Top Search Engine Optimization Plugins For WordPress

Here I want to describe few SEO plugins for WordPress users to optimize their Blog:

1. All in One SEO Pack – One of the best and the most popular plugin in wordpress is All in One SEO Pack, the plugin does it all for you. If you are tired with writing HTML meta descriptions, keywords etc, The plugin makes it smooth to add meta tags, meta description, keywords and robots description. It helps by choosing the best keywords and avoiding duplicate descriptions.

2. Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO linking tools allows you to set the word phrase for automatic linking and can be set to “nofollow” to avoid duplicate links. Forget to put manual links just choose a word and give it a link. This plugin is user friendly and increases the navigation. The plugin also removes the back links, and thus increase your overall SEO score.

3. Google XML Sitemaps - The XML sitemap generator builds the sitemap for website, so that website links can easily be submitted to search engines. You don’t have to summit single URLs or wait for Google to index your pages. The XML site map does it all. It is the best tool for search engine Optimization. Build your site maps easily and you can exclude the URLs you don’t want to index. The tool is easy to use without any hazels.

4. HeadSpace2 – HeadSpace2 is the meta data manager, it does many SEO tasks. With it you can tag posts and can create custom title and description to increase your search engine ranking. It perform’s various operations like Meta-data nesting, Dynamic data extraction and a feature of mass editing. Besides it can be page specific and theme specific. It should be used to increase your SEO SCORE.

5. Simple Tags – The plugin is extremely easy to use. It helps blogger’s to add tags from automated generated tags, auto-completion of tags as you type, mass tag editing. IT has an Ajax Admin Interface, which is handy to use. The tool is for dummies to increase their SEO score.

6. Meta Robots WordPress plugin – The plugin add robot meta data to pages so that search engines get to know which page to follow and which to nofollow. Prevent authors, data based archives and search results to get indexed and give irrelevant search results. To configure it, the tool needs pro skills. If you are not sure about what are robots and what does they do, do get information before using it.

7. Redirection – For may reasons you may need Redirection tool. This tool allows you to redirect URLs from one page to another. If you change the post heading the permalink gets changed, now search engines need time to re-index your new URL, So Just redirect the older one’s to new ones. This simply optimize your SEO score.

8. SEO Post Link – The SEO Post Link plugin checks the URL of your posts and if it is too long search engines won’t give a liking towards it. It make the links to more search engine friendly, that is limiting it to a no of words, cut unnecessary words and much more.

9. SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – The plugin allows you to search the duplicate content on your blog for whatsoever the reason may be. It sets to “nofollow” the content and helps from search engine penalties.

10. SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Tags, all know what’s their power is, if you give tags for your content it will be read by the search engines and it drives traffic to the website. Tags are the keywords for your content. No tags less relevancy but good and enough tags get a flow of traffic.

Difference between 301 and 302 Redirects

Many people don't know the different between a 301 and 302 redirect. You might think that Google and the other search engines would just follow the redirects, but that's where things get complicated. A 301 redirect means that the page has moved to a new location, permanently. A 302 redirect means, that the move is temporary. Search engines need to figure out whether to keep the old page, or replace it with the one found at the new location. Use the wrong type of redirects, and the search engines' view of your web site can get screwed up, badly.

Why does this matter? If you are moving a web page or an entire web site to a new location, for instance if you change your domain name, you want visitors to be able to find your site. A redirect causes the user's browser to automatically forward from the old location to the new one. You might think that Google and the other search engines would just follow the redirects, but that's where things get complicated. When a site moves, that can trigger the Google aging delay. Usually the site drops out of the search rankings for several months, sometimes even a year. We'll come back to this later.

There aren't too many situations where a 302 is appropriate. How often have you temporarily moved a page? It's much more common to move pages permanently. Nevertheless, it seems easier to create 302 redirects than 301s. You can use Javascript or a meta tag to create a 302. Creating a 301 redirect requires special commands in your .htaccess file if you use an Apache server. With Windows servers, creating 301 takes even more time and trouble. That's why there's a tendency for people to mistakenly use 302 instead of 301.

