO for WordPress Categories
2. Which is Better – Blogger or WordPress?
3. Free or Premium WordPress Theme?

We all understand that we can generate lots of backlinks by commenting on related forums and blogs but the question may come as to how to find sites such sites. Let me share with you a special trick to find such sites using Google.

Use Google to search Powered By terms to find CMSes that can be potential for comments (read backlinks).

• powered by wordpress
• Powered by BlogEngine
• Powered by Blogsmith
• powered by Typepad
• powered by scoop
• Powered by PHPbb
• Powered by vBulletin
• Powered by SMF
• powered by Simple Machines
• powered by punBB
• Powered by Tagbox
• Powered by DRBGuestbook
• powered by bbPress
• powered by yabb
• powered by ip.board
• powered by invision power board
• powered by e-blah
• powered by xmb
• powered by fudforum
• powered by fluxbb
• powered by forum software minibb
• powered by phorum
• powered by quicksilver forums
• powered by seo-board
• powered by ubb.threads
• powered by the unclassified newsboard
• powered by usebb forum software
• powered by xennobb
• powered by yaf
• Powered By MyBB
• powered by icebb
• powered by javabb
• powered by viscacha
• Powered by Pligg
• Powered by PHPDug
• Powered by MediaShare
• Powered by clipbucket
• Powered by VidiScript
• Powered by PHPMotion
• Powered by ClipShare
• Powered by iVidPlay
• Powered by iSoftScripts
• Powered by VShare
• Powered by Video CMS
• Powered by PHP Melody
• Powered by SkaDate
• Powered by Sharemixer
• Powered by SocialMedia
• Powered By ONEsite
• powered by insoshi
• Powered by Ning
• powered by buddypress
• powered by elgg
• Drupal Powered Websites
• Powered by Drupal
• powered by b2evolution
• powered by Mephisto comment
• powered by subtext
• Powered by s9y comment
• powered by socialwebcms
• Powered by ModX
• powered by Concrete5
• powered by Plone
• powered by soapblox
• powered by Fireboard
• Powered by ExpressionEngine
• Powered by KickApps
• powered by snitz forums
• Powered by AEF
• Powered by Beehive
• Powered by FruitShow
• Powered By Webs ID
• Powered by free article directory
• Powered by Article Friendly
• Powered by ArticleMS
• Powered by Article Dashboard
• Powered by OpenLD

Using the above terms we can find forums and blogs for generating backlinks.

As an example let us say we want to find .edu domains that have a vBulletin forum and is related to fitness niche. Our search term in Google should be

“powered by vBulletin” site:.edu fitness – Like this

I hope this helps fellow webmasters build a link power house for their sites. Share your feedback in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. 11 Easy Ways To Build 2000+ Backlinks
2. vBulletin 4 SEO Tips
3. How to Get Adsense BlueDart Tracking Number in Advance – Special Trick As Gift On Friendship Day

Google recently changed its algorithm to punish content scrappers and some of my friends see traffic levels like this.

But that is not the end of the world and Good content sites like IMTips saw completely opposite

So it is important to understand things that can (and should) work in SEO and also things you should avoid.

1. Manipulating Content

I still see many sites use things like same colored text as background. If you are thinking to differ the color slightly (Black background and grey font color) and put 1000 keywords rich content below the footer you should still avoid that.

Apart from plain hiding if you think you are smart enough to get the hidden text behind an overlay-ed image or hide content with some CSS tricks it is time to think more from user point of view in 2011 and not search engine point of view.

If you are avoiding content manipulation the next thing that may come to your mind is about keyword density. Isn’t it? You may have even started to think about how you can increase your keyword density but make sure you have user as a reference point in your mind and not a search engine. If you think few extra times a keyword is something that is going to help your user it should be (and must be) done or else it is nothing more than waste of time.

2. Links

It is time to think beyond link building techniques like link farms, Link Exchanges, Link Wheelers, 3 Way link Exchanges or even n way link exchanges. If you think your user will not benefit from the link on your site there is no point in having that link just to gain SEO and Google ranking. Google has been working (read punishing) a lot on sites that impact the Google algorithm un-naturally.

Next thing that may come to your mind is link from other related forums and blogs. Being a webmaster of Programming and SEO Forum I will suggest you to avoid spamming and be helpful in forums. More or less every blog and forum allows you to promote your site with a link but make sure you know what is allowed. Don’t forget that a user for life is much more valuable than thousands of guests for few seconds per day.

Apart from the normal link cloaking techniques if you are thinking to can get the manual directory submissions done for as low as $1.99 it is like wasting your hard earned money and a penny saved is a penny earned.

