However he is making a mistake by getting people to link his blog with only an anchor text of ‘make money online’. If too many sites link his blog with the same anchor text, Google will be able to find out that these are artificial links and may soon kick his blog out from the first page of the search result itself. Infact this happened recently.

To last longer for the keywords you target, get sites to link you with a variation of the keywords in the anchor text. Having a variety in the anchor text of your incoming links is a signal that those links are natural.

Example: If you are trying to get your site to rank well for the keywords ‘make money online’, try to get sites to link you (or buy links) with a variety in the anchor text like ‘make money online surfing’ and ‘ways to make money online’.

This way Google may not figure out easily that you are artificially trying to rank for some keywords and you will last longer once you are successful in getting to a good position for the keywords.

Or you could try to make some good post on making money online, like a guide, and then Digg it. If your post gets to the frontpage, you will get thousands of incoming links to your post and pretty soon you may get to a high position for the keywords you are targeting.

If you are confused on which anchor texts to target, try using a keyword tool like Overture. Also check out this backlink anchor text analyzer and checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo.

Some things you can learn from this video are to put a post in only one category to prevent content duplication (Google and other search engines penalize sites that have duplicated content), make use of the ‘more’ feature to prevent content duplication in homepage, single post page, category pages, etc and use a robots.txt file.

To prevent duplicated content in category pages, tag pages, yearly archives or monthly archives make sure your theme uses post excerpts there. Also create a robots.txt file to tell search engine bots which pages on your web site should be crawled and indexed.

RSS Readers: If you can’t see this video click here

A new version of SEO Title Tag was recently released and since I have blogged about this plugin earlier, I will just mention the new features of the plugin.

• a Title Tag input box in the Edit Post and Write Post forms.
• mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages
• ability to define the title tag of 404 error pages
• handles internal search result pages
• when used with Ultimate Tag Warrior, let’s you customize the title tags on tag pages and on tag conjunction pages too
• title tags of category pages can optionally be set to the category description

Some points to remember:

• remove your blog name from single post pages
• the title of a page must match the content inside it
• for single post pages, it is best to just have the post name as the title and nothing else
• keep your title short, don’t overload it with too many keywords as higher the number of keywords the smaller the value that will be given to each one of them
• give a good description for your category pages

Also, check out other WordPress plugins needed to optimize your Blog for Search Engines.

Here are the things Neil did with his blog:

• removed comment feeds from search results so that no duplicate comment text is indexed
• removed trackback URLs from being indexed because it was causing blank pages to be indexed
• denied search bots access to his blog installation folder (MovableType).

If you are using WordPress, a sample robots.txt file would be:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

In the above code, Disallow: /wp- makes sure that the search engine bots will not crawl the WordPress files.

Update: Another example of a robots.txt file for WordPress that I found in WordPress.org:

User-agent: *
# disallow files in /cgi-bin
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /z/j/
Disallow: /z/c/
# disallow all files ending in .php
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.txt$
#disallow all files in /wp- directorys
Disallow: /wp-*/
# disallow all files with ? in url
Disallow: /*?
# disallow any files that are stats related
Disallow: /stats*
Disallow: /about/legal-notice/
Disallow: /about/copyright-policy/
Disallow: /about/terms-and-conditions/
Disallow: /about/feed/
Disallow: /about/trackback/
Disallow: /contact/
Disallow: /tag
Disallow: /docs*
Disallow: /manual*
Disallow: /category/uncategorized*

You can also find an example of a robots.txt file for WordPress here.

If you are not using WordPress, you can substitute the disallow lines with files or folders on your web site that you do not want to be crawled.

After you finish creating the robots.txt file, don’t forget to upload it to your site’s root directory.

I also recommend you to display post excerpts instead of full posts on the homepage to ensure that you are not incurring any search engine penalties for duplicated content (on the homepage and single post pages).

1. Head Meta Description – Head Meta Description allows you to add dynamic meta description automatically by extracting the first few words from your post. So it’s important to place your most important keywords in the first paragraph so that they are picked by this plugin.