Google recognizes that many people use 302 when they really mean 301. Fortunately, Google isn't bound by any law to take people literally. For the sake of producing the best possible search results, Google can and should look at 302s and figure out if the webmaster really means 302, or if it's run-of-the-mill confusion and they really mean 301.

Whether Google actually handles 302s properly is an open question. If you use a 302 when you should be using a 301, there's a chance Google or some other search engines might keep your old URL in the index, and then filter out your new URL as a duplicate. You might end up with link popularity divided between the two domains, hurting your search rankings. The search engines might figure out how to handle your 302, or they might not.

Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer

Back in 2001, Eric asked for a brainstorm of a few "splashy" ideas in search. A designer and product manager at the time, I made a few mockups -- one of which was for 'universal search.' It was a sample search results page for Britney Spears that, in addition to web results, also had news, images, and groups results right on the same page. Even then, we could see that people could easily become overwhelmed with the number of different search tools available on Google -- let alone those that would be created over the next few years. This proliferation of tools, while useful, has outgrown the old model of search. We want to help you find the very best answer, even if you don't know where to look.

That mockup and early observations were the motivation behind the universal search effort we announced earlier today. And while that Britney Spears mockup was the start of Google's universal search vision, it was instantly obvious that this would be one of the biggest architectural, ranking, and interface challenges we would face at Google. Over several years, with the help of more than 100 people, we've built the infrastructure, search algorithms, and presentation mechanisms to provide what we see as just the first step in the evolution toward universal search. Today, we're making that first step available on google.com by launching the new architecture and using it to blend content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into our web results.

With universal search, we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results. Read more ...

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Difference between SEO and SEM

As you know Search engine optimization purely based in organic way or in simple terms in a free manner .SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is a part of SEM.SEM stands for Search engine Marketing ,it can be explained as acquiring traffic from search engines and other websites by means of payment. Like Google adwords, Yahoo marketing, MSN adCenter.

We know that SEO is a long term process ,so generally website owner wont wait for that long time they will pay for their website traffic driven by search engines and other websites.

Paid inclusions in search engines and directories
Pay per click advertising
Traditional advertising i.e placing ads in search engines

For example if you need 1000 visitors per day you can pay an amount for each visitor and buy them from the popular means like google adwords, MSN adcenter, yahoo sponsor, Miva and many of other search engines .This is traffic driven from search engine advertising whereas another famous one contextual advertising is you can place your website ads on other websites which can drive you traffic .

Advantages:
People needs to switch over the paid marketing because it produces a definite and quick result ,
You can test your product reach and performance in daily basis
If your product is worthy you can convert it in to money
You can target your visitors to the perfect landing pages of your website which can express more about your product
SEO may lead a general traffic but paid traffic leads category related traffic
For example
If you have a music related website which sells CD/DVD or products
SEO may generate traffic even for free mp3 musics but you can sell your product to a viewer who is expecting something free where as in SEM you can generate the perfect traffic for your product.

Disadvantages:
If you cant convince your visitor both your time and money gets failed.
It can make you profitable suddenly at the same time it drives to a great loss.
SEM cannot be fulfilled without SEO ,well trained SEO can perform SEM better.
I have just explained you the basic and differences between SEO and sem .There is lot do with SEM we will discus in coming days .Hope you can understand the difference.

Top 10 On-Page SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important ingredients for getting large amounts of traffic to your website besides high-quality content. Because once your articles are a few weeks old, the majority of the traffic to those articles will come from search engines. That's why it's important to rank high in search engines.

In this article I'm going to describe the 10 basic SEO tips that you should keep in mind when writing a new article or developing a new website to make sure your blog ranks high in the search engines.

1. Place Your Keywords In the Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important things for ranking high for particular keywords. That's why it's very important to think of a title that contains important keywords and grabs the attention of people. Because when people search on search engines like Google, the title of your page will be displayed in the results and people will click on links that are the most attractive to them first. Remember that it's also very important and rewarding to have a unique title, so before you use the title, Google it and see if the title already appears in the top 10 results.

