Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress blog is not a big deal as Wordpress is search engine optimized. I had done some posts in the past, just thought of sorting it out and posting the links for you.

Recommended Reading

1. 11 Ways to customize Wordpress for your needs
2. SEO for Wordpress
3. Google Trust
4. Optimizing your blog for Search Engines
5. Pagerank FAQ’s
6. Search Result Analysis
7. Analysis of Search Results with top keywords – SERPs
8. Pagerank importance for SERPs
9. Fall in Pagerank – Reasons
10. Search Results for SEO Tips on Google [Case Study]

Search Engine Optimized Themes

1. WP Remix
2. Studiopress
3. WooThemes 
4. Elegant Themes 

SEO Wordpress Plugins

1. All in One SEO Plugin
2. Platinum SEO Pack

Other Resources

1. Complete Guide for Wordpress SEO
2. SEO for Wordpress
3. SEO First steps
4. Wordpress SEO

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.

If you have a blog or a website, the biggest concern should be about the traffic to your blog or website after having impressive posts. Getting traffic is  not that easy, but with good content, it becomes achievable. You need to do some work to get your blog traffic growing and with time it will happen. I have my blog with most of the traffic coming from Google, to be frank, I have never tried much to get more traffic or buying backlinks or any blackhat SEO methods. I have been following some SEO Tips which has resulted good for me. Your blog earning will always depend on the traffic of your blog, just not traffic but the quality of the traffic.

There are different ways a visitor may come to your blog or website like

1. Search engines : Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live are the best source of traffic for free. You need to rank well for potential keywords to get consistent traffic from search engines.
2. Social media networking sites : Social Media Sites like Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, FaceBook are sources which can shoot up your traffic.
3. Email link : A visitor can send your blog post URL to his friend to visit or read your post if its  impressive.
4. Direct traffic : Some loyal visitors who already know your blog URL may come to your blog by keying in your blog URL.
5. News letters : Your news letter subscribers will come to your blog reading your newsletters
6. Other blogs or website linked to your blog or we can call backlinks
7. Banners or Advertisements : You can get traffic from different advertisements or banners.
8. RSS Feeds : Feeds are very popular these days. Many read news or blog posts using different feed aggregators which are very easy to manage and read

As far as a webmaster or a blogger is concerned, the best traffic source is which gives some benefit to the blog or website. The quality of traffic can be determined by the following factors

1. Time spent on the website
2. Bounce rate
3. Repeated visiting
4. Bookmarking
5. Subscribing to newsletters
6. Subscribing to RSS feeds
7. Post a backlink to the webpage or the blog
8. Submitting the post to Social Media Sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, etc
9. Sales or conversion if you have some products to be sold
10. Ad revenue

Now coming to the topic of this post, the best source of traffic should be a source which gives you conversions, subscribers, loyal readers, backlinks, sales, Ad revenue etc.

In my opinion the best source of traffic should be Search engines for the following reasons

Consistent Traffic – If you have posts which lists on top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) then you will surely get tons of traffic if the key phrase or the keywords are popular or if its up in trends.

Less Bounce Rate – The bounce rate for the traffic coming from search engines are very low, reason being the visitor comes to your blog or web page searching for something through a search engine and gets what he was looking for.

Length or Depth of a visit – Usually traffic coming from search engines do spend lot of time on your blog visiting related posts or posts from the same category.

New Visitors – Usually the traffic from search engines will be new visitors and if you have a good blog or impressive posts, you get new visitors converted to loyal visitors or subscribers

Back Links- New visitors or search engine visitors could generate more back links or social media bookmarking. If you blog has your social networking links like Twitter, Digg, facebook or stumbleupon, you have high chances to get more followers or friends which can improve your presence on the World Wide Web.

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?

If you care about backlinks and want to check your blogs backlinks, here is a tool. This tool will check the backlinks from different search engines. All you need to do is to enter the URL of the website for which you need to check the backlinks and wait till you get the results. Once the result is ready, you will be able to view the total number of backlinks, total number of unique anchor texts, list backlinks, with their respective PR, what pages are the most popular ones and what anchor text is the most popular one.

This tool can show you all the important information about your competitor’s links. The report includes pagerank, anchor texts, no-follow information and more

Link Diagnosis – examine your link competition

I was just checking this blog, if the translated static pages are indexed by Google. Yes, you can see the screenshot of the pages, these are the home pages for different languages. If you have translation feature for you blog, it would give a chance to get more visitors from different languages.

I would suggest, just to enable not more than 6 languages. If you are using Google Adsense, please make sure that you enable only those languages that are allowed to serve Google Adsense. I am planning to add the option to disable translations for languages which are not supported by Google Adsense.

