Search Engine Optimization or commonly called SEO is important as the traffic from search engines are very important and the of the best quality. I have been using Wordpress for a long time now and I have some experience which I would love to share with you all. You can get traffic from Search Engines only if your blog pages get listed on the first or the second page of the SERPs. Pagerank is related to Google which has some importance in the SERPs, which I have discussed previously so I do not want to go into the Pagerank Topic.

I have some tips which you can try to improve your search engine rankings or increase your traffic from Search engines. Let me tell you, there are no shortcuts to get consistent traffic from search engines. You need to have unique and impressive content and always write posts for your visitors and not for search engines. Never dump keywords to your blog posts, this will not really help you, but use it where ever you feel its necessary.

Title of the Blog Post

Title of a blog post is something very important, it can be a search term or a very short description of your blog post. Title is very important, so spend some time to write the title of your post. The title should say what you have covered in the post. Let me take the example of this post for which the title I have give is “Search Engine Tips For Your Wordpress Blog – Wordpress SEO”, it could have been search engine tips, or SEO tips, or Wordpress SEO Tips, but the one I have given covers almost all the possibilities of search Key Phrases. Make sure that your blog template uses the <h1> tag for the title of your post. The <h1> tag can be modified using CSS style to match the look and feel of your blog.

SEO Plugins for Wordpress Blog

I use All in One SEO plugin which is most popular to optimize your blog for search engines. You can take care of the meta tags like the meta keywords, meta descriptions for your blog posts. Search engines like Google does not show much importance for these tags, but other search engines may give some importance.

Related Posts plugin will help you in displaying related posts and this might help in your site to get crawled by search engines in better way.

One another plugin which I suggest to use is the alinks plugin which is good to automatically link your posts for  specific key phrases and keywords.

Tags to be used

Use tags like rel=nofollow if you do paid reviews to avoid penalties from search engines. No index, no follow  tags are also important for pages which show duplicate content. You can add  no follow for pages like the tag pages and the category pages which will contain the same content. Duplicate content is an issue with search engines so make sure that you take care of this problem. All in One SEO plugin can be useful to sort this issue. Use rel=bookmark for the titles and rel=me for your own blogs. Always use the alt tag for images which should help in image search ranking.

The style of title

The page title can be modified by modifying the <title> tag of the page. I use the following code to generate Title for the blog pages checking for different conditions.

    <title>
        <?php if ( is_home() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<?php bloginfo('description'); ?><?php } ?>
        <?php if ( is_search() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?>&nbsp;|&nbsp;Search Results<?php } ?>
        <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?><?php wp_title(''); } ?>
        <?php if ( is_page() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<?php wp_title(''); ?><?php } ?>
        <?php if ( is_category() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?>&nbsp;|&nbsp;Archive&nbsp;|&nbsp;<?php single_cat_title(); ?><?php } ?>
        <?php if ( is_month() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?>&nbsp;|&nbsp;Archive&nbsp;|&nbsp;<?php the_time('F'); ?><?php } ?>
        <?php if ( is_tag() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?>&nbsp;|&nbsp;Tag Archive&nbsp;|&nbsp;<?php  single_tag_title("", true); ?><?php } ?>
    </title>

Deep Linking

Deep linking to your related posts should help you in getting better ranking in SERPs. I use Windows live writer and I very often use the autolinking feature which creates links for the words or phrases which have links saved in the autolinking feature. Whenever I do a new post, after the post, I create autolinking keywords or key phrases for that post so that when I write future posts, the links are taken care. The anchor text used for the links has very high importance, so avoid creating links like go here to read more. Create links with the right anchor text which should be the key phrases for the described or linked page. Another way to get backlinks from external sites are directory submissions

Sitemap

Use the Google Sitemap generator to generate search engine compatible sitemaps.Sitemaps tell the search engine crawlers about the pages you have in your blog.

Pinging

After you do a post, ping using the ping feature of Wordpress. Recommended Pinging Services are

http://ping.feedburner.google.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://www.bloglines.com/ping

Pinging can help in faster crawling, but I see that without pinging, Google is Indexing my blog posts in minutes.

Link to Authority Websites

Its important and useful if you link to trusted and high ranked websites.This will help your blog in better ranking and trust.

