Philip.alex08

Most people believe generating traffic to a new blog or website is hard, you’re probably one of them, I certainly know I was. This happens for 2 reasons:

Reason #1: They don’t have a systematic way of implementing their strategies and tactics. They try one technique for a few days, then read a random blog post that covers a different strategy and decide to switch to that. They have no guiding process, they don’t give it 100%. Instead they switch from one strategy to another and as a result go nowhere.

Reason #2: Almost all blogs on internet marketing and web traffic tell you it’s hard to grow your traffic. They always tell you to produce content for weeks and weeks and eventually people will find your blog. If you’re just starting your blog now you would believe this too.

The first thing you need to realize, is there’s and easy way and a hard way to jump-start your traffic. Before social media sites weren’t so “all over the internet” the only choice was to take the slow path: build backlinks to rank in search engines, building up a name on forums and other stuff like that. Of course this were and still are very good strategies to generate traffic but they have a big downside…they take time.

When I started out with my blog I remember that I would check my analytics everyday to see how many visitors I had. I was kinda disappointed almost every time. The key to keeping motivated when you’ve just started your blog is quick results. Today it is much easier to get those quick results especially when we’ve got sites like Twitter and Facebook with millions of users on them every day. They also make it very easy for you to find people in your target market on them too.

So the easiest way to jump-start traffic to your blog is to center your time and efforts into building your Twitter and Facebook profile. Here are the steps you need to take with each of these sites.

With Twitter take the following steps:

1. After creating your profile, start following other people and companies in your target market.

2. Perform keyword searches on Twitter, related to your market. Start following 100 to 200 of those people each day.

3. Start tweeting about topics related to your market(don’t tweet about stuff on your website at least for now).

4. After a couple of days you will start to notice that 20-30% of the people you follow will follow you back. You can start cleaning up your profile by manually unfollowing the people who don’t follow you back. If you don’t have the time for this you can use a service like Tweet Adder(affiliate link) which will do all the following and unfollowing in an automated way.

5. Start interacting on Twitter by tweeting people in your target market and retweeting some of their tweets.

6. At this point you should have been on Twitter for at least a week. Now you can start tweeting about your blog or website content. Make sure you’re not overdoing it with the self promotion and that 70% of the time you’re still tweeting stuff that isn’t related to your blog.

8. Use the 4-1-1 rule. This means for every self-serving tweet, you should re-tweet one relevant tweet and most importantly share 4 pieces of relevant content written by others.

With Facebook follow these steps:

1. Send friend requests to people who are considered leaders in your target market. It’s possible that a large percentage of the people will not accept your friend request, at least 10% of the leaders should.

2. Start interacting with your audience by posting stuff on your wall. The stuff you post shouldn’t be about your own content but more so about news and events relevant to your market or niche.

3. To build more engagement post stuff that is short and during times you think your “target audience” is online.

4. Start commenting on your friend’s wall and like messages that you like within your feed.

5. Start asking questions on your wall. Ask questions related to your market. By asking questions you will start to notice more engagement from your “target audience“.

6. After a week or so of interacting more heavily on Facebook you will be noticing more friend requests. Instead of ignoring people you don’t know, accept their friend request as they could be a reader of your blog or a potential customer of your product or service.

7. At this point you should be posting information related to your content about 30% of the time. Again, don’t over-promote your content, try to mix up your posting.

After you spend a month or so building your social media presence on Twitter and Facebook, it shouldn’t be hard to get at least a few thousand visitors from these 2 traffic sources. These are the steps you should take when building your presence on Twitter and Facebook, and you can do this on all the social media sites like LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest.

Overall Strategy for Getting Traffic from Social Media Sites

1. First build your presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Be an active community member, participate in discussions and add friends.

2. Link each of your profiles to your website or blog, to help build your personal brand and get more visitors.

3. On your social profiles post topics that make you seem like an authority figure in your niche market. This increases your chances of getting more followers on each social media site.

4. As you start getting more followers on your social profiles, promote your website through there, which doesn’t just build traffic, it also causes new people to discover your content and possibly link to it from their on blogs/websites.

