Why title of the post is most important

The title of your next post is the main factor that people use to determine whether they’ll read your next post. This is true in most places that people are going to stumble upon your post whether it be on a search engine, in an RSS feed, on a social media site, in a link from another blog etc.

A great title will draw people into the post and give them reason to read it.

A bad title will more often than not be ignored, glossed over and mean a post goes unread.

As a result – bloggers need to spend at least a few minutes thinking specifically about the post title before publishing. Without it all the effort that you put into your actual post could be wasted.

Tips to write effective posts

Much has been written on the topic of writing great blog post titles and I’ll link to some great resources below – but here are a few strategies and tips that I’ve found useful.

1. Communicate a Benefit – a title should tell readers something that they’ll ‘get’ by reading your post.


2. Create Controversy or Debate – not suitable for every post title but there’s nothing like Debate to get people checking out a post.


3. Ask a Question – in my experience posts with questions in the titles tend to get read more than others – they also are better at stimulating comments from readers.


4. Personalize Titles – for example: using ‘you’ in your post title (and post) can have a real impact and take a post from the realm of ‘theory’ into a more personal post.


5. Use Keywords – keywords that signal to readers and search engines what your post is about can help draw in significant traffic if you use them well.


6. Use Power Words – Not all words are created equal – some evoke a powerful response in readers – words like ‘free’, ’stunning’, ‘discover’, ‘warning’, ’secrets’, ‘easy’ etc all work well in my experience of blogging.


7. Make Claims and Promises – as long as you can back them up in your post – a big claim or promise can get someone’s attention.


8. Humor Titles – be careful with this one – funny can work great but it can also leave your readers very confused if it’s too cryptic…. or if it’s just not funny.

How to quickly index in google

1. Blog Communities

There are few blog related community portals that have a very good rankings in Google and other Major Search Engines Results, they are: MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Blogged and NetworkedBlogs, particularly MyBlogLog. This means that if you get your blog on these blog communities, Google will have no other choice but to index your blog. So, go ahead and register for an account on these communities and list your blog on it. Once you are done you will have a page like this, this and this.

What to pay attention: Your blog’s description (have a proper write-up), keywords & tags (add related keywords and tags to your listing, this will be used by other members to find your blog), branding (put your logo, avatars, screenshots etc. have a consistent branding everywhere), and list your blog in the correct category.

2. Site Valuation & Stats Sites

Some of those How Much Your Site Worth? sites have a good ranking in Search Engines. All you need to do is to go there and check how much your site worth. This would create a special page for your blog (like this) and consecutively it would be indexed by Google. Here is a list of worthy sites: WebsiteOutlook, StatBrain, CubeStat, WebTrafficAgents, BuiltWith, WhoIs, QuarkBase, URLfan and AboutTheDomain.

3. Feed Aggregators

List your blog’s feed in these feed aggregators Feed-Squirrel, OctoFinder, FeedAdage. Once you have submitted your feed to these sites, they will keep track of your newly published posts and index them in their site. Whenever someone clicks on the blog post title, he/she will be redirected to your original blog post sending you free traffic and getting your latest posts indexed by Google.

4. Social Sites

Registering account on Social Sites with the same username as your blog’s URL is very effective in getting your blog indexed by Search Engines. Especially for those targeted keywords.

For example, if your blog’s name is WhiteElephant, it’s a good practice to register the same username at twitter as @WhiteElephant, and to create a page in Facebook at www.facebook.com/WhiteElephant. Having a consistent keyword-username on all major Social Sites will help get your blog indexed faster, and at a later stage it will also help build a “brand” for your blog.

So, get account on major Social Sites for your newly launched blog, namely: Twitter, Facebook (create a page for your blog), Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc. By the way, it’s a good pratice to create a separate Social Sites account for each of your projects. This way you can stay focused and post messages that are related to your project. In the long run, this will help build a community that are like-minded around your project.

Note from Darren: it’s worth nothing that many social media sites (like Twitter) use no follow tags on links which means the links don’t really help with SEO. Having said this – it’s still worth getting pages for your keywords/brand as these pages can rank in and of themselves in Google and can help you to have control over numerous search results for the same keyword.

5. Misc Sites

Squidoo is a community website that allows people to create pages (called “lenses”) on various topics. Creating a topic that is related to your blog and then including your feed in that page would help your blog get indexed by Search Engines. Squidoo used to have a really good ranking in Google results, but not so much today. But it’s still ranks well and it shouldn’t be neglected.

