Creating tags is not a magical task, but tag creation is critical if you’re doing any content publishing or blogging.  Search engines, plugins, and even crawlers look for instances of the reuse of key terms and index your page/post accordingly.  Getting ‘tagged’ can be the difference of your site coming up in search results, and leaving you in the dust.  Using some generic logic can help you discern which words to latch on to, which words can help you to get closer to the top of the search results.

One method that is common is to search for the words and phrases that you want to use [inside your search engine of choice].  Place yourself amongst those who you want to be compared against.  If you want to be a fine dining result, then find like-minded sites, and study their keyword source – see if it’s pertinent to what you can, factually, offer as a word to ‘be known by’.

Anyone who wants to come up on a page of results needs to tag their site. If you’re using templates, use the meta keywords tags in the head, if you’re using a blogging structure, then take advantage of the seo/keywords/tag features that come default on almost any blog framework.  CMS (content management systems) have even incorporated  a tagging logic, allowing each page of the system to be able to be crawled, index, and make it a contender for a pertinent search query.

Example of the Meta Keywords tag:

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”oranges, lemons, limes”>

Blogging systems like WordPress, have input boxes on the side, where you can enter keywords, one at a time, called “Post Tags”.  The use and common advice is to repeat features that may ‘best describe the point you want to get across’.  For this post we chose, “metatag”, “keyword”, “seo”, “example”, “how to”, “html” and “blog”.   Just by even stating what my keywords are will increase the ranking of the post (the frequency).

There are different guidelines for each crawler, but as a general rule, you can usually use 10 keywords safely, and up to 25 – each separated by a comma. With this in mind, place (what you feel are) the most critical keywords up in the first 10.  Likewise, make your site description short and sweet – usually one sentence.  If possible, include your region – even your address if possible.

references: Seomoz | webmarketingnow.com |

Need a “Pick-Me-Up?”

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Google Sitemap Generator
This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. If you have any intention of using the webmaster tools – you should get this plugin so you can keep your sitemaps current & prevent any hold ups from your site not being current with current tags/etc…

Digg-Digg
This is another program that gives your blog visitor’s the opportunity to make it accessible to share a post in a network that can potentially drive more traffic to your site. The integrate “Digg Button” , “Reddit Me Button” , “Dzone Button” and “Yahoo Buzz Button” Into WordPress Content. Setup screen provided to let user choose where user want to display Digg , Reddit , Dzone and Yahoo Buzz buttons.

Awesomepixgallery
Let’s face it… there isn’t a perfect gallery out there. If it looks good, it’s slow – if it’s ugly is fast and no one wants it anyway. APG is a good compromise between all the features out there. APG does have a superior intergration interface (after you upload pics you have quite a bit of control immediately to place/shape the image).

Email-Users
A plugin for wordpress which allows you to send an email to the registered blog users. Users can send personal emails to each other. Power users can email groups of users and even notify group of users of posts. The best part about this plugin is that you can specify mailing by group, so you only hit the publishers, subscribers/etc…

All in One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

http://semperfiwebdesign.com/ I keep going back between this and the headspace2 plugin, both have their advantages. Even though I’m currently on headspace, this is still worth checking out.

Simpler-Contact-Page
Are you tired of all the “bells and whistles” of most WordPress contact forms? Are you exhausted from modifying CSS for hours just to get a contact plugin to display with your theme?
WP-Cache

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to, supposedly, less than a millisecond.
Google Analytic Plugin

• Google Analyticator supports the following features:
• Standard Google Analytics tracking support
• Provides a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
• External link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
• Download link tracking
• Support for hiding Administrator visits without effecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
• Support for any advanced tracking code Google provides
• Easily installable only requiring the user knows their UID
• Allows code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
• Complete control over options; disable any feature if needed

Socialble Bookmarking Plugin
Social bookmarking sites allow your blog visitors to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find on your website. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts – making each post as accessible as possible. I’m currently using Digg Digg, but it doesn’t hurt to stay familiar with updates to the social networking sites. Sometimes what one plugin misses – the other will catch.