Please keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters(about 8 words) of your page's title. Google does not even index the keywords in your page's title after the 12th or so word. Yahoo and MSN don't even index pages that have a page title that's too long. Source: Google – How Many Words In A Page Title Tag?

Note: WordPress users should use the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you the ability to easily place the title of your post in the beginning of your title tag.

2. Optimize Your Robots.txt

Having an optimized robots.txt is important because this file can control which pages of your websites get crawled by the search engine spiders. For those of you who use WordPress, I recommend preventing search engine spiders from crawling wp-admin and plugin folders.

Here are some more resources about the robots.txt file:

3. Proper Use of ALT Tags

The tag should be used to describe an image, not to spammed with keywords that have nothing to do with the image.
Why? Because while it's true that search engine spiders cannot read images, they can however read tags, and having it spammed with keywords that are totally irrelevant to the image will make Google aware of what to derank you for.

Here's some more information about alt tags:

4. Anchor Text of Links

The anchor text is the text inside your tags that links to other pages. Wether they're incoming or outgoing links, it's important for the anchor text to contain a description of where the link is taking the visitor. This is even more important for search engines because it tells its crawlers where the link is going.

So avoid using words like "Click Here" as an anchor text as it can hurt both your website and the website you're linking to. One more thing to keep in mind is to keep the characters in your anchor text under 55.

5. Quality of Inbound and Outbound Links

While most web developers know that having many web sites link to your can boost your rankings, a lot of them don't know that the quality of the websites linking to your websites plays a vital role in your website's page rank. Getting links for random dofollow blogs has a way smaller impact than if a website with a high pagerank links to your website in an article.

Who you link to matters, as Google warned webmasters that they can be penalized if they link to spam websites. Linking to really bad websites (malware injecting websites etc.) can easily get your site removed from Google's search engine results pages(SERPs). One thing to keep in mind is that Google's spiders might not follow all of your links if you have over 100 unique outbound links on a single page.

More articles about linking:

6. Proper Use of Header Tags

,

tags etc. should be used when appropriate. Don't be using

tags as a paragraph or using
class="title"
to display the title of your page or something.

Here's a few things to keep in mind when using header tags:

only use one
tag per page

you can use as many
-
tags as you like in your pages

search engine crawlers only read basic html(no css what-so-ever)

More articles about header tags:

How To Use Tags – Proper Use Of H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 Elements

How to optimize keywords in header tags.

7. Importance of the First Paragraph

Your first paragraph is the most important paragraph in your page. This is because it's the first paragraph search engines scan and they assume that it's somewhat of a summary of the page/article. That's why it's essential to have the most important keywords of your page in the first sentence or two.

If you're using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, the plugin will automatically take the content from your first paragraph and place it in the meta description, which is the text that search engines display under the title of your page.

8. Ensure Your Site is Accessible

An accessible website should ensure that its content can be successfully delivered as often as possible. The functionality of pages, the uptime of the server, validity of HTML elements are all parts of site accessibility. If these points are either ignored or faulty, both your visitors and search engines will select other websites to visit.

Use tools like:

To know if your site contains broken links or when your site is down.

9. Use SEO Friendly URLs

The URL of a page should be descriptive so both the users and search engines have an idea what the page they're being linked to consists of. SEO Friendly URLs also have the benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copy pasted to forums etc. due to URL having the keywords of the page in its URL. These type of URLs usually rank higher in search engines than pages with a URL like example.com/p=981489894.

Furthermore, when using Dynamic URLs try to keep your dynamic parameters under 2 or else the chance is high than it might not get crawled by search engine spiders unless they're perceived as very important(ie. have a large amount of inbound links).

More articles about SEO Friendly URLs:

10. Site Usability

If your website is cluttered with ads and has a terrible layout, accessibility, navigation and low quality of content, chances are that you'll get less people linking back to your site than one that has better usability than yours, thus resulting in lower page ranking.
If your website was designed in the 90s you seriously need consider hiring a web designer to redesign your website.

