Beginner WordPress SEO : How to Optimize Your Blog Posts

Getting high search engine rankings for your blog takes work. A lot of work. While we all know the benefits of SEO, sometimes there just isn’t enough time to focus on both SEO and developing a quality product or business.

What can you do? You could hire a SEO consulting firm like Outspoken Media, but if you lack a budget, this article is perfect for you.

Everyone knows that creating fresh, engaging content helps build a loyal following and attract links. However, if you’re looking to improve your SEO with no budget, you can tweak your existing articles to prime it for high search engine rankings.

Now I’m not saying that your website will shoot up into Google’s top 3. I’m also not going to tell you to stuff as many keywords into your post as possible. If I did, that would be cheesy and I would be lying.

Instead, I will say this: if you focus on these 7 key areas of on-page SEO, you can improve your search engine rankings. How do I know this? Because it worked for me.

Conduct Keyword Research

You could try and guess what what people type when they use a search engine, but with free Keyword Research tools available, it’s wasted effort.

What are some of the best, free keyword tools? You could use the Google tool, or one that I like is Wordtracker. In addition, you can use this tool from Google to research trends in search phrases.

If you’re looking for a premium keyword research tool, look no further than SEObook.com, SEOmoz.org, or Raven Tools.

Focus on Low-Competition Keyphrases

Don’t waste your time going after highly competitive keywords with on-site optimization because you won’t be able to nab them.

So, how do you know if a keyword or keyphrase is competitive?

Take one of the phrases you found while conducting keyword research, type it into Google search using quotations (ex. “how to install Thesis Theme Framework”), and then look at the number that appears below the search box.

If the number is large (over 75,000), I’d avoid it because it’s highly competitive. If it’s small, I’d focus on it because it should be much easier to score a top ranking.

Note, just because a keyword or phrase isn’t competitive doesn’t mean it won’t send traffic. And if it doesn’t send much traffic, that doesn’t matter either because the traffic it does send is highly targeted. For example, I once optimized a post that landed the #1 position in Google and it helped me make a $1500 sale.

Choose One Keyword or Phrase, and then Write or Tweak Your Article

While you want a keyphrase with little competition, you’ll also want it to have some search traffic (greater than zero). Then, either write a post that targets that keyphrase or go back through some of your older articles and tweak them for a specific phrase.

I’m not saying that you should let that keyphrases dictate what you write about. Instead, find a phrase that relates to your topic, and craft a helpful article around it. Remember, quality content matters. The higher the quality, the better chance it will garner links and then rank in search engines.

For example, if you run a blog about Kangaroos, and one of your researched keyphrases is “what do kangaroos eat”, then you might want to write a blog post about that.

Use Your Keyphrase In Your Post Title and Title Tags

Yep, simple as that. Use the keyphrase in the title of your post and in your title tags.

Repeat the Keyphrase in Your Article.

You want to build a loyal following, so don’t go crazy with this. Instead, what I mean is, if you want to rank for your keyphrase, you must use it. Avoid creating nicknames or trying to be clever. In the end, clear and concise wins. As a rule of thumb, try to include your keyphrase early on in your article or in a H2 tag. While this may have little impact on your rankings, it will help show your readers that they’re reading the right piece of content.

Use the Keyphrase in your Meta Description tags

Using keywords in your meta description tags does not help you rank higher. However, when you include them, when people search on Google for a specific keyword, Google bolds the keyphrase in the search results. So, while it may not help you rank higher, it will encourage people to click on your search results.

Find Images Related to Your Keyphrase

Think about it. If you were looking for information on Kangaroos, when you visited a website, would it make sense to have a picture of a Kanagaroo on it? Absolutely.

So, when you publish your articles, ensure that you find related images and use your keyphrase in the alt description of your image. This is beneficial for two reasons: first, it helps search engines see that you’re trying to create a complete piece of content, and second, it’s great for accessibility.