*Edited on 01October 2010:

A must see plugin for WordPress:

After the Deadline, you will wonder how you’ve lived without it (seriously)… it’s not just a real-time spell checker, it checks language specific usage, grammer and language syntax (comparative dynamics).

Don’t believe me? Give it a try now!

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Just a small heads up, as I type this, Google is in the process of yet another major update.

Holy Search Engine Optimization some of my readers and RSS subscribers might be thinking. What shall I do now?

Have no fear, there are some common starting points that if you apply these to all of your sites, you should be able to see the listings you once did as the norm.

• Proper naming structure
• Name your page titles with your keywords if possible
• Always have a sitemap
• Always include a robots.txt file
• If you must use a re-direct, be sure it’s server side, not with a meta refresh tag
• Don’t use hidden text
• Make sure your keyword phrase is included in your H1 tags
• Don’t optimize for more than 2 keywords per page
• Use text links where possible
• In any image, be sure to use the alt tag (describe the image, don’t use keywords).
• Use hyphens, not underscores when you name a page file
• Make sure your site has an error handling page
• Create a Google Sitemap and submit it to them (This is in addition to a typical sitemap)
• Offload all your JavaScript and CSS code (make it all off page).
• Don’t forget about meta tags

Be sure to follow these simple guidelines and you won’t need to worry too much anytime Google has an update.

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For those who don’t know, your website’s Alexa rank affects the amount of money that advertisers will pay to be shown on your site. The lower the numerical Alexa rank, the more money advertisers are prepared to pay. It’s not all that they will be looking for, but it’s an important factor regardless.

In short: a good Alexa ranking matters. So how do you go about ensuring a good ranking? Well, recently I’ve watched the Alexa ranking of this site get better and better over time so the waiting game is a crucial part of the rank improvement process.

So how do you go about improving your Alexa rank? Here’s a few simple tips to get you started:

Install the Alexa Toolbar
If you install the Alexa toolbar on your own web browser, then every time you view your own site, you register as a hit (and so does everyone else who vists your site with the toolbar installed). If you are an Internet Explorer user you can download it here. If Firefox is your browser of choice don’t feel excluded because you can install the SearchStatus Extension instead.

Encourage others to follow suit
Conformity isn’t such a bad thing in this case; so encourage your friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers to install the toolbar or the Firefox extension. Give them motivation by placing a link to it on your site. (Hint, hint)

Install Alexa widgets
It seems every site offers a widget for your site these days and Alexa is no exception. Read all about their widgets here. They look something like this:

Use Alexa redirects
Use Alexa Redirects on your website URL. For example: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.forgedeuphoria.com. Replace forgedeuphoria.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will only count each unique IP address once a day.

Write or Blog about Alexa
Webmasters and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has an effect on your Alexa ranking.

Give people good links
The blogosphere is generally a nice place, so it’s only simple logic that the more times you give people good quality links with good anchor text, the more times you will get the same high quality links in return and hopefully when clicked, will increase your Alexa ranking.

Try Alexa Autosurfs
Do they work? Everyone says maybe for brand new sites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there might be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using this option with caution.

So there are just a few options/tips to increase your Alexa ranking and start moving up in the interweb hierarchy.

Got any other Alexa tips? I’d love to hear them.

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These should be the steps taken when making a decision into which domain to buy:

1. Select a niche or core topic for your site.
2. Clearly define the purpose and goals of your site.
3. Choose an appropriate domain name.

I think it’s obvious that I missed the boat on all of the steps when choosing my domain. When I started my blog I had no idea what I was going to write about and now that I’ve settled on some topics I’m starting to suffer for it.

Your choice of domain name can be the most important decision you make for your site and can make or break it too.

I’m #1 on Google’s search results page for “forged euphoria”. Surprisingly I’ve actually had a few hits from people looking for this. I have no idea what they expected to find.