5. Since your social media profiles are growing, contact other blogs or websites in your market and ask them if you can write a guest post for them. Also tell them how you will promote that post on all your social media profiles and the amount of traffic you can generate to that post. These posts will also provide you with new visitors and quality backlinks to your own blog or website.

6. The last thing you must do is to actively monitor what people are saying about your competition on this social media sites.

By using these steps mention here not only will you get more traffic to your website, but more importantly you will start to grow a loyal readership that will always be coming back to your website for more tips and more information. Here is the power of social media today:

Again, getting traffic to your website doesn’t have to be hard, and by all means its no rocket science, trust me anyone that tells you different is trying really hard to sell you something.

I’ve worked hard to write this post for you guys so I’d appreciate if you would share and leave me your comments about your social media journey and how you’re doing. I’d love it if you would send me a tweet @PhilipAlex08 or just say “hello” on Facebook.

Related posts:

1. How to drive traffic to your blog without Google?
2. How to start a successful blog that stands out
3. The Most Honest Tweet Adder Review You’ll Ever Read

Keyword research is the first step when you’re starting your blog or affiliate niche site or when your writing a new post on your website.

But what does keyword research really mean? Well, for me it means finding those keywords or keyphrases that people are using in search engines like Google when they are looking for  information, and after that analyzing each one in terms of competition and number of monthly search queries.

First of all there are 3 different types of keywords.

1. The “Head”: These are very popular keywords but there not worth targeting by their own because most of the times they’re related to big brand names, for example: Facebook, Google, Wikipedia… but also general terms like marketing, fashion, etc.

2. The “Body”: These are two or three words that form a more specific search query. For example: internet marketing or internet marketing strategies, Youtube funny videos.

3. The “Tail”: Or the long tail keywords. These usually contain more than three keywords and get less searched than the Head and Body keywords but there are more of them. They often come in the form of a question, here are some examples: how to build a blog, what are the latest fashion trends… you get my point.

Creating an Initial Keyword List

Now considering that you’ve chosen a topic on which you want to start a niche site or write a new blog post, its time to brainstorm what keywords you want to rank for. This is very important, because if you won’t focus on a set of specific keywords to rank for and just be all over the place, its more likely that you won’t rank for anything.

Creating your initial keyword list shouldn’t be hard, there are a lot of ways you can do this. The first step to this process is to find the seed keywords, these represent your niche site’s main topic. Here are 5 different strategies to help you do this:

1. Think like a customer

Ask yourself what would you search for when looking for your products/services or the information you provide. You can use a free tool such as Seed Keywords. All you have to do is create a scenario for a search query and a url will be given to you to share it with your contacts and then see the results. An example scenario would be “You’re starting a website and you have no idea how to do keyword research, what would you search for?”. Then all you have to do is bookmark the link and share it. You will find the results on the same link.

2. Look at the Google “related searches” box

You can find this box right at the bottom of the search results page. Just type in your main keyword in the search box to see related searches that include it.

3. Use the Google Adwords contextual targeting tool

You can find this in your Google Adwords account under the “tools and analysis” tab, all you need is a Google Adwords account which is free to create. It’s Google’s new Wonder Wheel.

4. Browsing Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers or Quora

As I’ve mentioned in the beginning of my post a lot of the long tail keywords  are formed as a question. Yahoo Answer has a massive database full of questions and answers on any topic you can think of. Questions are most often addressing a problem, and problems can be heavily monetized by providing useful solutions.

5. Use Google Trends

This can help you establish the popularity your chosen keyword has on Google, and some additional related keywords that are on the rise. A great way to put this tool to use is to look for popular searches on specific dates, holidays, sports events and other events that get a huge media coverage. Looking at popular search queries from the past will give you a pretty good idea on what people will search in the future on a specific day or month.

Ranking your keywords based on the number of search queries

After you’ve got yourself an average of 20 to 40 keywords the next step is to rank them based on the number of monthly search queries. You can do this very easily for free using the Google keyword research tool or if you’re using Firefox you can install the SeoBook Firefox Addon which will give you the monthly searches for Bing and Yahoo along with a lot of insights.