Other SEO Factors

There are, of course, other factors that influence your search engine rankings that I don’t talk about here. However, if you want to focus on building your business and creating great content, these 7 areas can help kick-start your SEO without becoming a full-time job. If you have any other quick hints that you think people will find useful, feel free to leave a comment.

SEO for Flash: 5 Tips and Best Practices

SEO for Flash – is it a reality yet?

One of the most common issues for web sites with poor search visibility involves Google not being able to crawl and index a site’s content. Web sites made entirely with Flash are problematic because there are often no links for search engine crawlers to follow or HTML text to copy.

According to the Opera (browser) developer center, somewhere between 30% and 40% of all pages tested contained Flash files representing a lot of content that may not be included in search results or only partially indexed. Despite a large number of sites publishing content using this type of file format, Flash and search engines have been like oil and water. They just didn’t mix.

In the summer of 2008, Google announced it had improved the indexing of Adobe Flash files. Many Flash developers and SEOs across the globe could breathe an optimistic sigh of relief: Text in Flash files was now crawlable.

But what’s the whole story? Can a site be built entirely with Flash and expect to gain the same search benefits as an HTML site?

Consider these 5 points that Google makes in regards to SEO for Flash:

1. Google can crawl and index all of the text content users see as they interact with the Flash file. That’s a big step in the right direction, since ensuring a site is crawlable is the No. 1 SEO basic. A few points to keep in mind concerning SEO for Flash:

1) Google maintains that the text in Flash files is treated like text in HTML or PDF files.
2) If identical content is used in both Flash and HTML, Google will likely see it as duplicate content.
3) If a Flash file is embedded in HTML, you’ll be able to add meta information, but the content will be indexed as a single item.

2. Google can discover links within Flash files. In other words, if a Flash file includes links to your website pages, you can increase your odds of Google finding and crawling more of the site – just as is the case with links that appear in HTML and other files.

3. Google can index external content that a Flash file loads and associate it with that Flash file. This capability is an update from the summer 2008 revision. Previously, if a Flash file were to load an HTML or XML file, Google would not associate that external content with the Flash file. This new capability, introduced just this summer, allows external content to appear in search results.

4. Google supports common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash. Another update from the 2008 revision, this capability also applies to SWFObject and SWFObject 2. Previously, if a page loaded a Flash file using JavaScript, Google wouldn’t recognize or index it.

5. Google can index sites scripted with ActionScript. That includes AS1, AS2 and AS3 versions. Google also maintains that is does not decompile Flash files or expose ActionScript code if it’s not visible to users.

All that said, Google’s ability to crawl Flash files is still evolving, so building a site entirely in Flash isn’t best practice. To create the right balance when it comes to using Flash and implementing SEO for Flash, consider these tips:

1) Don’t use Flash as the navigation.
2) Embed Flash files into HTML pages.
3) Use descriptive page titles and meta descriptions.
4) Don’t include an entire site in one Flash file. Instead, break the content into multiple Flash files with different HTML pages.
5) Use Flash for design elements and less-important content, and use HTML for the most important page elements.
6) Enhance web fonts in Flash files by using slfr, per a suggestion by SEO Zombie Blogger Justin Briggs. Because the Flash styles enhance the HTML content rather than replace it, the engines can still read titles.

For Flash optimization from the source, be sure to check out the Adobe SEO Technology Center web site, which was set up specifically to provide webmasters with what the challenges are and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices that you can follow to overcome them.

While Flash, Ajax and JavaScript offer enticing user experience, they continue to offer a less than ideal experience for search engine crawlers. What tactics or best practices have you found in balancing rich media and SEO? Do you think it’s reasonable to for a web site to have an amazing Flash component and still be able to compete in aggressive search categories?

How to Get Links Once You Have Great Content

Any good linking strategy starts with having high quality content. Your content needs to be so good that anyone who reads it feels indebted to you for putting it out.

