Its pretty easy to submit your blog or website to the search engines by just copying your sitemap’s URL and hitting the next buttons for their submission process. But in order to make the search engines pick your new posts and inject them into their site’s data we need to optimize our posts, just as we optimize our blog. It includes the keywords, that we use in our blog or website’s header as well as the Titles and the Tags. So in order to write a perfectly SEO optimized blog post, we need to think about it just as a web page and use some, or all, of my tips below. We will focus mainly on WordPress, for it is pretty easy to optimize for the search engines.

Post Title and SEO Title

Many users might not have yet realized that the title you write in the top bar is different than the one you write down in the SEO plugin’s bar. The title that you write in the POST Title bar is the one that appears on your blog above your post’s description or on the header bar of your browser. Whereas the SEO Title is the one that is tracked by the Search Engines and put up in their search results. Google shows up to 60 characters in their search results so it would be a better idea if you use as close to 60 characters as you can.

SEO Description And Keywords

I know many of the WordPress users just write a post, submit it and put it up on their Social Media thinking it will save the day. But trust me, that’s not the right way to deal with getting traffic. You need to have some organic and search engine traffic and search engines rely on the SEO description and keywords of your blog, more than the post content. You need to insert something into that description box that a reader can get the gist of the post easily, that it’s the thing they are searching for, because this description is the one that is shown below the post title in the search results. You should write up to 160 characters in here for the same reason as in the post title. And don’t forget about the keywords at all, for these are something that makes your post appealing. The words in this tab shows the search engine what the post is about, just like the description shows the reader.

Now, the real fact is that some users, just put in all the keywords related to the post inside that keywords box. But that is not going to give you any fruit, because search engines take these keywords and then search them throughout the content of the post, to confirm whether the post is truly about the keyword that reader has searched for. Now you might be thinking about what to put in that box, well here is deal, just think of yourself as a reader and look for the words that you would use to search for a specific blog post, for they are the one that will be more effective.

Post Permalink

This permalink is what adds up to your blog post’s link to let the readers get directed towards it. Most of the users use their post title as the permalink, and so you would be wondering whats the importance of a permalink. Well take the example of this post. The post title is ‘A Detailed Guide To Write An SEO Optimized Blog Post in WordPress’, and now if I use the same as my permalink, it would hurt my SEO. The reason is that the words ‘A, To, An, In’ are STOP words, and these are skipped by the search engines, to save their disk space and speed up indexing. We need to avoid having these stop words in our permalinks, and so the permalink I used for this post is rather ‘guide-write-seo-optimized-blog-post’. Oh and by the way if you have already submitted your post, don’t try to change your permalink now, for the old permalink will give an ERROR to your readers and it will effect your blog/website’s reputation.

You can find some more stop words HERE.

Post Interlinking

This is a crucial step while writing a blog post, especially when your blog has a very high bounce rate. Bounce rate is actually the percentage of the readers that run away from your blog without jumping to another page. How we work it out is that we link the old post on our blogs to the related words on our new blog post. WordPress has a new feature now while inserting/editing a link. You can now easily click or link to existing content and write the related word that you are searching a related post for, and select it. This option in WordPress clearly shows how user friendly WordPress has become for bloggers, to easily optimize their blogs. In SEO terms, interlinking to your old posts improves your page rank and gives a new route to the search engines to crawl over your old blog posts if they may have faced an error crawling it before.

Image Optimization

When I used to blog for my own blog a long time ago, I usually used to ignore this step and didn’t realize that I was doing something wrong until I started adopting this method for my new blog, when I saw some traffic being generated from ‘http://images.google.com‘. This happened because I optimized the images that I insert in my blog posts. The method to do that is very simple. After you insert your image, just open its options, and add the details of the image into the tab ‘Alternate Text’. See, for example, the image above is for the image settings, so I used ‘Image-Settings’ as an alternate text. Now whenever someone will search for ‘Image-Settings’ they will land on this post.

There are many plugins to do this, but the best one is SEO Friendly Images which automatically adds the name of the image as its Alternate Text, and so for this purpose when you are saving an image, always save it with the details that are in the picture.

To summarize all the important steps above, I would want you to do take care of your post’s keywords for that is what the search engine will crawl upon your post. In order for your post to gain a good position in the search results (rather than a post that tries to scam the system by filling everything with keyword after keyword and no real content), just take care of these things below and you will notice the difference:

After choosing a keyword for your blog post, try to make sure:

1. The title contains the keyword.
2. The title starts with the keyword.
3. The permalink contains the keyword.
4. The SEO description contains the keyword.
5. The SEO description starts with the keyword.
6. The SEO keyword contains the keyword.
7. The content has the keyword with a density of at most 4.5%
8. An image in the post contains the keyword as the alternate text.
9. The content contains a Bold keyword.
10. The content contains an Italicized keyword.
11. The content contains an Underlined keyword.
12. The content contains a keyword linked to a post on the same blog.
13. The content contains a keyword linked to a post from some other website/blog.
14. The content contains the keyword in the first and in the last 100 words.

