I wrote a post Learn SEO by Improving Important Web Ranks a few months before but now I guess it’s the right time to upgrade and elaborate it because Google and other search engines are changing their policy at high pace. First we need to get head into three of the most important ranks on web:

1. Page Rank
2. MOZ Rank
3. Alexa Rank

1. Page Rank:

Nowadays there is a big fuss that Google removing page rank or it’s the end of page rank. Well yes Google have removed page rank from webmaster tools, but still I don’t think it’s an end to page rank because this topic is going on from past 4 years. That is why we will talk about improving page rank as well.

Page rank is one of the most important and commonly talked about ranks on web. its the heart and soul of SEO and getting traffic from search engines. Page Rank is said to be an estimate of your site’s popularity on the web by measuring the number of websites linking to your site, assigned by Google. Page Rank is determined by Google Links not Inbound Links!! This is an important part to understand, Google links and inbound links are not same. Inbound Link means that links pointing to your site from another site, while Google links are an extract of the quality inbound links. In Short Google links are taken from the inbound links, but only quality links.

How to improve your site’s Page rank:

Improving page rank is a difficult but still not so difficult task to do. You can easily get about PR 3 in first two months. Sounds impossible? Well not actually I can do that with a challenge :), I have done that to plenty of sites. So how to? Some very Simple Techniques!!!

• Optimize your homepage for search engines.

  This includes proper page Title, Proper Keywords, Proper Description and most of all Proper Content. Now what do i mean by proper?

  By Proper I mean that your title, keywords and description should not consist of extra stuff like numbers, stop words (and, or etc.), same keywords must not repeat more than 3 times in title and description. In Content Optimization Keep your content clean, fewer images, Use your main keyword in H1, also try to use keywords in h2 and h3. (For Details see this post : on page Optimization)

• Install Google Toolbar
• Start using Chrome Browser since they take data of sites you are browsing.
• Post your site’s Links to these social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Deddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkzDirect etc.
• Nofollow outgoing or not so important links. How to do that?

  Normal Links: <a href=”http://www.sitename.com”>sitename</a>

  Nofollowed Links: <a href=”http://www.sitename.com” rel=”nofollow”>sitename</a> (See This post for more: Nofollow)

• Ask for sites with same focus for link exchange, Don’t hesitate to ask they won’t say no trust me :)
• Avoid using URL Shorteners if you are bookmarking your site’s link in social bookmarking networks, because with this the inbound link goes to the URL Shortener site not you. Twitter is exception since it nofollows all links.

In about two months u will achieve Page Rank 1-3. If you want to improve your site’s Rank and push even further please see this post: Link Popularity Building

2. MOZ Rank:

Moz rank is some what like link juice estimation. Link Juice just like page rank flows from page to page of your site or links to others sites on your pages.

• Install Quick Search Status toolbar or SEO Moz Bar
• Nofollow outgoing or not so important links (See This post: Nofollow)
• Use SEO MOZ Tools to get info about your site.

In simple words the more quality inbound links you have the better moz rank you get. Quality links are considered as inbound links on sites whose page rank is higher than your site. For example if my site’s page rank is 2 then putting link on site who’s page rank is higher than 2 or 3 would be considered as quality Inbound link, of course by using proper link posting method.

Proper Link posting is something like this:

Normally if u post a link u do it like this. <a href=”http://www.sitename.com”>Site Name</a>. Well yes u did made a link but not quality link. Here is how u can optimize your link. <a href=”http://www.sitename.com/” title=”your-keyword”>Your Keyword</a>

Now what’s different in it? You are using a title attribute which strengthens your links focus and instead of using link on your site/brand name it’s better to use your keyword in it.

Once you do this and get a grip on SEO Moz tools you will easily control the flow of your link juice in your site and can control your site’s SEO to some extent

3. Alexa Rank:

Ok, everybody knows what it I won’t get into details is. Just simple to improve alexa rank just install alexa toolbar and browse your site daily. Refresh after a few minutes or so in a week you will improve your rank to about 200000 places. Note also this will work only to really new and fresh sites, for well established websites you still need traffic to get ranked.

Want even more??

• Optimize your homepage for search engines (it’s very simple just read this post : onpage Optimization)
• Ask members of your site or friends to install alexa toolbar and browse your site.
• Even More?? Install alexa toolbar on a network of computers and set your browser’s homepage to your site so whenever its opened your site sends a hit to alexa , thus your rank improves..

When u will go through all these steps just to improve your site’s rankings once, you have learned SEO.