3. Auto Content

Don’t go for some automated script which can create content for some of your site from other sources it is time to re-think on the same. Auto Blogs may have worked in the past but the recent step of Google towards copied content means you should focus more on things which in the long run can work in your favour rather than focusing more on things which has worked in the past.

4. Meta

Again getting the perfect Meta keywords and description will not make a hell lot of different from getting the right Meta keywords and description. They are nothing more than just a waste of time and so never used more than few minutes on getting them right. If you think you are giving too much time on them it is better to not to have them as well. I will also not waste too much of my time writing about them.

5. PageRank

Last but still by no means least is to think about PageRank. Google itself is devaluing the Toolbar PR and so if you are still looking at Toolbar PageRank I think it is time to shift your focus on better things than Toolbar PR.

What is your strategy for SEO in 2011?

No related posts.

My Google Organic Traffic Increased with Decrease in Adwords Expense and I am certain that is it not a coincidence. I do PPC Marketing for new sites for keywords I want to rank well in SEO. As my ranking improves I experimentally decrease my PPC expense.

My website in this article is ranked No1 in Google Organic Results where I was also spending in Adwords. When my Adwords ads were gone my first Google organic ranking takes all the clicks from users because all keywords in the Adwords campaign were long tail keywords with very less to no competition. As there are no Ads from me and other advertisers’ users are more inclined towards clicking on the organic results.

An example will help more.

Let us say that you want to rank for keyword “oc tod spitmi” (imtips.co spelled in reverse)

You register a good domain and then add some content to the site. Work on SEO but to give a kick start you also start with Adwords and bid for “oc tod spitmi” as well. You know this is keyword with low to no competition and so once you rank well in Google organic if you decrease your Adwords expense you will see a surge in the Google organic traffic. Now your ad is not pushing your Google Organic listing down.

More Related Posts:

1. Increase in Google Organic Traffic With Decrease In Adwords Expense. Is It A Coincidence?
2. How to Link Multiple Adwords Account in Google Analytics?
3. FREE Google Adwords Coupons – $75 Worth of FREE Advertising

Time and again I say this – Webmasters should always experiment. I do a lot of experiments myself. Last weekend I decreased my Adwords daily spend to half for one of my site. I expected a sharp fall in daily traffic but I did not see the fall. I was bit surprised but digging more stats I found that decrease in Adwords traffic was is compensated by Google Organic traffic.

Initially I thought this was just a one day spike and it will settle down and so I was watching the traffic level very keenly for complete last week. When I did not see a fall in my Google Organic traffic for couple of days I started to search for similar views by other webmasters and to my surprise I see completely opposite views i.e. if you decrease your spend in Adwords your organic traffic can fall (See here).

Is it just a coincidence? Share your views in comments below. I will be sharing my in-depth views in the upcoming post.

More Related Posts:

1. Why Google Organic Traffic Surged With Decrease In Adwords Expense
2. How to Link Multiple Adwords Account in Google Analytics?
3. FREE Google Adwords Coupons – $75 Worth of FREE Advertising

SEO experts and especially Google SEO experts will always suggest working on off-page optimization factors more than on-page optimization for better organic ranking.

C Programming Forum was something I never had the time to work on for quite some time until recently in the first week of September I started working on it. Upgraded vBulletin, then gave a whole new look, Installed vBSEO and other relevant plugins.

After the new look I started with my marketing efforts and soon I saw traffic picking up.

I thought the traffic was because of marketing efforts but to my surprise it was not only marketing that has worked in my favour. It was Google Organic Traffic that has tripled.

As you can see from the screenshot I installed vBSEO on 5th September 2010 and hours after installation my traffic from Google organic started to rise. Remember this is was one of those low traffic forums and yet I started to see results.

Now let us see a day to day to comparison of Google Organic traffic keeping 5th of September as the pivot.

You can clearly see the effect of vBSEO.

According to me vBSEO is one of the best plugin for vBulletin which makes your forum more search engine friendly. It has some handsome lists of features but my personal favourite features are user friendly url’s (Read SEO Friendly url’s ) and guest enhancements features that lightens HTML code by removing some not so used features by guests. Features like forum jump dropdown, member DHTML menus and many others…

So after looking at the charts finally my question is – Is “Google SEO” Only Off-Page Optimization? Share your views in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. vbSEO Canonical URL Bug Fix
2. Increase in Google Organic Traffic With Decrease In Adwords Expense. Is It A Coincidence?
3. Why Google Organic Traffic Surged With Decrease In Adwords Expense