The reason of having a keyword in the title, permalink, description and keywords is obvious. The keyword density being too low will prove that your post is not a scam. The keywords being bold, italicized and underlined is because search engines sometimes give preference to text that is different than the main body text and detecting the ones that ‘stand out’ as keywords will help further imporve yor ranking. Linking to other blogs also can improve your ranking.

I believe that this detailed guide to writing an SEO Optimized Blog post will help you reach your goal and you will surely notice the difference after implementing this method. Do leave your comments below to share your experience and even if you have something to ask about.

Here are a number of  advanced tweaks and WordPress plugins you can install to help with URL structuring, search engine crawling, handling duplicate content, optimizing title and meta tags, images and internal linking.

Setting Up the Permalink Structure

In WordPress:  Settings >> Permalinks

WordPress gives you a number of ways you can structure your post urls.  By default WordPress sets the urls like www.domain.com/?p=123. This is obviously not optimal because you are not gaining the benefits of having keywords in the url.

They also have options to set the urls organized by year/month/date, for example www.domain.com/2010/02/07/sample-post/. This is getting better, because you are able to add a unique post name in the url, however the post is four directories deep which can cause potential crawling issues.

The most effective way to optimize your urls is by using the custom permalink structure.  Choose “Custom Structure” and enter “/%postname%/ “.  By setting this custom structure your urls will look like www.domain.com/post-name/.  This puts your post directly off the root level and uses keywords based on your post title.

Setting Up non-www to www Redirect

In WordPress:  Settings >> General

The newer versions of WordPress make this extremely easy to do.  Simply change the Blog Address (url) to http://www.domain.com. WordPress will automatically update your htaccess file to redirect the non-www version to the www version.  If you have an older version of WordPress you will have to copy and paste the code provided into your htaccess file.  However I would upgrade to the latest version of WordPress before I manually add it.

Search engines treat the www and non-www version of a page as two different pages.  If not corrected, this can cause your blog to have hundreds or thousands of duplicate pages.  By fixing this you are minimizing potential duplicate content issues. 

Optimize Post Titles

In WordPress:  Settings >> All in One SEO Pack

By default WordPress creates page titles like “Blog Title >> Blog Archive >> Post Name”. This is ok, but not optimal.  Search engines will place more importance on the keywords at the beginning of the title tag so we will want to modify the tags so that the post name is at the beginning of the post and not the end.

To do this, make sure you install All in One SEO Pack.  This plugin will automatically set up your title and meta description tags the proper way.  Your page titles will now look like “Post Title | Blog Title“.  You will have the option to override a specific post title within the post if you would like.  Make sure you create a unique description after you have written your post.  All in One SEO Pack will not create meta descriptions, so when creating a post there is a section for adding unique titles and descriptions.

Block Certain File Directories in Robots.txt

There are certain directories that you should block from search engines.  Check out the Robots.txt guide I wrote that will show you exactly which directories you should block.

This will help with controlling which content you want search engines to crawl and not crawl.  There are many directories and files that are unnecessary for the crawlers to spider.  This will help the crawlers find the content you want spidered faster.

Install SEO Plugins

All in One SEO Pack

This SEO plugin is probably the best and most robust plugin for optimizing your blog for search engines.  This plugin will automatically optimize your blog category and post url structure, auto generate title tags, avoid duplicate content issue by restricting search engines from accessing pages that have duplicate content on them, and canonical tag integration.

Google XML Sitemap Generator

This plugin will automatically generate a XML sitemap of your wordpress blog that is formatted for Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.  Your sitemap will be sent to all of the search engines every time the plugin rebuilds your XML sitemap.  Having this plugin, ensures that the search engines are aware of all of your posts and will help with the overall crawling of your blog.

Google Analyticator

This plugin will add your Google Analytics tracking script to every page on your blog.  There are also other options and features which give you more accurate tracking.

• Disable Admin Tracking
• Enable Event Tracking
• Track Outbound Link Clicks
• Track Downloads (PDF, CSV, DOC)
• Google Adsense Integration
• Ability to Modify Tracking Script

SEO Smart Links

Interior linking will help with the overall crawling of your website, along with keeping readers engaged in your content.  You can also leverage your content by using keyword-rich anchor text and linking to other content within your blog.  This plugin does just that.  It will take keyword and phrases within your post and comments and link them to corresponding posts on your site.  This can significantly cut down on having to manually search for relevant posts on your site that you can link to within a post.

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images will automatically optimize all of your images by adding alt and title attributes.  If you do not have an alt or title attribute for your images, it will add one for you.

W3 Total Cache

Load time is becoming an important factor in search engine algorithms.  Not to mention a page that loads fast makes a visitor much happier and is more likely to stay on your site longer.  W3 Total Cache will help speed up the page load times by caching pages, removing white space and comments, and compressing css and js files.  Here are a few reasons why this plugin boasts it’s at least a 10x increase in site performance.

• Enable Page Caching
• Enable Minify
• Enable Database Caching

More SEO Quick Tips for WordPress

• Allow commenting for user generated comment and higher engagement
• Use good categorization for usability
• Add compelling graphics and images in your posts
• Ask questions at the end of your posts to encourage comments
• Syndicate your content to your Twitter and Facebook profiles
• Social bookmark your best content

Share your tips and tricks with us via comments section.

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!