How to use Keywords to improve Search Engine Rank

Those who are trying to get their website on a search engine should realize that while popularity is a part of the equation, there are many other factors to how search engines rank web sites for the search results. While each search engine will have it’s own way as to how it filters results, there are four things that every search engine relies heavy on for its results.

Keyword Frequency

The main thing that search engines are looking for is the page (or pages) that offer the most information on the topic. This is determined by the frequency of the key words available on the actual website. If someone searches for “SEO tips”, the search engine will look for the websites that have the best frequency of “SEO tips” available; too little will garner no results, and too high of a frequency may have an adverse effect.

Keyword Location

Another thing that search engines are looking for is the actual location of those specific keywords. The search engines want to know how soon the web page is actually getting into the information that the person is search for. If the keywords appear toward the top of the page, the website will rank higher. If the keywords do not show up until later in the page, they will rank low, or will not even rank on the search engine results at all.

Spamming

Many people take the idea of the keyword and over-do it. They try to place the keyword on the webpage as much as possible. To protect results against this, search engines will actually cut out results that are deemed to have too many keywords. They feel that the web page is attempting to “spam” the search engine by simply featuring multiple keywords excessive amounts of time without actually having information about the specific keyword.

Popularity

Search engine results do take popularity into account when ranking the websites for keywords. Those web pages that rank high on results but are not often clicked on will find that they are dropped on the results page. This is something that is not controllable, as it simply relies on how often your link is chosen when shown on a search engine results page.

Summary:

Trying to get a website to show up on the top results of a search engine’s results can be difficult and confusing for many. While getting the results wanted may be easy for certain topics, it may be incredibly difficult for others. Taking all of the aspects of how search engines rank web sites can help you to understand exactly what needs to be done to rank as high as physically possible on search engine result pages.

Role of Link Baiting

Link Baiting is an important part of SEO and can spell the difference in the effectiveness of an SEO strategy. While some people consider it a somewhat underhanded practice, it is simply a creative method of building links.

To the uninitiated, link bait is any content or feature within a web site that is designed to lure viewers to place links to it from other web sites. Link baits can come in many forms. They could be free tools, an article, an image, a puzzle, an invitation to join a contest – there really is no limit to what you can use.

Link baiting drives SEO results as this is a speedy and easy method of building links. It gets your website the attention it needs as more and more people learn about what you have to offer. If your link bait is very good, people will continue referring your links to others and this is really akin to having other people do your work for you at no cost! Of course, an increase in traffic volume may potentially lead to higher profits.

Link baiting is also one of the factors that can increase your search engine rankings. The number of backlinks attributed to your site increases your chances of appearing in the top results page of a search engine. Now if your links are picked up by well-established websites, that will do even more wonders for your reputation.

The potential of earning long term results through link baiting is also a significant advantage of this technique. If your content is compelling enough, people will keep referring to your site for years and years to come. When you actively use link baits, you are building up an image, a reputation for providing useful data to the public. Even if you use link baits for special or seasonal events only, this doesn’t necessarily mean traffic generation ends once the event has concluded. A well thought out link baiting scheme leads to sustainable traffic, not just one time visits that won’t be duplicated once the curiosity has worn off.

For link baiting to contribute considerably to your SEO strategy, remember that your website must have a strong backbone and that backbone comes in the form of superior quality content.

Unless your website has something truly useful or relevant to offer, no amount of backlinking will boost your rank or maintain traffic over time. Link baiting sounds very easy but it requires strategic planning for it to be effective.

Easy Steps for WordPress Blog Setup

I want to describe here is to set down some step-by-step instructions for the people who wants to get started with a solid foundation with a self-hosted WordPress blog. There are many blogging platforms available, most available at little or no cost. I like WordPress, mostly because it’s easy to make. This post is some steps that I have learned along the way that will hopefully help you to:

• Set up your blog easily
• Make sure it’s safe from hackers
• Give you some basics that will get you started to a successful blog

This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor is it intended to be. It’s merely a compendium of things that I’ve learned along the way that can help you get going with a minimum of effort, and these are the exact same steps I take for my clients who want me to do it for them. You can host your blog with WordPress directly free of charge. However, if you host your blog with your Web site, it becomes part of the Web site – really just an extension – and can benefit you from an SEO perspective.