This plugin creates search engine friendly links from the original page to the translated pages, so its very easy for all the pages to get indexed and its happening atleast in my case ( I am using this plugin for 3 of my blogs) and I noticed a considerable increase in traffic for search results in different languages from Google and other search engines.

The Translation Plugin which I have written has lots of improvements to be done, which I am doing by testing on different servers which I use. The main problem is that I am not getting much time to work on this due to my official commitments. I will try my best to release a very stable version taking care of most of the bugs that I come across or from the feedbacks I get.

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 have been working on a new version of my Translation plugin for Wordpress which creates static translated pages of your blog and links to it. You do not need worry about getting your blog pages translated. This plugin is free to use, you can see it in action on this blog. This blog can be read by readers from 23 different countries. You can see the picture on the right side which is from Google Analytics. You can see searches coming in different languages.

Using this translation plugin can increase your traffic and sales and more revenue from advertisements. I have been using this plugin for about 2 months now and I have seen my Indexed pages on Google has gone up 10 times.

This plugin works well for me, if you are interested, you can download it from the Wordpress Plugins Directory. I have recently updated the plugin and did some testing, its working well for me. If you find any bugs, please report it here 

Advantages of Using The Translation Plugin

• Gain International readers who do not understand English
• Instant Translation – You can use other plugins which redirects the visitor to Google Translation website
• Search Engine Friendly URL
• Translated Pages Updated as per your setting
• Widget can be customized
• Regular Updates and simple installation

I have updated the Translation Plugin. The translation Engine used is Google Translate  . If you would like to use this plugin, you can download it from the Wordpress Plugins Directory – Translation Plugin for Wordpress Blog

Features

• Instant Translation
• Generates Translated HTML Files
• Cleans UP the Translated Page
• SEO friendly Translated Page
• Page Updating Interval can be set
• Home Page Translation

Please let me know if you find any problems. This plugin is tested on the latest version of Wordpress 2.7 . This plugin will work only if you the PHP curl library installed in your server.

Installation

Installation is very simple, just download the plugin, unzip it and upload to your plugin directory. Open your theme folder and add the following line to your 404.php file

<?php

if(!isset($_REQUEST['error']) && createTranslation404()) {

    //Nothing - Will take care of the fetching the translated page

}

else {

// your regular 404 error page

?>

    <?php get_header();?>

    <div id="content">

    <div class="post">

    <h1><?php _e("$AA_STATUS_CODE $AA_REASON_PHRASE"); ?></h1>

    <?php if(function_exists('aa_google_404')) aa_google_404(); ?>

    </div>

    </div>

    <?php get_sidebar(); ?>

    <?php get_footer(); ?>

<?php } // don't forget to close the braces

exit; exit();

?>

Just above the get_header() function of the 404.php file in your theme folder

And other modification that you need to do is to add the following function just after the <body>tag of your template

<body>

<?php if(function_exists('printLangListKish')) printLangListKish(); ?>

To print the Change Language links, insert this function to your sidebar

<?php if(function_exists('printKishTranslateChangeLang')) printKishTranslateChangeLang(10); ?>

Settings To be Done

Please make sure that you complete the settings after installing the plugin

The first four are the Widget Setting, for Translation which you will find on the top your every page. You can set the background color, the font color, the border color and the height of the widget. (I need to do some more work to make it more customizable to match every theme)

The “Translated Text Color” and the fade color is to create a fade, when the translated text is displayed, you can test it by doing a translation

Then you can select the languages that you would like to show on the widget, anyway all the languages are found in the dropdown menu

Then comes the Wordpress url, Just add your blog url without the forward slash. The root path, just check if the displayed one is right and copy paste it to the text box, then the language directory name – The name of the folder, which will hold all the translation pages, The last text box can be left blank, it will be updated when you save the settings

Updating the Plugin

You need to revert the changes that you had done in your templates. You have modified the single.php and the header.php, you can revert it back to your original template file. Do the modification as mentioned above for the fresh installation, i.e you need to add the lines to the <body> tag if you want to display the Ajax widget and the 404.php file(This is mandatory for this plugin to work). To add a sidebar widget you need to add the function to your sidebar

Modifying the Looks of the Widget and the sidebar link widget

If you want to modify the look and feel of the Translation Widget, you can do it by modifying the CSS styles in the functions.php file. I have added the option to change the border color, background color and the font color, but still you can change it totally by modifying the CSS values or adding new. I have this Translation Plugin being used on this blog and my other blog “Earning Through Blogging”

That’s it, It should work now.