In order for your site to garner real backlinks and real rankings, you need to actively market your links. You need to be able to get websites who’ve never heard of you to look at your content and give you a one-way backlink.

If you can’t do this, then your content is most likely going to sit in the archives of Google, only to be found by a handful of people.

So how do you market your content so it gets more links?

Make Your Content Rank

One of the best ways to get your content new backlinks is to make it rank. That might seem counter-intuitive on the surface, but when you really look at it, it makes sense.

All you really need to do is get your page to the top 10. If you can get your piece of content to the top 10, it’ll get enough traffic that people will start to link to it. People with websites will see your content, like it and help you finish the race to the top.

So instead of trying to rank a no-link page, try to get your no-link page to #9 on Google. Treat it as if it were an SEO project. Use the best and most cutting edge backlinking techniques you can find to get your content up to the first page.

Do Some Guest Posting

Do some guest posting on other people’s websites. Create a high quality content post about something that’s relevant to both websites. Don’t write your guest post just to get a backlink. Instead, write it to attract real people to your website. Remember, the more real people you get to your website, the higher your chances of getting more backlinks.

In your author bio, link to your new content piece instead of your home page. This will give your content piece more link juice as well as more visitors. Alternatively, you can link to your home page in your bio section but link to your content page in the actual guest post itself.

Tap Your Relationships

If you’re regularly trying to rank pages in an industry, it’s a good idea to build as many relationships as possible. Talk to other webmasters and website owners. Connect with them on Twitter. Comment on their posts. Let them know that you exist. Contribute to their communities and help them succeed in whatever way possible.

Then when you have something that you want to promote, you can come to them and ask them for the favor. Because you’ve been so helpful in the past, they probably won’t hesitate to give you a hand.

Figure Out How They Did It

Another way you can bump your content to the top is to take apart the current top listing’s strategy.

Use tools like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO to probe into their linking structure. Who’s linking to them? Does it look like a self-generated linking strategy, or was it done through relationships?

If their strategy was self-generated, see if you can replicate it. If it was generated through relationships, see if you can find similar relationships to promote yours. If your content is outright better than theirs, you can even try getting those sites to replace their link.

Do a Social Media Push

Go on your social media networks and do a push for your content piece. Publish it on your Twitter account as well as your Facebook account.

Message other Twitter users who you have a strong relationship with and ask them to tweet out your piece of content. If your content is catchy enough, there’s a good chance that other people will keep retweeting it. This can help drive a lot of traffic to the content and bring you a lot more backlinks.

These strategies will help you get your new content ranked higher, which will garner more links for it. Don’t assume that just because you have great content, you’ll rank. You need to put in the work to build it backlinks. Once it hits a certain threshold, like hitting the front page, then the quality of your content can indeed carry it the rest of the way.

Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers

Tips on optimizing keywords

1) Post with SEO keywords does not make it look natural.
2) The words should be the same that the user is typing in Plural forms are a better choice.

3) Use common mis-spelling of the keyword is not appropriate.
4) List of possible keywords should be used. They can be as words–the utility, Hacks, health … Apart from SEO Webmaster it encourages utilities.
5) The keywords are being used more in the article. Since users do not see them, Google does not put much importance on meta descriptions.
6) The same keywords should not be used in a line, a synonym or variant can be used.

URL or SEO Tips for Bloggers
1) Blogs should not be placed at the root of the domain. It should be placed in a subdomain or sub.
2) In the URL, use a hyphen/dash to separate the keywords. Google underscore separators as good keywords.
3) The old URL of this article should be changed to be a resident or a 301 redirect.
4) URL extensions like. Php,. Asp,. CFM. Htm,. Html, etc. can all be used but is not. Exe.
5) Question mark or highlight the dynamics of a URL to be treated as static URL by Google, but the parameters must not exceed 3, the Google bot can collect information if it is not beyond three.
6) Your own domain name to be used in FeedBurner feeds.