If you’re starting a niche site I recommend that you stick with keywords that are averaging 4000 – 7000 monthly searches, these are most likely to have low seo competition.

The Google Adwords keyword tool is free to use but you should create an Adwords account which is also free. If you have a Gmail email use that to login to Adwords. You should do this because you will get 800 keyword ideas based on your initial keywords instead of only 100 without an account.

Now insert each of your keywords in the first box of the Google keyword tool.

Make sure you have selected [Exact Match] for your keywords on the left side panel. You want to find out how many monthly searches the exact match of your keyword or keyphrase gets.

So far so good, now let’s analyze the results.

In the above picture are the stats for the keywords you inserted in the keyword box at the top of the page. It will give you the number of searches world-wide, the local monthly searches based on the location you selected, the paid search advertiser competition and an estimate of how much a click on an ad containing this click would cost, in other words how much you get paid for a click on your website for that keyword.

Go through these results and choose keywords in 4000-7000 range for global searches.

If your planning to monetize your site with Adsense choose keywords that have high advertiser competition, these will earn you more money per click.

It’s also a good thing to pay attention to the search trends on each keyword, it will give you an idea on future number of searches for it.

Based on the keywords you inserted more related keywords and keyphrases will be generated for you to choose from.

So now you’ve chosen your keywords based on the number of searches they get each month, but your work is far from over.

Some keywords will be more difficult to rank for, preferably on the first page of Google and it could take you a lot of time. You should target difficult keywords only if you’re 100% sure you can get to first page, otherwise stick with keywords that are easier to rank for.

This leads us to the next step in the keyword research process, checking the competition.

Time to check the competition for each keyword

Obviously some keywords will be more difficult than others to rank for. You’re going to want to look for 3 things when it comes to keyword difficulty:

1. Competition: This is the number of pages indexed by the search engine for a search query.
2. Authority: This involves the webpage authority and the overall domain authority which is determined by the quality and quantity of incoming links(backlinks).
3. Relevance: Is the content on that webpage relevant to the search query? This includes on page keyword optimization but also the presence of the targeted keyword in the anchor text of incoming links.

This is the number of pages Google has indexed for the specific search query. Now, this will not tell you what the competition for that keyword is, or how difficult it will be for you to rank for it. Your goal is to rank your webpage on the first page of the search results, to do that you need to analyze the top 10 pages that rank for your chosen keyword.

What to look for when analyzing the top 10 ranking webpages

This step gives you a very good idea on how difficult it will be to rank for your keyword on the first page of Google. The main factors are Authority and Relevance. So here is how you analyze each of these 2 criteria.

Authority

Domain authority and page authority, basically this tells you what are the chances for a page or a domain to rank high for any given content. You can read this post from Seomoz if you want to know more about domain authority.

Both domain and page authority are influenced by a variety of factors, what we’re interested in is the age of the page or domain and the number and quality of the incoming links to that page or domain which also influences the Google Page Rank.

You can easily check this using a free tool such as the SeoBook extension for Firefox.

You won’t need to look at all the data this tool provides you with, in the above picture I’ve highlighted what you need to investigate. OSE links means Open Site Explorer links to the page and to the domain.

Open Site explorer also shows you the authority of the page or domain from where the incoming link is coming from. Based on that you will have some idea of the quality of each incoming link. Not all incoming links carry value or in other words are “do follow” links. So what you need to look for are the do follow links that carry link juice.

The Page Rank of the top 10 positions is another thing you should be aware of which is also dictated by the number and quality of the backlinks it has. Although there are a lot of websites or pages that out rank higher PR sites, it’s better to take page rank into account too.

Relevance

Now, when you look at relevance the important thing to figure out is this: is the ranking page or domain specifically targeting that keyword or it’s just randomly mentioning it in their content.

A lot of websites are ranking for specific keywords without any intent or optimization for those keywords, simply because it’s mentioned within the page’s content. If this is the case, than you should be confident that you can outrank these pages even if they have a high page rank with more relevant content and a minimal number of backlinks.