   Download Head Meta Description

2. SEO Title Tag – Title tags are one of the most important on-page factors for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This WordPress plugin, SEO Title Tag, addresses several limitations in creating Search Engine Optimized title tags for blog posts and for Pages in the WordPress blogging platform. It allows you to optimize your WordPress blog’s Title tags in ways not supported by the default WordPress installation.Features include:
   • Allows you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one defined through a custom field
   • Allows you to define a custom home page title through the Options -> SEO Title Tag page in the WordPress Admin
   • Reverses the order of the blog name and the title. This gives more keyword prominence to the title instead of the blog name. Or you can even drop the blog name altogether or replace it with a shorter nickname
   • Puts the tag name in the title of ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior‘ tag pages
   • Uses a Category’s description as the title tag on Category pages

   Download SEO Title Tag

3. Ultimate Tag Warrior – Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is a tagging plugin for WordPress designed to increase the functions for tagging posts and expanding site navigation through the creation of lists of tags.

   How does this plugin help to Optimize your Blog for Search Engines?

   Ultimate Tag Warrior let’s you include your tags as Meta Keywords in the header of tag pages and single post pages. To enable this, login to your Admin panel > Options and then click ‘Tags’ to enter the configuration page of UTW. From there tick ‘Include meta keywords’ found under ‘Meta Keywords’.

4. All in One SEO Pack – This plugin optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines by letting you
   • define your home page title, description and keywords
   • define your post, page, category, archive, tag and search title formats
   • use categories for META keywords
   • avoid indexing of duplicate content (prevents indexing of category, archive and tag archive pages)
   • autogenerate descriptions

   If you decide to use All in One SEO Pack, remember to disable Head Meta Description, SEO Title Tag and Ultimate Tag Warrior Meta Keyword feature as this plugin does all that these plugins do and much more!

   Download All in One SEO Pack

5. Google Sitemaps Generator – Google Sitemaps Generator will create a Google compliant Sitemap of your WordPress Blog. The Google sitemaps program is part of the “Google webmaster tools”.Currently homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported by this plugin. The priority of a post depends on its comments. More comments, higher priority! If you have external pages which don’t belong to your blog, you can also add them to the list.The XML file gets automatically rebuilt if you change/edit/create/publish a post and the plugin will automatically inform Google about changes via Google-Ping.

   Download Google Sitemaps Generator

6. Related Posts – Related posts will list out all related posts to an article which is helpful to your visitors when they are looking for specific information and want to read more on it. This also helps Search Engines to dig deeper into your blog.
7. WWW Redirect – This plugin is useful for people like me who have different PageRanks for their www and non www versions of their domain name. Example: PR 5 for http://johntp.com and PR 3 for www.johntp.com.
   

   The continuous plague of several pages being indexed using numerous variations of the same domain name has definately been experienced by most of us. In an attempt to remedy this extremely aggrivating issue; WWW-Redirect was born. Originating from the source of Matt’s no-www plug-in, www-redirect takes it a step or so further by allowing users to opt for different redirect settings. This plugin allows users to have more control over the uri in which their users access their blog. By doing so, you’re giving search engines and users a consistent link for accessing your content.

8. Permalink Redirect – A WordPress plugin that replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.

   Download Permalink Redirect

That’s all for now. I will update this post whenever I find new Plugins. Till then have a look at my Collection of useful WordPress Plugins.

Do you know of any other WordPress Plugins that help to optimize Blogs for Search Engines?

• Previously my post pages had titles like ‘TechnoBlue Released at JohnTP’s Home’. I have always wanted to change this to ‘TechnoBlue Released – JohnTP’s Home’. With SEO Title Tag I was able to change the default ‘at’ to ‘-’ in the title.
• I wanted to have two different blog titles for homepage and single post pages. For Example, if I wanted to use ‘JohnTP.com – Tech News,Tutorials,Blog Tips,WordPress Themes and Plugins’ as title for the homepage then my single post pages would have titles like ‘Crazy Egg – Visualize visitor clicks – JohnTP.com – Tech News,Tutorials,Blog Tips,WordPress Themes and Plugins’.