Google Trust

Google Trust is something related to Google search engine. The age of your blog domain plays a vital role in getting better ranking in the search engine result pages. New domains have less chances to get ranked in the search engine result pages.

The pagerank update on the toolbar is now visible. The pagerank of this blog is 3 from 0. This is very new domain

Wordpress is a wonderful blogging software or you can say the lightest CMS(Content Management Software) and is most widely used and above all a free tool with frequent update, free addons / plugins, free themes, free support and a big community to support your problems.

Wordpress takes care of keeping your blog optimized for Search Engines and there are some additional tools which can be used to make it more Search Engine friendly. Before I talk about SEO, let me tell you there are many search engines available and the most popular one is Google. Google has the major share in the Industry and has its own way of serving the search results. Its advised to keep your self updated with the latest guidelines of Google Webmaster Guidelines. I am not a SEO expert, so whatever I say here is from my experience as 80% of my traffic is from Google.

Recommended Plugin for Wordpress for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There is an excellent plugin, which will take care of your blog Search Engine optimization called All In One SEO Plugin. Make sure you use this plugin if you are using Wordpress. Just download the plugin and install it and make all the basic recommended settings. By default Wordpress does not have the meta description and the meta keyword tag, which is not if much important these days as far as Google is concerned, but its advised to use it as we have to respect other search engines or the search engines which value these tags.

Some Tips which you can implement to get on top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)

Best SEO Optimized Title for Wordpress Blog

The title of the page is very important and I have seen if your title is optimized with search keywords, there are chances that you get a good position in the Google SERPs. In Wordpress blog, you can edit your header.php file and use this code

<title>

<?php if (is_home () ) { 

bloginfo('name'); 

} 

elseif ( is_category() ) { 

    single_cat_title(); echo " - "; bloginfo('name'); 

} elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { 

    single_post_title(); 

} elseif (is_search() ) { 

    bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s); 

} else { wp_title('',true); 

} ?> 

</title>

Suggested Permalink for Wordpress Blog

There are different ways that you can create the URL for a Wordpress blog. You can do this by go to the permalink settings in your Wordpress Admin Panel. I suggest the Post Name as the best.

Alt Tag for Images

Don’t ignore to use the alt tag for images. Always use some keywords or describe the image using minimum words as alt tag. This will surely help you in getting some links and traffic from image searches.

Cross Linking your Blog Pages

Its very important to link your blog pages, which can be of good use the reader as well as to get all your pages indexed by search engines. There are many plugins which will do this automatically for you. I have been using Windows Live Writer and it has feature called autolinking which is of great use.

Don’t try to dump your post with keywords to make up your blog for search engine. When you write a post, write for your visitors and not for search engines. Google is very intelligent, it can make out the tricks that we try. You will get backlinks if your post is worth linking. Backlinks from trusted pages of other website or blogs will boost the chances of getting on top of search results. Blackhat tricks will not be good for long run. Just getting a reader by giving a wrong impression is not worth, but if you get a visitor who was looking for something that you have  on your webpage will surely turn that visitor to a regular reader, may bookmark your page on a social bookmarking service or / and may subscribe to your blog and / or recommend your page to their friends.

I get lots of queries about pagerank from my readers. Some of the questions are really interesting and I try to answer them using best of my knowledge

What is Pagerank?

Pagerank is a rank assigned to a web page by Google, the search engine giant. Pagerank is calculated by an algorithm developed by Google which takes different factors into consideration and one of the major factor is the number of backlinks to that particular page.

How often is Pagerank Updated ?

I had a done a post related to the frequency of Pagerank Update, please go through that.

What is the importance of Pagerank?

This is a question which is debateable. Websites with high pagerank are of high commercial value. A high PR website means there are lots of other websites which are linking to that particular website or webpage. If a web page has higher pagerank, the chances of getting on the top of the Google SERPs is very high, but I would like to stress that it is not always. If a page has better information, Google algorithm will show a page with lower pagerank on the top of the result. Inbound links are not just enough to boost your pagerank, but inbound links from a related website and or a inbound link with related anchor text is very important. So in clear words, there are high importance of pagerank, but not always to get listed on the top.

Other advantages of having high pagerank are Credibility, Google Trust, which means that Google has trust in your website and Google Trusts your website only because, there are other websites which trust your webpage and linked to you. If you have links from trusted and aged website, you will get a better pagerank and the its important.