ChangeDetection is a website that monitors sites for changes. When you monitor a particular site using ChangeDetection, it will ask you whether you want the notices to be public or private. If you say public, it will be published in their news section. For example; AdesBlog.com got an update today, type of update: text additions etc. This of course will get picked up by Search Engines and Search Engines in return will index your blog.

Technorati is a search engine for searching blogs. According to Wikipedia, as of June 2008, Technorati was indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. It’s a dying breed, but not just dead yet. You have to definitely register for an account and get your blog listed on Technorati.

That’s it. Once you are done with creating accounts and submitting your newly launched blog in the above mentioned sites, you should see your blog in Google’s Search Results within 24 hours. Most of the time it will appear within the next few hours only.

Lastly, getting indexed is one thing but sustaining that traffic is another. And this is where the Content is King phrase should truly be emphasized. Because, without a good and valuable content, all your effort will be just wasted.

25 Free Ways To Generate Traffic To website

So , in response to that here are 25 ways to generate traffic to your blog:

1. Article Marketing


2. Forum Marketing


3. Google, Yahoo, and AOL Group


4. Viral Marketing - Giveaways & Bonuses


5. Expired domains


6. Squidoo


7. Social Bookmaking sites


8. Social media sites


9. BUM Marketing


10. Viral Videos at Youtube.com


11. Press Releases

13.Post regularity
14.Submit your posts to social media sites
15.Submit to My Yahoo!
16.Submit to Google's Reader
17. Ping your post to ping sites such as ping-o-matic. Ping your site every time you add a new post.
18. Submit your blog to web directories such as DMOZ
19.Submit your blog RSS feeds to as many RSS Directories as possible
20.Submit your blog to Search Engines
21.comment on other Blogs
22.Participate in Forums
23.Tag your website
24.submit to social bookmaking sites
25.submit your blog to blog directories

SEO for WordPress

I’m an SEO and I have been working a lot with WordPress, here I give you all my tips for you to rank very well in Google with your blog.

Quick Facts

1. There are 55 million blogs out there, if you don’t stand out you will have no chance.


2. The first second of a visitors attention is the most crucial.


3. Your main traffic should come to articles and posts inside your blog, not the home page.


4. Search engine rankings relies heavily upon the quality and quantity of links to your blog when they determine the ranking.


5. The best way to get links is by natural recommendations from other bloggers or web site owners.

Section 1: Optimize Your Blog

Usually the WordPress themes are well designed and structured already but there are a number of things you really should do to improve it for better optimization for search engines.

Using the best URLs

To enable the permalinks is easy and you have probably already done that, just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel. But what format is the best to choose? The structure /%postname%/ – nothing else. This is best because your URLs to your articles should never change. And if you have it like this it does not matter if you change the category of the article or republish it with a new date, it will always be the same URL (more about that later). And if you happen to have two posts with the same title it is not a problem as WordPress will automatically add “-2″ in the end.

Have you been using the wrong format? Well, if your blog is not totally new you should not change. It is not vital and for the next time you make a blog you know how to make it right.

Handling URL Canonization

Every WordPress blog has an issue in which there are 4 different URLs for the same post and this has to be fixed to prevent dilution.

Title Tags

The title tag is the most important HTML-tag in terms of SEO.

Here are different versions you should use inside the <title></title> located in theme/header.php

Optimum ranking:
<?php if(is_home()) { echo 'Your blogs name | Few important words'; } else { wp_title('') ;} ?>

For branding purposes:
<?php if(is_home()) { echo 'Your blogs name | Few important words'; } else { echo 'Your blogs name:'; wp_title('') ;} ?>

The best title tag solution for advanced users

Either install and properly use the SEO Title Tag plugin or do the following:

1. Download and install this plugin.


2. Replace <?php get_header(); ?> with the context in header.php on single.php, page.php and category.php.


3. Work out the best titles for the different versions and use the plugin to create different versions of category.php and single.php with their own versions of title tags. For example if your category with ID 5 is “SEO News” you could have the following title tag in single-cat-5.php:
   <title>SEO News: <?php { wp_title('') ;} ?></title>
   In category.php you could have: <title><?php { wp_title('') ;} ?> | Your Name</title>

Headings

Headings are defined by HTML with H1 (largest) to H6 (smallest). You need to use them in your articles when you write. Your article title should be in a main heading (H1), sub headings with H2 and small headings with H3.