  With SEO Title Tag I was able to have different blog titles for homepage and single post pages. So currently I am able to have the title ‘JohnTP.com – Tech News,Tutorials,Blog Tips,WordPress Themes and Plugins’ for the homepage and ‘Crazy Egg – Visualize visitor clicks – JohnTP.com’ for single post pages

• I also wanted to change my WordPress Themes page’s title to ‘WordPress Themes,WordPress Skins,WordPress Templates’.

  Earlier if I had done that then ‘WordPress Themes,WordPress Skins,WordPress Templates’ would come up on my menu too. So I had to stick with the title ‘WordPress Themes’ for a long time.

  Now with SEO Title Tag I can have any title as it allows me to override a page’s title tag with a custom one defined through a custom field.

These are only some of the things SEO Title Tag can do. It’s other features include:

• Reverses the order of the blog name and the title. This gives more keyword prominence to the title instead of the blog name. Or you can even drop the blog name altogether or replace it with a shorter nickname
• Puts the tag name in the title of ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior’ tag pages
• Uses a Category’s description as the title tag on Category pages

Installation

• Upload seo-title-tag.php to your wp-content/plugins directory
• Activate the plugin
• Open your Header file and find these codes

  <title><?php bloginfo('name'); wp_title(); ?></title>

  Note: You may be having a different <title> container.

  Now replace your exisitng title codes with this

  <title><?php if (function_exists('seo_title_tag')) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo('name'); wp_title();} ?></title>

Now go to Options > SEO Title Tag in your Admin panel and specify a title tag for your home page which will override your blog name as the home page’s title tag. You can also configure here whether you want all the rest of your site’s title tags to have your blog name, or a shortened version of your blog name, or neither, appended to the end.

Go to Manage > Categories and define Category descriptions to be used in place of category names in the title tag on category pages.

As I mentioned earlier, SEO Title Tag lets you have a custom title tag for both posts and pages. To do this enter title_tag (or whatever you specified as the custom field name under Options > SEO Title Tag) as a custom field and give it a value depending on whatever you want that post’s/page’s title tag to be.

I highly recommend all Blogger’s using the WordPress blogging platform to use this Plugin to optimize their Blog Titles.

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for Search Engine Optimization (”SEO”). This WordPress plugin “SEO Title Tag”, written by Stephan Spencer of SEO specialist web agency Netconcepts, addresses several limitations in creating Search Engine Optimized title tags for blog posts and for Pages in the WordPress blogging platform. It is completely free and has been released as “open source” under the GPL license. So enjoy!

I have added this plugin to my Collection of useful WordPress Plugins

Download SEO Title Tag

Link Popularity used to play an important role in getting you a higher PageRank. Although now I feel Google does not give much importance to backlinks. They seem to award every new site with a PR 5 nowadays. So what is Google looking for? Well, I am not sure but Orginal content is still an important factor.

Your site’s Link Popularity also plays an important part in how search engines rank your website for various keyword searches. That explains why I am still on the first page for keyword ‘utorrent’. The how to increase download speeds of utorrent post has got a number of links to it and is the main reason why it is still on the first page for that and it’s related keywords.

A link from any site is good. But it is best if you get quality links from related sites. As a result, increasing the number of quality, relevant sites which link to your site can actually improve your search engine rankings.

So how do you increase your site’s Link Popularity?