So, in order to find out if the page is targeting the keyword you will have to look at the keyword use on that page:

1. Is the keyword in the title of the page/website?

2. Is the keyword in the description?

3. Is the keyword used in the URL?

4. Is the keyword in the subheadings(H2, H3)?

5. Is the keyword in the body/content of that page or website?

6. Is the ranking page a home page or just an individual page?

If a home page is targeting that keyword its most likely the whole website is centered around it.

To check the keyword use on a page I like to use the keyword analyzer tool from Web Seo Analytics and the on-page optimization tool from Juxseo.

They are both free to use and will give you all the data you need, so you can figure out if a page or website is actually targeting that keyword and the level of optimization for the keyword or they just happen to mention it in a remote fashion.

So now that we’ve gathered all the data we need, the next step is to decide whether we want to go for a specific keyword or not, based on our keyword research data.

One more thing, insert all of the data you’ve gathered in an Excel file so you can have a clear view and make it easier for yourself to run everything through a selection process.

Keyword selection guidelines: To Be or Not To Be

This is the final stage of the keyword research process, and it involves running each keyword through a selection procedure.

The rules based on which you decide if a keyword is approachable or is too difficult to target are not the same for everyone. If you’ve got the resources to do it and your confident you would rank for that keyword you can definitely target even high competition keywords.

But if you’re starting a fresh niche site or a blog here are some guidelines you should consider following when making your final keyword selection:

Finding the keywords that match these selection criteria will probably take you a bit of time to do, but it will be less difficult to rank for them on the first page of the search results.

However if you’re confident that you can rank for a specific keyword and got the resources to do so you should definitely go for it, even if it doesn’t follow the guidelines above.

Free tools to help you with keyword research

I’ve mentioned a couple of tools that I use to help me find keywords and determine the competition for each one. Here is a list with all the tools:

Adwords Keyword Tool – Free tool from Google.

Seobook Firefox extensions – You need Mozilla Firefox to use this tool.

SEOquake Toolbar – Works with Firefox and Chrome.

These tools are all free to use and can provide you with all the information you need to make the decision of going for a keyword or not. The key to using these tools is to put all of the gathered data in one place where you can make comparisons between the competition for each keyword and the number of searches it gets monthly.

Paid keyword research tools worth mentioning

If you took the time to read the entire post(thank you!) and not just scan it, by this time you probably know that you can do effective keyword research without the use of any paid tools.

However paid tools have their advantages. First of all the time you spend on analyzing the competition for each keyword will be greatly reduced, because all of the information you need the make your decision is organized neatly in one place. Secondly it makes your life a whole lot easier when you’re working on multiple projects at the same time, whether we’re talking about niche sites or individual blog posts. If you’re juggling your “9 to 5 job” with blogging as I am, I’m sure you can appreciate the importance of saving time and increasing your productivity.

The only keyword research tool I use and recommend to others is Long Tail Pro(affiliate link). It drastically reduces the time I spend on keyword research and finding domains for building new niche sites.

I won’t go over the advantages of using this tool and how it’s better than other tools on the market, I’m basically addicted to it and its the keyword research tool I recommend all the time. If you’re interest in what Long Tail Pro is about, here is a video tutorial on how I do keyword research using this tool.

So I’ve reached the end of my keyword research guide, hope you found it useful.

If there is anything I left out please let me know through the commenting box. If not I’d still love to hear your thoughts on keyword research and niche marketing.

Before I end this I just want to let you know that I am an affiliate for Long Tail Pro, and if you decide to go through my affiliate link I will receive a commission without any extra cost to you, so thank you for your support and I really appreciate it.

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If you haven’t noticed this already, I’m a huge fan of search engine optimization. Why? Well first of all search engine traffic is the most targeted traffic you can generate to your website, and secondly it’s 100% free.

When you’re trying to rank in search engines it’s vital that you choose a specific keyword or keyphrase for which you want to get rankings. Every website you build, every page or blog post you publish must have a target keyword.

The first step in finding the keyword or keyphrase for which you want to rank is to perform a thorough keyword research.