Make sure that in theme/single.php this code <?php the_title(); ?> is wrapped in H1 so that it looks like:
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

If your theme designer already used a specific CSS design for the heading tags you can do like this:

1. Open up theme/single.php and add <div class=”singleheadings”> to the top after <?php get_header(); ?> and </div> to the bottom before <?php get_footer(); ?>.


2. Add then add for example the following lines of CSS to your CSS file:
   .singleheadings h1 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}
.singleheadings h2 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}
.singleheadings h3 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}

You can change your quicktags by for example using this file instead (also add H2 to the file) so that you easily can insert heading tags when you write.

Navigation

Most of the link power is coming to the home page of your blog and gets distributed evenly among the rest of the links on that page. So in additional to having a good navigation structure for your visitors also do the following:

• Have links to the most important articles and pages from your home page. That can easily be achieved by making a category with your best articles and using the WP Category Post plugin to make a list of them on the index.php file.


• Install the Related Posts plugin and have your articles link to similar articles.


• Also link yourself to previous articles you have written.


• Place the attribute rel=”nofollow” on links that are totally useless for search engines such as to RSS feeds for the blog and comment links. In case you want to remove the nofollow on the comment links make sure you check the author links before approval as it is important that you don’t link to bad sites from your blog.


• You should not have hundreds of external links on the home page, if you have that I recommend that you place them on a separate page.

Site Map

A Site Map is where your visitors go to navigate and find specific articles and posts on your blog. It is also a place for search engines to find links to all your pages on your blog.

What about a Google Sitemap?

It is not needed. There is no reason for a WordPress blog with a proper navigation structure to submit a Google Sitemap other than for information purposes. A Google Sitemap does not improve your ranking, only crawling, and that is not a problem.

Design

Everyone has different tastes about design but here are points to think about when you design your blog:Keep the design simple, very simple.

• Have the body text big with big and clear headings.


• For some reason blogs are not liked in the big social network sites (like digg, reddit etc) so make your theme unique and try to make it look like a site and not a blog.


• Make sure nothing steals attention from your text.


• The text width should not be longer than one and a half alphabet, even shorter.


• When a visitor reaches an article on your blog, the text should be seen instantly. Have the text as far up as possible. A visitor should not have to scroll to reach the content.


• If you are not making decent money with ads I suggest you to erase all ads you have on the blog.

What About the Meta Tags?

There are various WP plugins out there for this but to be honest and frank I can tell you that they are not worth the effort. The meta keywords tag are not used anymore (or extremely little) in the ranking calculation and while the meta description tag can show up in the SERPs I consider the snippet of text the visitor gets being better.

CSS Positioning

It has been said that by providing the important content first in the source code it will make a positive difference in your search engine ranking. I am not sure if this is true, but it won’t hurt to do it. For example on this blog the navigation on the left is in the bottom of the code.

Section 2: How to Craft Your Articles

You should read the entire section of Authoring High Quality Content by Mr. Fishkin but I give you here a very quick summary as it relates to this article.

First the most important quote:

One Great Page is Worth a Thousand Good Pages

While hundreds or dozens of on-topic pages that cover sections of an industry are valuable to a website’s growth, it is actually far better to invest a significant amount of time and energy producing a few articles/resources of truly exceptional quality. To create documents that become “industry standard” on the web and are pointed to time after time as the “source” for further investigations, claims, documents, etc. is to truly succeed in the rankings battle. The value of “owning” this traffic and link source far outweighs a myriad of articles that are rarely read or linked to.

Write articles or posts that serves as a stand alone document. This means there is everything valuable collected on that page on that specific topic. For example a stand alone document on “SEO for WordPress” should have everything on that page and the reader should not need any other articles on that topic.

Better 1 great article that you revise 10 times than 10 smaller ok articles.

To do this you can also rewrite and republish your old articles with the current time to show up again as the latest article.

Include links to more reading if applicable

Withing or at the end of your article you should link to other sources so that the reader can read more if he is interested. You can also use this as sources if you got your writing materials from other places.

Headlines

You should write the kind of headlines to your articles that:

• Contains important keyword combinations or phrase for ranking


• Describes with great interest what the article is about


• Makes the reader want to read it and clicks on it in the SERPs


• And is short and to the point

Section 3: Increase User Interaction

• Use polls from for example Poll Daddy.


• Increase the commenting field for longer user comments and better interaction. This also provides more unique content to your articles.


