6 Common Seo Wordpress Blog Mistakes

When it comes to running a site (or several sites) it is easy to neglect some of the important aspects of search engine optimization. I have put together a small guide listing 6 of the most common places where wordpress blog owners sometimes go wrong, you can use the same principles on other blog platforms aswell but this post is aimed at wordpress as it includes several plugins.

Blogs can generate a lot of extra traffic which you can then work on converting into sales on your main site, but if your blog isn’t set up right you wont be seeing the results you should be.

You can use this post as a reference or a check-list to make sure your site is properly search engine optimized and google friendly.

One of the first things I do when optimizing a newly indexed blog is set up a google friendly xml sitemap and upload it to google webmaster tools, you also want to make sure you have a copy on your server and a link to it on one of your main pages so the other search engines like yahoo and msn can find it. There is a plugin which you can use and upload to your wordpress blog using the admin panel, it is designed to create a google friendly xml sitemap of all your posts and auto update each time you write a new post, you can find the official download link here. The good thing about this sitemap generator is it doesn’t include your tags which is good for seo purposes and I will explain why further down this post. Make sure you download this plugin or create a sitemap for your blog, it will make life easier when it comes down to indexing pages and search engine optimization purposes.

The second most important thing that I would do is set up a robots.txt file to help prevent duplicate content and website crap. I wrote a post just the other day about creating a wordpress robots.txt file which you can find and read about in more detail and see a better example.

Sitemap

Robot

layout between design and advertisement, also talk about navigation

Site setup I.e title, categories address bar title ect

Link structure I.e duplicate content

You have dedicated a lot of your time and attention in optimizing your website lately. You’ve done the necessary research in finding effective strategies in promoting your webpage. You even make it a point to use appropriate keywords and allocate the right places for them, however it’s still not working the way you want it to be. At this point, for sure there are questions running on your head because you haven’t met your goals yet, and that is to achieve the rankings that you are aiming for. You know what’s the missing piece here? It’s no other than link popularity building. It is very important because it can build traffic and can create links to your site.
Luckily, there are several ways to help improve the popularity and the quality of your link. All you need to do is to identify what are the methods that you think, would work best for your business. To answer your big question, let’s take a closer look on the 5 methods that are proven to be effective in driving traffic to your site.
1. Article Marketing- This is the most effective way of building links. All you need to do is to produce content with the right keywords. Then you can submit your finished article to major article directories such as ezinearticles.com.  Here’s the trick, the more articles you submit, the greater, the chances that you will get backlinks. It’s also a plus factor that search engines love articles and for sure they would place your articles in their results.
2. Forum Backlinks – this is a good way to maximize backlink, although there are some rules that must be followed, it will all be worth it because traffic to your site will be doubled and there will be an increase in your link worth.
3. Blog Commenting – this is also a very efficient technique to use and the good thing with this is that it’s also free. By making reliable and timely opinions to particular topics would earn a backlink to your site. If you are trustworthy for sure there would be more individuals who would be interested in learning more about what you have to say and they will click the link to your webpage, thus, creating more traffic.
4. Squidoo/Hubpages- These two websites are on line community webpage where you can create your own free webpage and you’re able to share it to individual browsing the net. The quality of your content can also be rated, for Squidoo; it’s called “Lensrank” while Hub ranking is determined by “Hubscore”.
5. Directory Submissions – It is also recommended to add your website to major web directories, of course prior to this you must do your homework and research on the sites that would allow helpful links to your own webpage.
These are the top 5 methods that you can use if you want to be visible on the net. You must learn how to make use of each technique efficiently and then put your ideas in action. Always remember that link building company is an important aspect of your business and should be given priority. Make it as a long-term investment and make it as your habit. For sure, all your time and effort will be paid in the future and you might not know it but your site is already attracting more visitors and thus will give you much more benefits than you ever dreamed of.

Our service is unique in so many ways but the one thing that stands out the most is the final results. 77% of all the websites we have linked built for are now ranked on the frontpage of google for many of the terms we promoted.

We guarantee we can build you relevant links on any site in any niche, our service  is 100% google friendly and carried out manually by professionals.

Even if you build links on relevant sites it is stilled classed as a spammy technique if you have your links in the footer or sidebars, so what we specialise in doing is getting your links displayed within the actual text in the center of the page i.e in- content links. Not only that but the pages that display your links will be optimized for your terms and those pages will be displayed on sites that relate to your content.

There’s no hidden catches, we have developed a very unique link building tool and we can assure you that our work is 100% google friendly.

Another important benefit from our relevant link building service is your traffic will increase as relevant links produce two types of traffic, one from the search engine and the second is from the sites that display your link. As we place your links within the body of the content the user reads the page and follows your link, this method has also been proven to produce the highest click through rates from any link.

Link Popularity Building |  Link Building Tool

How To Get More Traffic Links

So its time to stop focusing on seo link building and start building links that start producing some targeted traffic.