Resources To Get Started

Before you can start with any of this, you need to have some basic materials. I will assume you already have a working computer with a reasonable internet connection. Beyond that, you will need:

• A Web hosting plan that supports both PHP and a MySQL database. I prefer GoDaddy but you can use any hosting as long as they support PHP and MySQL databases.
• FTP software – This is to move files to your hosting platform. I like CuteFtp, but there are many free tools available as well.
Assuming you have all this, let’s get started with setting up a WordPress blog.

Download WordPress Software

The first step is that you need to get the software. Go to the WordPress.org Web site, and click the button that says “Download WordPress 2.8.6″ (or whatever the current version is). Save the zip file to your hard drive, and unzip (uncompress) it to a folder that’s convenient to get to.

Create a MySQL Database

Go to your hosting platform and create a MySQL database. Usually you can do this through your Control Panel. You’ll need to know the following:
• The database host server (sometimes it’s “localhost”)
• The database name
• The user id to connect
• The password
Usually you can specify everything but the host, so pick a secure password that includes letters and numbers.
Upload the WordPress Software

Connect to your Web hosting with your FTP software, and create a folder that you want the blog to live in. I usually just create a folder called “blog”, but you can call it what you want. If you want the blog software to actually be your Web site, you don’t need to create a folder. Just upload all the files and folders to the root directory of the Web site. This is about 7.1MB of files, so it shouldn’t take very long if you have a decent connection.

Configure the WordPress Blog Software

You’ll find a file called wp-config-sample.php. You need to edit this file with a text editor. You can either edit the local copy on your computer, or edit the one on the Web. Enter the database server, database name, user name, and password where it shows these settings in single quotes (see red underlines in the sample graphic).
Next, you must create a unique authentication key by going to the WordPress authentication key site. Copy and paste the four lines into the config file where it shows the sample lines.

Security Tip - I

The last and most important change is to make sure that you change your Table Prefix. Most hackers know that the default prefix is “wp_”, so change it to something totally random, like “wp_55SEO7U1”. Just add some random upper and lower case letters and numbers. This will make it much harder for a hacker to break into your database.

Save the file. Rename it as wp-config.php and either upload it from your computer, or just rename the one that’s on your Web site.

Kick Off The Installation Process

Open your browser and go to the Web site with the directory into which you installed the WordPress software. So if it’s in the /blog directory, go to http://www.domainname/blog and the installation process should automatically kick off. If it complains that it can’t connect to the database, check your config file to make sure you entered all the database information correctly.
It will automatically create an admin id and password. Print this page out! If you forget the password, or don’t write it down, you have to delete the database and start all over.

Security Tip -II

Before you do anything else, create a new admin id that is something like “admin0512″ (or a name that means something to you) and very secure password using upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters. The meter will show you how secure your password is. Hackers know that the default admin id is “admin”, and will try to hack it. Now log out, log in with your new admin id, and delete the original admin id. This is critical to prevent hackers from getting into the site (or at least slow them down).

Apply a Theme

There are lots of free themes or you can buy attractive themes that people have developed. Find one that has four or five stars and apply it to your site. The ones that have high ratings and have been downloaded thousands of times have been tested and upgraded so that they work the best for you. You can always customize it with your logo and other changes later.
Install Plugins

I have a specific set of plugins (which are additional functionality that doesn’t come with the base WordPress software) that add value. I recommend that at a minimum, you install these:

• XML Sitemaps – Creates XML sitemaps for Google automatically, which is great for getting indexed
• Google Analytics for WP – Set up your Analytics code so you can track all the throngs of people reading your blog
• All In One SEO Pack – Has great SEO tools for your blog
• Akismet (already installed, but be sure to activate it) – It catches all the comment spammers and blocks them
• WP Security Scan – Gives you a report to see if your WordPress blog is fully safe from hackers
• WP DB Backup – Allows you to back up your database before you make any changes. ALWAYS back up your database before you upgrade or do anything!
• SEO Platinum – To make individual title for all pages.