Anyway, the reason I’m #1 for that term is because everyone links to this site with the anchor tag “Forged Euphoria”, so naturally I’m up there in the rankings; the only problem is this isn’t the term I want to rank high with.

The key is choosing a domain that relates specifically to your niche and has your desired keywords in the title.

For example if you were going to start a blog about cars, cars-blog.com or blog-about-cars.com would be two I’d consider using. When people link to you the majority of the time the anchor tag they’d use would be “Cars Blog” or “Blog About Cars”.

Having people link to you is great, having them link with relevant keywords in the anchor tag is much much better. If your domain name contains keywords relevant to your niche you force people to link to your site with the exact keywords which will help you get a better search engine ranking.

If you’re thinking of buying a new domain first consider your niche and the purpose of your blog before you even start throwing around ideas for names. Don’t make my mistake and get stuck trying to make the best of a bad situation and suffer for it in the future.

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So what do you need to do to get that all important traffic to your site? How can you be sure the Search Engines will spider your site and index you?

Here are 3 things you absolutely must do right away:

• Include relevant keywords in your main page content. So if you are selling a service, describe your service, describe the benefits of your service, using targetted keywords throughout your description. Make sure your content is clear, grammatically correct, and spelled correctly so that visitors to your site will percieve you as a professional.
• Use normal HTML/XHTML inner links so that the Search engines can spider your entire site properly. Avoid using Javascript or Flash for your main site navigation because the spiders cannot see those elements and your site won’t get crawled.
• Get incoming links from reputable sites that relate to your service. If other sites are linking to you and they are already established as an authority in your service industry, that gives your site some credibility and your ranking will slowly improve as you continue to acquire more inbound links.

If you focus on the above 3 strategies and make them a priority, you will get the desired results. Here’s to your successful website launch!

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In a recent article, Chris Pearson gives us the Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs, where he writes:

You’d think that as a result of open-source development practices, blog architectures would be pretty close to perfection in areas like Web standards and maximum SEO impact. You’d be wrong.

The article points to several areas that can easily be optimized for search engines through the use of semantic markup; most of these pointers could be applied to any site, not just blogs.

The first, and easiest, SEO improvement is to optimize your title tags by structuring them like this: Post Title – Site Name.

The terms that appear earliest in the title tag are the ones that carry most weight with search engines, so you want them to be as keyword-rich as possible.

The name of your site probably isn’t very descriptive of the content on any one specific page, but the title of a post should be very descriptive, and so it makes the most sense to put those terms first in your title tag.

The second biggest SEO improvement you can make is to make strategic use of your heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.).

After the title tag, the h1 tag is the next most important in terms of telling search engines about the content of a specific page.

Ideally, each page of your site will have just one h1 tag that, like your title tag, contains keywords that are descriptive of that page’s content.

This is one area that I am willing to bet most sites fail – usually you will see the site name at the top of the page in an h1 tag, with the post title farther down in an h2 or h3 tag.

From an SEO standpoint, this is completely backwards – by doing this, you are telling search engines that your site’s name is the most important element on the page, while the title of your post is the 2nd most important.

The article suggests that your home page should contain the site’s name in an h1 tag, with the titles of your most recent posts in h2 tags, but that individual posts and pages should have the site name contained inside an h2 tag, with the post’s title inside an h1 tag.

The rest of the article contains several additional tips for improving your SEO performance, but I believe these 2 simple changes will give you the most bang for your buck.

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The key thing to understand is that the keywords appearing earlier in the <title> tag are the ones that carry the most weight. This is why it is important to format your <title> tags as: post title – site name. This formatting can easily be achieved in WordPress by using the following bit of PHP code between the <head> tags:

<title>
<?php wp_title(' '); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo '-'; } ?>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
</title>


By formatting your <title> tags correctly, you should be well on your way to achieving higher search rankings (assuming you have quality content, of course!).

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