If your looking for ways to increase traffic then you have probably seen many ebooks for sale teaching you secret methods to increase your traffic, but to be honest there isn’t any real secrets to it, to work out how to increase traffic takes time and is something that you should try to gain as much experience in doing as possible. When you have enough experience you will naturally develop your own traffic methods.

I’m happy to share a couple of my methods to help you get started and get some targeted traffic which should hopefully convert into sales. If you use my methods then you will notice an increase in traffic, it does vary for different sites in different niches but traffic is traffic at the end of the day and I try to focus on getting targeted traffic which you should do as well. When you have a traffic building strategy you need to repeat it daily to increase your traffic over a long period of time, there’s no short cuts so if you want the sales you need to put in the time and effort. One day there will be a point when you wont have to do anything but sit back and relax but until then its time to get down to work.

The first method may seem like it requires a fair bit of time but it really doesn’t and the results it produces will definitely make a difference where you rank for your keyterm. The easiest way to increase search engine position is by producing high quality link from relevant sites or sites that have pages optimised for your term. To get started you must first know your niche and chosen terms that you want to promote, once you have these search up the terms in google and use google option to only show you results from blogs. Then you need to create a standard e-mail asking the site owner if they would like some freshly written content for three site and readers in return for one link pointing back to your site. The chances are the website owner will agree as they are always looking for new content so this method should produce some good results. It literally takes 5 minutes to find a handful of sites and fire off a standard e-mail. Give this method a go and see the results for yourself.

The second method also involves the writing of articles as you will promote these articles on article directories and article databases. You need to write several compelling articles and submit them to the big named article directories like ezine, try to make a name for yourself in your field by promoting as many articles as possible. Articles and press releases can rank quite highly depending on what keyterm you go for. When writing articles you need to make them stand out so the reader wants to know more about you or your website.

If you have a blog and connected to your site and blog daily then this method might be good for you. With every article you write and publish on your blog your main goal is to get as many people to see it has possible, a great way to do this is to submit the link to your article to the social bookmarking sites with a really catchy title and description and then just watch the traffic come in. Also submit your link to places like twitter as well as there are millions of potential readers on at one time. If a reader finds your article interesting then they might link back to you from there blog giving you another stream of traffic.

These are just several good ways of increasing your traffic, if you have anyothers please feel free to share them in the comments section.

Remember we also offer a relevant link building service which will help you greatly when building your targeted traffic streams.

Should I Use Robot TXT On MY Website

I was asked a good question today by one of my readers asking if they should use a robot txt file on there website.

Most sites now days use a robot txt file as a lot of content management scripts require a bit of tweaking for search engine optimisation purposes. The main cms that comes to mind is wordpress it’s a good idea to create a robot txt file if you use wordpress as there are some duplicate content issues.

Should I Use Robot TXT On MY Website

A robot txt is mainly used to tell the search engines which parts of your site you don’t want crawled and indexed. For example most peoples “contact us” page doesn’t hold any real weight and isn’t used for sales or a landing page so what people tend to do is block it from the search engines, this also helps to control your pagerank more.

Some sites wont need a robot txt file but the ones that have been around for a few will probably need to use one just to keep their site tidy in the eyes of google.

Should I Use Robot TXT On MY Website

Add A Favicon Icon To Wordpress

Do you want your website to look more professionals and more complete, well if so then why not consider adding a favicon, a favicon is an icon that displays before your url in the address bar.

All the top sites have a favicon, google, digg, facebook, paypal, bing, reddit, myspace, the list can go on, that is why its about time you added a favicon to your site or wordpress blog.

With the wordpress blog they have a great little feature that allows you to upload and activate plugins using the admin panel. All you do is navigate to your plugins section, hit the upload plugins button and browse to your zipped file, then when you hit upload again it will upload and activate your plugin.

There’s a favicon manager plugin which you can use to display icons in your url bar.

To download the favicon manager click here.

Once you have installed your plugin all you need to do is insert the url to the icon you want to use and hit save, it will then shrink the icon down and display it in your address bar. People use favicon to make there sites look more professional which helps increase conversions.

All in all this plugin has got a lot of good feedback, I have also recently started using it and it does exactly what it says it does and nothing else.

If you want to add a favicon to your wordpress blog then this plugin will do it for you, give it ago and leave some feedback.

Creating A Robots.txt File For Wordpress

Wordpress is a ready made blogging platform which has become very popular with hundreds of plugins and themes being created pretty much every day, you can take a look at the official plugins over at the main wordpress site, they also have a good range of themes to get you started and off the basic theme that everyone uses.

The reason why I use wordpress is it has a really good admin section and with there latest release it makes uploading plugins/widgets and themes a lot easier. The wordpress blog also reacts well with the search engines however I have had to tweak it slightly to make it more seo.

For example I have created a robots.txt file for wordpress to help me keep google away from the the parts I don’t want it to crawl, you don’t want google to crawl your tags or calendar links, and you certainly don’t want google to follows links that could cause duplicate content like trackback and the comments section.