Advantages of high Pagerank?

If you website has high pagerank and you have unique content, then then you will surely perform well in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Commercially, you will get good advertisers, people will contact you for buying text links to get the pagerank juice.

Why Google is against Buying and Selling Text Links?

Buying and selling text links are effecting the search results of Google and the noble cause of the Google pagerank algorithm. Google ranks a web page according the natural backlinks that a page has, but when webmasters and SEO experts started buying and selling text links and created artificial backlinks, the quality of the Google Search got effected. There are lots of webmasters who have made lots of money by selling text links. Google could have protected this by not disclosing the pagerank of any website and could have used it internally. Google says that you can buy and sell text links or go for paid reviews, but you need to use rel=nofollow tag

What did Google Do to fight buying and selling text links?

Google introduced something called rel-nofollow which is a tag to tell the Google bot to not follow the link and the pagerank juice is not passed to that linked page. Google started manually checking for web pages who where buying and selling text links and started penalizing those websites. Some websites were seriously effected and lost all the ranking in the search results.

How do I get a better Pagerank?

Content is the king as far as web pages are concerned. If you have really good content, you will get readers who will link to you and your pagerank will be boosted automatically. You need to follow the Google Webmaster guidelines. You cannot expect to have your Pagerank shot up in a month or two even if you have good number of backlinks. Google checks for the age of the backlink, the content or the category of the webpage that is linking to your webpage. For example, if somebody is linking from a page which is about cars to your webpage, which is about online trading, then don’t expect a hike in pagerank. My advice is not to go behind pagerank, just create good and unique content for your readers. This blog just has a PR 2, but ranks well from many high valued keywords.

These are a few questions which I could answer and its from my knowledge and experience. I cannot assure you that all the information I have given is true, but its true to my knowledge and information. If you have any experience to share, please post it as a comment.

You might have noticed some changes in pagerank, if you really are keeping a check, if not, you can check it now. I have noticed my recently published pages with new pagerank. You can check your pagerank on the tool provided below

I find some pagerank update on the google toolbar. I have found that most of my website pagerank has been changed, but not much of difference. This blog has the same pagerank, but I have found many internal pages with great changes in pagerank. Some of my internal pages has a better pagerank than my homepage. I have not done anything to boost my pagerank as I do not worry much about that now. The first pagerank update for the year 2008 was in January 2008

I saw some threads on Google pagerank update, but could not find any change on any of my websites. I found a thread on DP on this. Its sure that the pagerank update is on. I used the pagerank checking tool for checking my websites and my money making blog just 2 months old has got PR 2 from PR 0, that’s good and I have seen some changes in the search engine ranking for this blog.

Other important thing I have noticed this Johnchow who had lost his PR in the last update has gone from PR 3 to PR 4, I don’t think he has stopped paid links or paid reviews.

We have seen many blogs and websites losing their pageranks for selling links on their websites. Why does Google does this? Google’s pagerank algorithm is related to the number of backlinks to that particular page and Pagerank has some influence on SERP’s. To keep the quality and reliability of Google search results, Google needs to keep a check on this. Many webmasters buy links from Websites having high Pagerank and enhance their Pagerank.

How can we sell links without effecting our pagerank.

Google has very clearly mentioned that they do not have any problem with anybody selling links, but to avoid the Pagerank Juice, you need to either use rel=nofollow tag or redirect the links to a page which is blocked from search engine using robot.txt file

But when we use this, its very difficult to sell links as new site webmasters want to buy links from SEO purpose rather than traffic or sales.

Youtube.com, Google’s Own video sharing website effected by Fall in Pagerank (PR)

Don’t know if its a mistake or bug, may be it will be changed, but what about others??

I can confirm that Google has updated the pagerank on the Google Toolbar. Again this time, sites selling links and paid reviews are penalized. I see Johnchow.Com again falling from PR4 to PR3. In the previous update, he was penalized from PR6 to PR4. I have not got much information about other sites right now. I will keep this post updated. I have some of my blogs PR going up and some going down. I think the update was a slow process this time. The fluctuation in PR was there for the last one week as I had done in my earlier post. I have do not have any changes on the main page of this blog, but I have got some sub pages PR growth. Will this PR update effect top bloggers. Problogger has PR6 when I checked last and its the same.