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.

There was a Pagerank Update after the last Pagerank Update in 2008 which was during Christmas. I did not experience anything on any on my blogs or websites, but trusted forums like Digital Point, Webmaster world, SEO Round Table has reported changes in Google Toolbar. Most of the sites seems to be penalized like it happened to John Chow

Most of them have reported, fall in Pagerank and SERP’s. Did you notice anything like this?

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

I had read lots of posts about the latest pagerank update, but I can confirm that the pagerank update has happened. My personal blog was a new domain with a pagerank of 0 has got pagerank 3. This blog has gone from PR 2 to 3.

I have got some good pagerank for my internal pages. I did not find any fall in my pagerank for any of my blogs. Importance of pagerank is a debateable topic, why do we need to care so much about pagerank? Did you note any change in your blog pagerank?

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.

There are lots of webmasters who always keep their eye on the Google Toolbar to check the pagerank of their website and I have seen that Google is updating the Toolbar pagerank very frequently. In fact the real pagerank is calculated every time, but the toolbar is updated usually once in 2-3 months or sometimes after 4 months.

But recently there were some updates done very frequently. November 2008 pagerank update was really not noticed on majority of websites,  but I can confirm that as some of my pages got new PR. Earlier, we could really tell that the PR update will be around so and so date, but now lots of things have been changed with Google Pagerank. Google penalizes websites for paid links, paid reviews. The algorithm of Pagerank has been changed, the standard of Pagerank has been changed now.

Now the question is do you have to bother about pagerank and if you, how do you gain pagerank and what are the advantages of having a better pagerank.

Gone are the days when you do some link trading or get some reciprocal links or get some backlinks by blackhat SEO tricks. In my opinion, just concentrate of creating good content for your readers, follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines. If you have good content, you will get back links from related websites and you will finally have a better pagerank. If you have a better pagerank, you will get a position in the Google SERPs and finally tons of traffic. If you are planning to get better pagerank to sell text links and make money, then it will not work. Google is intelligent enough to get hold of websites where links are sold and they are penalizing the websites. So for a long run, if you are expecting good traffic from Google, forget about these tricks and concentrate of good and unique contents.

Today I could notice some changes in the Pagerank of some of my websites. I never expected an update so soon, but an update was smelling as there were lots of changes in SERPs for the past one week. The last update was in October.

Recent Google Pagerank Update is something different from the previous update. If your pagerank has not gone up or has come down there is nothing to worry. Website enjoying pagerank 10 has come down to pagerank 9. Now only there are a very few website which has pagerank 10 like the Google itself and United States Government Website

This indicates that Google has done some major changes in the Pagerank Algorithm and has given more standard to the Pagerank.

My blog has not shown any change in the pagerank, but lots of my new pages has got pagerank

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Back links are very important for improvement of pagerank and pagerank is important for better traffic from Google. When a different website links to your blog or website, and is indexed by the Google Search engine, you can get an alert using the Google Alert service. Google Alert is of great use to keep track of the Google search engine results. If you create an alert for specific search key phrase, you will be sent an email by Google alert giving the information of the Search result.

You can use link:http://yoursite.com as the search key phrase to get an alert for the back links to your blog. When ever any other site links to your blog and get indexed by Google, you will receive an email stating the information. This helps you in knowing the which sites links to you and set the How Often parameter to “as-it-happens”

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