Once you’ve found the keyword you want to target, the next step of the process is to make the webpage which will target the keyword as relevant as possible for your chosen term. This is called on-page keyword optimization and it’s the only part of SEO you will have full control of.

In this post I’m going to show you how you can optimize your pages for a target keyword.

But first let me show you some blog posts I published that climbed up the search rankings simply because of the proper keyword targeting:

The Most Honest Tweet Adder Review You’ll Ever Read

• Target keyword: “tweet adder review” 2nd position on Google
• Word count: 1204 words
• Video embed: Yes

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Without Google?

• Target keyword: “drive traffic to your blog” 2nd position on Google
• Word count: 1258 words
• Video embed: Yes

So both of these blog posts got over 1000 words and they both have a video embedded in them. The video part is something I noticed while I was doing searches for my keywords on Google and what I discovered is that posts which contained videos got higher rankings over time. I don’t think it’s a rule but it’s one of the similarities I discovered throughout my high ranking posts.

Okay, now let’s take a look at the keyword targeting process.

Keyword Optimization Overview

Keyword optimization is all about including your target keywords in specific parts of your webpage so that Google and other search engines will consider your page relevant for that particular keyword or keyphrase.

 Page URL

The URL of your page is the first location where you want to insert your target keyword. I suggest you keep the URL as short as possible. Shorter URLs are easier to remember and more likely to be copy/pasted and shared.

One other things is to position your keyword as close as you can to the root domain. For example ‘www.yoursite.com/target-keyword‘ is way better than ‘www.yoursite.com/category/target-keyword‘.

Make sure that the permalink settings on your WordPress blog is set to ‘Custom Structure’, this way when you’ve written in the title of your blog post inside the text editor WordPress will automatically create a permalink that is identical to the title. I suggest you take time to manually edit the permalink and remove unnecessary filler words like ‘the’, ‘to’,'is’,'you’, so that the permalink contains only the target keyphrase.

The Title

The keywords with the most SEO value are the ones that appear in the title of your page. I always try to come up with headlines where the keyword is positioned right at the beginning of the title. Of course this is not always the case.

Target Keyword: Tag Line

Building Trust – The Key to Growing Your Online Home Business

WordPress SEO: The Ultimate Guide

The title of you page is the bold text which appears in search engine results when you’re searching for a particular term.

If you want to rank for a specific keyword then it should definitely be in your title tag.

The Meta Description

The meta description is a short paragraph which describes what your page is about. The meta description shows up in search engine results right under the title of your page.

It’s a good idea to include your target keyword and a related keyphrase in it. Although the meta description does not affect your rankings it can definitely help the click-through rate.

All you need to do is to make sure that each page or blog post has a unique and compelling meta description.

The Meta Keyword Tag

It’s a well known fact that top search engines like Google and Bing completely ignore the keywords tag. I personally stopped using this tag on all of my websites simply because it holds no SEO value, and more than that it can giveaway valuable information to your competitors.

The H1 Heading

The H1 tag is the headline of your blog post or page. If you’re using WordPress, the H1 tag is most likely to be identical with the title tag of your page.

However, using a SEO plugin like All In One SEO or in my case the Genesis Framework(affiliate link) allows you to create a H1 tag that is different from your title tag.

This way you can optimize the title tag for your chosen keyword and also create a compelling headline which attracts the visitors to your blog to click on it.

The H2/H3/H4 Headings

These are the subheadings of your page or your blog post. You should include your target keyword at least in one of these subheadings. Also you can use related terms that are relevant for your target keyword.

Even if you don’t include your target keyword in these headings, using them will allow you to break your posts into easy to digest paragraphs, definitely making them more scannable for your readers, improving the overall user experience.

The Body Text

Your target keyword along with related keywords should be spread across the body of your blog post.

My blog posts and pages have an average keyword density of slightly less than 1%. This also counting the keywords from the title, H1, H2 and other headings I use to structure my page.

It’s also very important that you use related terms and not only your target keyword. For example if you were targeting the keyword ‘SEO‘ a related term is ‘search engine optimization‘ which is basically the same thing.