Wordpress Seo Tips

There is a wide concept in publisher’s mind that using wordpress means getting maximum traffic from search engines because wordpress is a very good CMS which hardly requires Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Well this concept is not as correct as it sounds. WordPress also requires some optimization to get max out of search engines. For this purpose i made a list of 10 Important Changes which should be a part of your wordpress blog.

1. Use a sitemap generator and generate XML sitemaps like twice a week.

2. Use an Ideal Robot.txt File which do the following:

Points to the sitemap in first line.
Disallow unnecessary pages, folders so search engines get to your content instead of wasting time and getting less important stuff.
Here is a sample : http://www.designzzz.com/robots.txt

3. Using rel=”nofollow” Attribute in outgoing or less important links.

This Attribute tells the search engine bots not to follow the specific link or do not share that page’s Rank with this link. This is a very important tip , you can control your site’s SEO and Page rank by just using proper nofollow attributes. Here is a post i wrote earlier which can show you how to control your page rank and seo by using nofollow. Ok, the Less Important links includes links like Read more.. , Click here etc. This can be done by editing the template files easily.
Some plugins which we use in Wordpess blogs requires a must nofollow and we never thought about that.  Here is a very cool example. You are using the easy retweet plugin and Retweet buttons are shown on start of every post even on your homepage. Lets say you have 10 posts blocks on your homepage and have 10 retweet buttons on it link to twitter.com !!! that means there are ten outgoing links, you are sharing your site’s page rank and getting lesser visibility in search engine. it can be nofollow from its settings.

4. Proper URL and Title Structure

It is the most important part which we neglect while publishing a post. Lets take a simple example. I am about ot publish a post lets say.
10 Awesome Graphics Designs and Digital Artworks  the URL would be :

www.yoursite.com/category/10-awesome-graphics-designs-and-digital-artworks
Seems pretty much alright, right? Well..here u miss about 30% of your visibility!!
A simple reason using STOP WORDS in title and URL are the worst idea u can think up of. !! AND is a stop word. About the url why make it so long using extra stuff in it like the word 10 , and etc. Trust me no one will search for your content in search engines with these words 10 graphics design.  If they look for that they will search graphics designs etc.
So get rid of 10 , and from your URL. Here is how they should be:

• Title: 10 Awesome Graphics Designs n Digital Artworks

• URL: www.yoursite.com/category/awesome-graphics-designs-digital-artworks/

Makes sense? well i don’t even use the category name in the URL structure to make it smaller and more powerful!

5. Using Keywords and Meta Description:

Ok, i have noticed that most of the bloggers use very tiny keywords. Well, guys small get a habit of using long tail keywords,because with them u get traffic for life time. Lets take the example of that above title post. keywords/tags which bloggers normally select are: graphics, design, digital, artworks. Why don’t you spice them up a bit to get even more traffic?  If i would do it , I would use these keywords:

Graphics, Design, Digital Artworks, Graphic Designs, Digital Graphics.

I actually spread the same keywords with order and words variation!!

About meta description keep it below 160 characters and add your keywords in it as well as possible like each keyword should be mentioned at least once.

6. Automatic SEO Plugin for WordPress

Well, I have used several plugins to test which one is good and the only plugin which satisfied me is Headspace2 SEO. I Recommend it.

7. On post page title of post should be written in Heading 1 (H1). and its very important to use your keywords in h2, h3 and h4 if possible.

8. Title and ALT Attribute in Links:

Ok, this is an important part which none of us actually look at. Title and alt attributes in links plays an important role in telling search bots that what this link or image is about.
Title and alt attributes are written like this if you are unaware of it:

• <a href=”link…” title=”keyword name or what it is about”>Keyword</a>

• <img src=”path to image” alt=”what image is about” />

My site gets 10% of its traffic from Google image search!! Because I use proper alt attribute.
Consider this example!! Like the graphics design post we discussed above. Your post consists of 10 Images. That means not much text to get good ranking and visibility in search engines. So why not use alt attribute in an optimized way!! in 10 images add alt tags with picture name + keyword/tag.

For example, the image name is abcd. i will add the alt attribute as alt=”abcd design” or abcd graphics etc.  That means in 10 places on your page’s source code your keywords are used! I think you get my point.

9. Avail WordPress ping facility to get max exposure and inbound links

Here is a list you might consider putting in your ping section in admin>settings>Writing:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2http://1470.net/api/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

10. This might sound odd!! No follow Home Page !!

See this post for proper info about no-following homepage and why is it important.

Hope this helps! Maybe you have some more tips you would like to add? Feel free to write them in comments! Thanks and enjoy!