Tips on accessibility and usability of the blog

1) Always use ALT tags for images. A full statement can be used in the Alt tag, but it should not exceed three to five words. Keywords relating not to be avoided.
2) It is better to do a podcast or a video, Matt cutt that bloggers can submit their pictures to hotornot.com and if the assessment is above 7, then a video can be a good idea better.
3) WordPress to be used for the blog to ensure that the site is crawling. Today, many people from accessing the site on your mobile phone, it better not to use frames or any weird stuff, they do not work well with mobile phones.
4) Enter the dates of the post must be shown.
5) The use of the Akismet spam comments will be protected to prevent your blog from being spammed. Google Analytics can locate traffic on your website. Finally, there is no substitute for content.

Article Writing in SEO

Professional SEO Consultant declares that article writing is very important step in SEO of any website. Think of an attractive, keyword-rich title that is one of the most crucial steps. You will require doing this right otherwise, you might not obtain the kind of open rate that you’re hoping for. You would desire your titles to be very compelling because you require getting as several people as possible to notice and open your articles. This will occur if you can encourage them that reading your articles will actually benefit them. So, exchange a few words what is in articles for them in a way that you will target their exciting hot buttons. Don’t forget to utilize the main keyword that you’re targeting as this will facilitate your articles in securing superior page ranking on Google.

Write all the articles according to the taste of your readers. You can appropriate the things that you have learned about SEO article writing. What you require to do is to focus on your readers and on addressing their learning needs. In order for you to impress them, you must present them amazing information that they’ll discover either interesting or useful to their lives or careers. It will also facilitate if you guarantee that the information you’re sharing with them is something that they will not simply discover on other articles. Also, guarantee that you make studying a massive knowledge for these people. Make your articles consistent, legible, friendly, relevant, meaty and to the point.

Formerly you are done giving out enough information; the next point is to make the search engines pleased. Start by placing your main keyword on your heading and also remember you can only utilize it one time on this part. Then, place it on your first paragraph if at all possible on the 1st ninety characters and go on by placing it one time or two times for every hundred words. If you have your own website or blog and using your articles on these, you can utilize these keywords as fix texts so search crawlers would recognize the keywords that you are placing.

10 SEO Tips for Joomla Websites

As we are already aware of the fact that the main focus during website creation should be to make it search engine friendly, so it is very important to optimize your website for search engine like Google. And now, not only webmaster can utilize their skills to make any website search engine friendly but also you as a owner can make it search engine friendly or in simple words we can say that you can put your website in ranking of search engine by utilizing content management system (CMS) like Joomla. Joomla web design is in high trend these days. With Joomla, you can create and manage a website on your own without any help of webmaster. Below mentioned are best Joomla SEO tips and these tips will help you to get your website into higher rank in Google.

Whenever you are deciding the title of your article, you need to keep in mind that this tittle will be in the tittle tag of Joomla and moreover in in-site links. So it is very important to choose the title of article very carefully, keeping the trends of search engine in mind.

Use anchor text in your article as inbound links using the keywords which you want to be in ranked in search engine ranking results.

Try to get more and more external sites links to web page of your website. But always keep the quality in order to increase the page-rank of web page of your website. For that, create quality content web page with help of Joomla to get bound links.

It is better if the age of site is more, so keep extending your domain registration
because registration of spam sites is not done for longer period and having higher age of your website increases trust on website and helps increasing page rank also.
Never forget the link popularity within the website. Use in-site links to navigate from your one webpage to another. You can use site map for that in your home page. If there are so many web pages in your website, then that will also increase your page rank.

This is good if you get so many inbound links from other website to your web page but you need to assure that you are getting qualitative inbound links. Qualitative links means links from external website having high page rank and link from related field also.