Configure Your Ping Servers

WordPress comes pre-configured with a single ping server, but you’ll want to add more. Every time you create a blog post, you want to make sure that the search engines know about it. When you click “Publish”, WordPress will go tell all the ping servers that you’ve configured to notify the search engines about your new post.

Configure Your Permalinks

Permalinks is a setting that tells WordPress how to display the links to your blog posts. We all know that you want your keywords in the link text if you can. The default setting for WordPress doesn’t give a very SEO-friendly link, so I recommend that you change it. Many people debate about the “right” way to set them up. Set them, and don’t worry about it. Most people set them to:

/category/postname

which will display your posts with a subdirectory of the post “Category”, then the actual words from your post title.

Google Docs Added Folder Sharing Feature

Google added couple of new features to its Google Docs, namely folder sharing and multiple file uploads.

Now you can share your files means spreadsheets, presentations and document files with other people also you can now share folders in Google Docs means that the service is more useful for groups who can now work on all the documents in a folder together.

And the addition of multiple file uploads means that you can upload more files at once,which previously allowed one. This feature saving both time and effort and making life so much easier.

Google is Finally Removed PageRank

Google has dropped PageRank data from its webmaster tools due to statistical imbalance.

Google uses PageRank algorithm to calculate a web page’s rank in a numerical score based on the importance it gets. Its rank is loosely dependent on the inbound links to a page apart from the relevance and credibility of these links.

Until now, PageRank has been one of the many variables included in Google's Webmaster Tools, but according to Google analyst Susan Moskwa:
"We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much... We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

Now a days Google is only updating the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year.

It certainly wont stop certain webmasters using the tool to obtain high quality links to enhance their sites ranking. Hopefully this may reduce the amount of people trying to manipulate the search results by selling links on high PR pages. This move by Google is a statement to Webmasters that PR is not as important as everyone thinks, lets hope it changes some peoples minds.

Major Search Engines Follows NoFollow links

Every search engines interpret NoFollow in their own way. Here's list of the major search engines and their actions with NoFollow link.

Google follows NoFollow links but simply does not pass any credit to outbound link that is tagged with the attribute(rel='nofollow').

Yahoo follows NoFollow links and excludes the link from all ranking calculations.

Bing may or may not follow a NoFollow link, but excludes the link from ranking calculations.

Ask does not adhere to NoFollow.

What problem with Duplicate Content ?

Duplicate content – This is very effective to loose Search Engine Rankings:
Using duplicate content is very harmful for search engine ranking. Most webmasters are using duplicate content today. Some of them thinking duplicating the content is time save, but the fact is that duplicate content can loss search engine rankings of your web page. The big problem for duplicating content is that, your web page won’t be indexed by the search engines no matter what SEO strategy you are doing for your page.

Google’s point of view about Duplicate content :
About Google point of view, duplicate content can be two types:
1. Duplicate content within your website – When same content appears in more than one page of your own website.
2. Duplicate content in others website – When one content of your site which appears in other external sites.
In case of first category (Duplicate content within your website) it’s totally on your hands to remove duplicate content to get crawled by Google. One of the best way provided by Google to avoid the first problem is use of the sitemap file. You should include the preferred version of the URL in the sitemap so that Google can index the particular page of your preference.

In case of second category (Duplicate content in others website), i.e. If any one steals your content and publish it in his website, you will have to monetize it. So that, when Google comes across such content across different web pages, the Google crawler will search for various thing and effectively identify the actual original webpage. According to Google don’t worry about your content duplicated by others because Google crawler can effectively identify them and avoid those pages from indexing.

As said in official Google Webmaster blog, “in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site's presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out.”

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