• Install the Subscribe to Comments plugin.


• Actually do reply to your commenters and answer their questions.


• If you revise an article based on a comment, do link and give credit to the commenter.

Section 4: Get Links

• Post your link baits on the major social network sites such as digg, reddit and the others.


• Install my Link to Me Textbox WordPess Plugin which provides an automatic HTML box of code for easy linking to you.


• Regularly link and reference other bloggers in your field in your posts to get attention from them. You loose nothing of it and many of them will return the favor and link to you. Also comment on their blogs to make them discover your blog.


• Read and follow my Link Building Guide

How to Get Google to Send Traffic to Your WordPress Blog

After recently moving a number of blogs from Blogger to a hosted WordPress Blog I discovered a BIG problem, Google stopped sending me traffic.

I managed to resolve the problem, and after a lot of hardwork, frustration and after what seemed like a life time, Google has started sending traffic to my new WordPress blog. I naively thought that this would be straight forward process and I wasn't alone as when I first started writing about this issue on my blog I was surprised to find that this is a common problem.

So when I finally found the solution I thought I would create an article and summarise the steps taken to resolve the problem.

It was certainly easier to get Google traffic to a blogger hosted blog as most of this process seemed to be automated.

These are the 7 steps I followed to get Google to send traffic to my WordPress blog:

Step 1: Tell Google your site exists, go to Google's add URL page and enter your sites details.

Step 2: Register an account with Google Webmaster tools. This will give you a meta tag so that you can be tracked by Google's tool set, by using the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress.

Step 3: Install the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful to integrate a number of different Google tools into your blog i.e. Webmaster toolkit, AdSense, & Analytics.

Step 4: Install the XML-Sitemap plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful as it automatically creates and updates a XML-Site map of your site. Sitemaps are useful as they help search engines like Google crawl through your site.

Step 5: Install the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to potentially increase your page ranking by incorporating SEO techniques into your blog. When you create a post a new section becomes visible which allows you to fill in a few details for SEO, then the plugin does the rest.

Step 6: Create some internal links. Google appears to like internal links, so I wrote a blog post which linked to every other post.

Step 7: Allow Google to see your site. Make sure your robots.txt file allows Google to crawl through your site - Google WebMaster tools can easily provide a working robots.txt file. There is also an option in the privacy settings of WordPress to block or allow search Engines, make sure this is set to allow.

I hope these 7 steps help some people out there.

Top ten techniques for Search engine optimization

No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms... SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.

Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche - you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.

Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time. I make this clarification because you must understand search engines, especially Google, are constantly redefining how they rank pages. Here are my favorite tactics and strategies:

1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them. You must understand search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.

2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches. Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don't forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting "long-tail" keywords been very beneficial for me.

3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content. Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, made sure all your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages should be no more than three levels away from it - keeping a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title, description, keywords... are all optimized. (Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression anyone will see of your site - make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.

4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google. Don't ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser, Google's influence will only grow stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google's Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content for Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my niche keywords and for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.

5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost your search rankings. Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites related to your niche market and make sure the 'anchor text' is related to your keywords but don't ignore the text and overall quality of the content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable portion of a link. Don't forget linking is a two-way street, make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant sites in your niche.

6. Article Marketing

is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it still works. Writing short 500 - 700 word informative helpful articles with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an extensive network of distribution including SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters... plus other major online sites. Don't forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your article distribution. And always remember you're also using these articles to pre-sale your content or products. Don't forget to leverage sites like Squidoo, Hubpages... to increase your rankings and traffic.

7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me. These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts - a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts. Works similar as a sub-domain but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind you're creating content to first satisfy your visitors.

8. WordPress blog software is extremely effective for SEO purposes. WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blogs to help distribute my content.

9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on the web. These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter... media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati... you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and using them. It's time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on all my content.

10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO. You must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly, you just don't want SEO - you want effective SEO. In order to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance, Authority and Conversions.

First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic or niche area you're pursuing - your content must fit in and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That's why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines, they give only relevant content to what's been searched for or discussed.

Second, your content/site must be perceived as an authority site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and the search engines will love you and your content. One way is to develop this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form links/partnerships with other perceived authority sites in your field. Always strive to make your site an authority site - tops in your niche - the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a conclusion.

Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you're into online marketing, conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.

Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic you're seeking, just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for you and your site in no time at all.