One other thing I would like to mention here is that you should aim to include your target keyword in the beginning paragraph of your blog post or webpage.

Bold and Italic Usage

You should use your keyword in ‘bold‘ at least once within your page. The same thing goes for ‘italic‘.

Using these formatting tags for your target keywords along with other related terms will make your page more relevant for those keywords in the eyes of search engines.

Make sure you don’t get carried away with this, and as with every keyword optimization tactic you should always put the reader first.

The Image Filename

The filename of your image should look like this: ‘target-keyword.png’.

This will allow you to tap into image search traffic, and here is where the filename of your image holds real value.

Always make sure that when you’re downloading an image from Flickr or other image sharing sites, and you want to use it on your webpage to rename it so that it includes your target keyword.

The Image Alt Attribute

The alt attribute or the alt tag of your images is the only way to tell search engines what that image is about. As with the image filename the alt tag should contain the target keyword or a variation of that keyword.

Make sure you keep your image alt tag to 3 or 4 words and stay away from keyword stuffing.

The alt tag holds a lot of SEO value, that’s why I recommend you use images in all of your blog posts and pages.

Final Note on Keyword Optimization

There is one thing which I think is very important and I would like to point out, keyword optimization and keyword stuffing are to completely different things.

Always aim to use your target keyword only as much as it makes sense to use it.

You should always keep in mind user experience when optimizing your pages and blog posts.

With that said I’ve reached the end of my keyword optimization guide.

If you have other tips or strategies you might want to share I encourage you to leave a comment on this post. And if there is something I left out or I forgot to mention please let me know.

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Ever since May 27 2003 when Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little released WordPress, it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, with millions of users world wide.

A lot of great things can be said about WordPress, but one of the huge benefits it provides users with, and which I’m going to get into more detail in this post, is WordPress’s out of the box SEO functionality.

So here is how I’m going to do this. To make this post easier for everyone to digest, I’ve decided to split the content into 2 main paragraphs: WordPress SEO basic and advanced tips.

1.WordPress SEO Basic Optimization Tips

These suggestions may be kinda obvious but that does not make them any less important when it comes to optimizing your blog for search engine traffic.

The Title Tag

The title tag is definitely the most important element of your website for SEO. It informs search engines what your site is about.

Your main keyword should be at the beginning of your home page title followed by your brand name:

• Residual Income: The Gain Profit Income Blog (my main keyword that I’m trying to rank for is “residual income”)

By default WordPress will add your site’s title after each post and page title. A lot of people make the mistake of leaving this as it is.

You are already targeting your main keyword on your home page, so it makes no sense to have it in all of the titles on your blog. This will only reduce the keyword density in your blog posts title. Each title should be unique and target a different keyword. You can easily rewrite your titles using the All In One SEO plugin.

I recommend you leave your blog title only for your “about”, “contact” and “privacy-policy” pages, because they are not targeting any keywords, so having your blog title in there too is better.

The Meta Tags

The meta tags are the description tag and keywords tag. The text that appears under your links in the search engine results is the description tag.

Although the description tag and the keywords tag are not taken into consideration by the search engines when ranking your website, having a compelling description will raise your click-through in the search results.

Your target keyword should also be included in the description tag to make your post or page more relevant for that keyword.

HTML Heading Structure

Another important aspect of on-page SEO is your heading structure. The headings tell the search engines which parts of your content are important.

Each page on your site should only have one H1 tag. Having more than one H1 tag is considered by the search engines as being a spam tactic.

Home Page Heading Structure:

• H1: Your blog’s name
• H2: The title of your posts
• H3: Popular posts or Recent posts widgets
• H4: Other related content widgets in your sidebar

Single Page/Post Heading Structure:

• H1: The title of your post
• H2 and H3: Subheadings in your post’s content
• H4: Related posts below the content of your post
• H5: Sidebar widgets

It’s important that the theme you are using on your website follows these guidelines, unfortunately not all WordPress themes have this heading structure.