Keywords of your content are very useful. It can increase the page rank of your web page. For that, write the quality content and then find out the keyword density in your content. From keyword density, pick up top two or three words and add them to the meta keywords. It optimizes the web page for the particular keyword.
Smaller sites usually have higher ranking in Google but generally, size of file is not responsible for ranking in search engines. Always optimize the images you have in your website. Joomla developers need to keep this point in mind while working on Joomla websites.

When you are working in Joomla and want your website to be search engine friendly, make use of clean URL with few parameters.
There comes error pages like 404 or file not found, in your screen. It happens when connection does not build up with the destined server and displays 404 error. Mostly people forget about this error page. Error pages should always be utilized by placing text links to site pages.

These are few tips for working with Joomla and put your website in the higher ranking of search engine. Utilize these tips to get your website in higher ranking in search engines and increase your page rank also.

What to Do When You Run Out of Keywords to Target in your Keyword Research

When you were first starting your website, you most likely picked a relatively modest keyword to target. You mastered that keyword, got ranked for it, then targeted higher traffic and more difficult keywords. You also probably went lateral and targeted similar keywords, synonyms and keywords that mean the same things but have different root words.

At some point, you’re going to hit a wall. You’ll have targeted every keyword you can think of in your industry. You might not be ranked for all of them yet; some of them might take time, some of them may be impossible to rank for and some of them you’re already at the top of. But you will hit a wall where it just seems like there’s no more room to expand.

There is to expand beyond this wall, you need to go beyond the basic research tactics. You need to really dig deep and use unconventional tactics to find new keywords to target.

Here are a few different ways you can go above and beyond to find new profitable keywords. As you’re browsing these different methods, keep in mind that the goal is to find keywords that are both relevant to your site and can generate substantial traffic.

Look Through Your Analytics


In your analytics data will be a section dedicated to telling you what keywords people typed in to access your site.

Many of these keywords will come from SERPs that you deliberately targeted and know you rank for.

However, a handful of people will have arrived at your site from keywords you’ve never heard of. Look into these keywords. There might be a whole host of related keywords you could target to get people to your site.

Look at Your Competitors’ Sites

Look at what your competitors are doing. What kinds of keywords are they targeting? Are they going into any peripheral markets?

Open up a few pages on their site and look through the source code. What keywords are they putting in their meta tags?

Put their site through the Google Keyword Tool. What keywords does Google think their site is relevant for?

Jump Through Wikipedia


Head on ovusing wikipedia for keyword ideaser to Wikipedia and lookup a few keywords related to your industry. For example, if you’re in the chemical business, head over to Wikipedia and look up a few of the chemicals you sell.

Look for other keywords that you might be able to target. For example, in this case you might look for specific chemical processes, precursor chemicals or special uses of the chemicals that you might be able to try to rank for.

Use Google’s Related Search Tool

One fast and simple way to brainstorm new ideas is to type your keywords into Google, one at a time. Scroll to the very bottom. Google will give you a list of keywords that they think are related to your search term.

Repeat this process with each and every one of your keywords. If you find any that you think might be good ideas to go after, write them down. Plug those new keywords back into the Google search tool and keep looking for innovative new keyword branches.

Come Up With Completely Different Ideas

A radical approach you could take is to take on a completely new direction or a completely new idea. The idea must be strongly linked to your site’s main idea right now.out of the box keyword research tips

For example, let’s say you sell chemicals that are used in manufacturing plastics. You’re ranked strongly for all the chemical names that you’re selling and many of the chemical processes. You’re looking for more keywords to target, but can’t seem to find any keywords in the chemical industry or the plastics industry.

If you hit a wall like that, why not try taking on an entirely new idea? In this case, you might try taking on green plastics and green manufacturing. If you sell chemicals that can be used making green plastics, try to rank for those processes and those chemicals. Try to build your brand in this entirely different yet strongly connected market.

Using these ideas, you’ll be able to take your basic keyword list and vastly expand it. You won’t run out of keywords to target for quite some time.