So for example I will show you a couple of duplicate content issues with wordpress but more importantly I’ll tell you how to fix it.

I will use my previous posts url for this example;

http://directorysubmissions.eu/news/2009/09/08/why-is-everyone-an-seo-expert/

That’s how the url should be displayed and the only way it should be displayed but wordpress produces duplicate content issues like

http://directorysubmissions.eu/news/2009/09/08/why-is-everyone-an-seo-expert/trackback/

and

http://directorysubmissions.eu/news/2009/09/08/why-is-everyone-an-seo-expert/comment-page-1/

If you were to click each of the above links you will see it takes you to a page which has the same content as the others.

You can easily fix this by writing a robots.txt file to ignore the trackback and comments sections, just copy and paste the below example into your robots.txt file and your problem is solved.

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */comment-page-1/
Disallow: */tag/

You can also block other sections of your wordpress blog to help keep it google friendly and clean. I have blocked my tag section as well as google can find my posts by going through the categories, you only need one way for google to find your pages and that can be achieved by having inbound links or a good internal link structure.

You can check your current robots.txt file in google webmaster tools and see if google has access to the parts you have blocked or tried to block. If you simply copy and paste my above example into your robots txt file everything will be fine.

Creating A Robots.txt File For Wordpress
Creating a google xml sitemap

Why Is Everyone An SEO Expert

Everyday we see someone new promoting there search engine optimisation service and classing themselves as an seo expert, but if you do research into that particular site you’ll see that there not really that good at all. A good search engine optimization company should atleast be ranking highly for popular terms in there market, you can use a website like alexa.com to find what keywords send them the most traffic and see where they rank for those terms. If you know a bit about search engine optimisation then that will help you workout who are the cowboys and who are the professionals, but if you don’t know then just ask on a seo forum as you’ll get good results from them.

There are a lot of good seo companies out there but they are slowly being out numbered by people setting up any old website and claiming to be an expert. Any old Tom, Dick or Harry can pick up a book and learn about search engine optimisation but it actually takes many years of dedication, practice and experience to fully understand the different techniques and how to apply them effectively to promote any website in any niche.

There’s a lot that goes into search engine optimisation and it can actually be quite an intensive process, you need to learn about analysis, research, data reading, high quality link building as well as the many on-site tags and techniques you can use. A lot of thought and planning goes into building a successful website, advanced seo’s (experts) use techniques like pagerank sculpting as well as other highly advanced methods.

An actual seo expert would never promote themselves as an expert or guru as some people do, there results should speak for themselves and obvious to find. I always start of by researching there website, finding out how many links they have, what keyterms they rank for, how many hits they get, how good is there on-site optimization, are there any reviews or testimonials, do they have a portfolio of previous clients, do they have a decent pagerank etc, as you can see you need to do abit of research before handing your website over to a stranger.

A good search engine optimisation company should only be using natural seo methods and ones that are 100% google friendly. Always ask your search engine optimization company what they are doing and how long it will take them, there’s nothing to hide in search engine optimisation so your seo specialists should explain to you what they are doing to an extent. If they don’t want to tell you want they are doing and give you excuses then you need to ask them to stop doing whatever they are doing and find someone else.

If you hand your website over to someone and the screw it up then your website could be damaged for life or take a very long time to rebuild reputation with google. You can build a good reputation with google by building google quality links from other websites in your niche.

Don’t Hide Text Or Links

Someone posted a comment in a forum I use regularly asking if it was possible to add a table of there keywords to the homepage and make it so the users cant see it but google can.

I see many sites with a whole bunch of keyterms in there footer on every page but this isn’t needed if you optimize your pages correctly. Who really wants to see a sites keyterms in the footer on every page, it isn’t really user friendly and puts a lot of people off.

If you have to put your keyterms in the footer of every page don’t hide it, google is aware that people hide text for search engine optimization purposes and now penalises websites that do it.

Ranking highly for search terms is pretty straight forward and can easily be achieved without stuffing keyterms into each page. There’s still seo companies that use this web 1.0 technique and if you every hire a seo company that uses this technique then I suggest asking them to stop all work and use a more reliable and update company.

Always Use Alt and Title Tags

Search engines optimization covers every aspect of your website from titles to tags and images to link text. There’s two attributes which can be used with virtually every command you use and they are the alt tag and title tag.

The alt tag stands for alternative so if you use this tag on an image and the image can’t be displayed it will display the text. The alt tag is also used to tell google what that image should represent, for example if you had an image of a vase of flowers you would label the alt text as “vase of flowers”. This helps you optimise you web-page for search terms a bit more, also use the title tag in the same way.

So for example the alt tag would be used like this
<img src=”filename” alt=”vase of flowers”>

The title tag gives you another way to optimize your page, but the title tag is displayed when a user hovers over the image of link. So I would use the title tag like this;
<img title=”£vase” src=””filename”” alt=””vase” />

If you don’t use these tags then try them out on way of your pages as they help to optimize your site and help you rank higher.

Html Link Tag