An easy way to check if your website is properly structured is to go into your Google Webmaster account in the “Optimization” tab and click “HTML Improvements”. Or you can use the SEO Quake Firefox plugin and click the “Diagnosis” button in your toolbar.

Here is how the heading structure looks on the home page of my blog:

That’s why I do not recommend using free WordPress themes, a mistake I made when I started my blog. A lot of them contain hidden code that can break your website, and they are poorly structured.

Not having a proper heading structure can also affect your rankings, because search engines take into consideration how your website is built when ranking it in the serps. This is something I noticed immediately after switching from the free theme I was using to the Genesis Framework(affiliate link), when I saw a noticeable increase in search traffic and a rise in the search engine results for most of my posts and pages.

The Permalink Structure

The permalink is the URL of your posts and pages. Your permalinks should look similar to the title of your posts.

For example: http://www.gainprofitincome.com/keyword-research-find-longtail-keywords/

This way people will know what a link is about before clicking on it and your keywords will also be highlighted in the search engine results if that link is relevant to the search query.

You can set WordPress to automatically create the permalinks this way by going to Settings>Permalinks.

Additionally you should manually edit the permalinks and remove words like “the”, “is”, before you publish a post. This is to make sure you have the highest keyword density possible in the URL of your post, and also to make the permalink short and sweet.

Using the Alt Tag for Images

The alt attribute is the only way of telling the search engines what an image is about.

Search engines consider this element very important when ranking your posts in the global search results as well as ranking your image in the images search results.

To make your post more relevant for a particular keyword, the file name, the title and the alt tag of your image should contain the targeted keyword.

Internal Linking

Inter-linking your posts makes it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your website. It also allows you to pass link juice to other posts and pages on your site.

What you’re basically doing is linking from one post to another. For example I sometimes happen to mention that the key to growing a successful blog is by building trust with your readers and I’ll immediately link to my post on building trust online.

This is also a great way to keep people on your site for a longer period of time and reduce bounce rates, which are two additional factors that affect your search engine rankings.

Creating a Sitemap

A sitemap is basically an outline of the content you have on your website. It includes your posts, pages, archives, categories and media attachments.

You can use the Google XML Sitemap plugin to create a sitemap for your WordPress blog. This plugin will automatically update the sitemap every time you make changes to your website.

After creating a sitemap using this plugin, it should look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Now all you have to do is submit your sitemap to Google Webmasters Tools and Bing Webmasters Tools.

2. WordPress SEO Advanced Tips

So far I’ve mentioned some of the basic WordPress optimization tips that can make your site more SEO friendly. But there are some additional improvements you can make to your website that are more advanced and which I’m going to share with you next.

WWW or Non WWW

Having the “www” in front of your domain or not having it doesn’t make any difference in getting your website ranked. However, the search engines consider www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as 2 totally different websites, thus splitting the link juice from your backlinks to each of them.

That’s why it’s very important to redirect one to the other using a 301 permanent redirect.

This may sound a bit techy but it’s actually very easy to do. By default WordPress already handles this redirect for you, but problem is that it does this using a 302 temporary redirect.

To be able to create this redirect you will need to edit your .htaccess file which is found on your hosting server.

The easiest way to do this, is with the Robots Meta plugin, which allows you to easily edit your .htaccess file.

All you have to do is copy this code in your .htaccess file:

# Begin 301
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.gainprofitincome\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.gainprofitincome.com/$1 [L,R=301]

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

This will redirect the non-WWW version of your website to the WWW one

If you want to redirect the WWW version to the non-WWW all you have to do is remove the “www” part from lines 3 and 4.

Also make sure you replace gainprofitincome.com with your domain name.

No Index, No Follow Archives, Tag Pages, Category Pages

Your archive pages, category pages and tag pages are all similar pages which link to your posts. That’s why there’s no point in having them all indexed by the search engines.

For example if you’re using categories on your blog you should add the “noindex” tag to your tag and archive pages.

The same thing goes for the “nofollow” tag.