• Get your site listed in the search engine directories: Google gives importance to the websites that are listed in DMOZ and Yahoo directories. If you manage to get your site listed on these directories, soon it will be listed on Google Directory and hundreds of other directories automaticaly. As a result, your site will get a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.However, it will take time to get your site listed in directories such as DMOZ. I have been trying for months now and have not succeeded so far.You can get listed much faster by getting links from niche specific directories. Find these directories by doing a search on Google with the primary keywords of your web site. For example “yourkeyword directory”.
• Provide quality content on your site: People will link to your site if you provide the information they are searching for. The best way to get more links is to submit your articles to Ezinearticles. From there more people will find your articles and link you.You could also offer some free services on your site that everyone would love. What type of services depend on your choice. I am sure services such as Website Optimization gets lots of links everyday. I have noticed many times that Reviews on the latest beta products or Web Services get a lot of backlinks. So you may want to try that.
• Link exchanges: Link exchanges is another good way to increase your site’s Link Popularity. But do look out to which sites you exchange links with. It is best to exchange links with related sites that have a high Search Engine Ranking with quality content.Look in directories such as Google’s to find sites that have your keyword. You will find a lot of sites with link pages that do link exchanges with other sites. Simply visit their site and ask for a link exchange. A search for “yourkeyword submit site” will list out hundreds of websites to exchange links with.
• Link Exchange Services: You could also consider registering with a link exchange service such as Link Market and Link Metro to quickly generate more links pointing to your site. This is how it works- You register your site with the service and the service adds you to the links page that other members place on their Web sites. Some services promise to add as many as 500 links pointing to your Web site within 30 days. They may also ask you to link to their site and upload a ‘links page’ that they offer. The links page will be linking to all their member’s sites.I won’t recommend this method as some Search Engines consider link exchange services as artificial link popularity and may even ban your site for participating in such a program.
• Wikipedia: I have heard that Google adds weight to sites that are linked by Wikipedia. So find a topic in Wikipedia that matches your article and trying linking it under ‘External Links‘. But please don’t try to spam it.
• Other methods: Other methods to increase yours site’s link popularity is to register and be active on a Forum that allow you to provide signatures. You may also sign Guestbooks and give out your URL. But these methods are not as effective as the methods mentioned above.

How to check Link Popularity in Search Engines?

You can use services such as Link Popularity Checker to check your site’s link popularity in the major Search Engines.

You may check the Link Popularity in Google using “link:www.yoursite.com”

Please do share your ideas on how to increase Link Popularity.

Some quick tips I would like to give you are

• select a permalink structure with the post title in it. Do not change your permalink structure once you have selected it as changing it will probably invalidate all of the links coming to you
• make sure that your post title comes before your blog name on your title
• Use keyword rich post titles
• use <h1> tags for your blog and post titles
• make proper use of alt tags. End them with a period (.)
• Use tags on your blog.
• Use Related posts plugin which will help search engines to dig deeper into your blog
• Use Google Sitemap Generator to let Google know whenever you update your blog.
• Use Landing Sites to show related posts to visitors search on your blog

Also check out my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Category for more interesting posts.

Sitening also provides another tool called SEO Analyzer that detects how optimized your web design is for search engines. The tool inspects your website, and then produces a detailed report on areas that need optimization.

The SEO Analyzer focuses on:

• web standards-based web design
• semantic structure
• obsolete and deprecated HTML
• improper use of table elements
• inline styles
• download size and time
• outgoing links
• top keywords

You can further optimize your blog by installing these four plugins.

1. Google Sitemaps Generator: This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Currently homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported. The priority of a post depends on its comments. More comments, higher priority! If you have external pages which don’t belong to your blog, you can also add them to the list. This plugin will automaically inform Google whenever the sitemap gets regenerated.
2. Optimal Title: Use this plugin to optimize your post title and display meaningful search engine results and browser bookmark names. It also reduces the chance of title truncation when viewed in search engine result pages by placing your post title in the beginning of the <title></title> tag.
3. Head Meta Description: This plugin allows you to add dynamic meta description automatically by extracting the first few words in your words. So it’s important to place your most important keywords in the first paragraph so that they are picked by this plugin.

   If you do not see your description tag, scroll down a bit because it’s possible that other tags may have pushed the <description></description> tag lower down but still inside the <head></head> tag.

4. Add Meta Keyword Tag: This plugin works similar like the Head Meta Description plugin except that it’s for the keyword tag. Add Meta Keyword Tag would output a default set of keywords, except on single posts. On single posts it would create a list of keywords based on the categories assigned to that post and any tags assigned to it. So you can simply pull the keywords from tagging plugins you already use such as Jerome’s Keywords and Bunny’s Technorati Tags.

Know any other WordPress Plugins that help in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your blog? Please let me know through comments.