I remember one time, when I was searching for my posts in Google and most of the times I had tag pages and category pages that outranked the actual posts. Applying the “noindex,nofollow” tag to archive, category and tag pages can be easily done with the All In One SEO plugin I mentioned earlier in this post.

This way you will direct most of the link juice to the actual post pages, which normally are the ones that are suppose to rank for their target keyword.

No Follow Certain Page Links

Adding the “nofollow” tag to certain links is a simple way you can use to divert link juice only to the pages you want to rank high in search engines, like your posts.

For example, if your displaying excerpts of your posts on your blog page, you have that “Continue Reading” link which takes you to the full post page. But the title of your post is also a link to the same page.

Adding the “nofollow” tag to the “Continue Reading” link will divert all the link juice to the post title link which is a keyword rich anchor text and is more relevant to the content of your post.

Also the post meta data which contains a link to the date archives, the category of the post, the author page. These are all links that don’t need to rank.

Or you could do what I did and completely remove those links from the post byline or meta data. As you can see I only have my name above the post title, and it’s not even a link.

One other thing I want to mention is, if you have a Tag Cloud widget in your sidebar make sure the links to the tag pages are nofollow, I made this mistake and what happened is that the tag pages where higher in the search results than the actual posts, trust me you don’t want that.

In regards on how to find those links in the code of your theme, there are way to many examples, and on a lot of themes this is done differently. But if you’re blog is running on the Genesis Framework(affiliate link) like mine just send me an email and I’ll be happy to give you all the instructions you need to make these changes.

But basically to make a link “nofollow” here is what you need to do:

• Normal link: <a href=”http://www.gainprofitincome.com”>The Gain Profit Income Blog</a>
• Nofollow link: <a href=”http://www.gainprofitincome.com” rel=”nofollow”>The Gain Profit Income Blog</a>

Use Google Webmaster Tools

This is a service you must definitely sign-up for. As you know it’s free and it provides you with a lot of useful information about the keywords people use to find your site, the number of backlinks Google has indexed, etc.

Another thing that I like about Google Webmaster Tools is that it notifies you of any 404 errors or “page not found”. I remember one time when I modified the permalink to one of my posts after it was published, and lost a lot of traffic because of this.

I immediately received a notification from GWT and redirected the old link to the new one.

Google Authorship

There’s been a lot of talk that Google will add the Author Rank to their ranking algorithm so it’s very important that you claim your Google Authorship.

The process of claiming your Google Authorship is very is to do.

First you will need to add this line of code in the <head> section of your website.

<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/100211679160877871318/posts“/>

Make sure you replace the link with your Google+ profile link.

Next step is to head over to your G+ profile and in the “About” tab look for the box that says  “Contributor to”. Add your website URL there and you’re all done.

That’s all you need to do. You must know that it will take a bit of time before your picture will show-up next to your posts and pages in the search results. To test this just go to your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Building Backlinks

This WordPress SEO guide would not be complete without mentioning another important aspect of search engine traffic which is link building.

Although the best link building technique is to write high value content that others will naturally link to from their own websites, getting this type of links is kind of hard when you’re just starting and the visitors coming to your blog are just a handful.

There are a lot of ways to manually build backlinks to your website but for now I’m going to mention just a couple of them.

• Guest Posting: Through guest posting instead of writing posts and publishing them on your own blog, you will publish them on other blogs in your niche. Those posts will have 1 or 2 links that will point back to your website.
• Linking out: Every time you link out to other websites, the owner of those websites will be notified automatically by WordPress. So when they see that you’ve linked to one of their posts, they might link back to one of your posts in the future.

These are just 2 of the many link building options you have. I wanted this post to be mainly about on-site SEO, but if you want more backlinking tips Jon Cooper from PointBlankSEO.com has a huge list of  link building strategies.

Final Word on WordPress SEO

Google always says that they want to deliver people the most relevant results for what they’re searching.

This guide is all about making your website, your posts, as relevant as possible for your target keyword. If you would only apply 80% percent of the things I mentioned in this post you would still notice an increase in rankings and search engine traffic.

Feel free to play around with these instructions as you see fit, if you have any other suggestions I would love it if you would share them in your comments.

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