Even if you don’t invest a lot of time, knowing who is speaking to your target audience, and linking to sites in your industry, is worthwhile. Most forums usually have FAQs and lists of recommended resources.

These are partly “friend lists,” and partly based on who has already established themselves. If they link to someone else in your industry, there’s no reason why they can’t link to you, if they have a good reason to do so. I’ve personally spent a bit of time on SEO related and webmaster forums, talking with a lot of bloggers, designers and webmasters in general, because it just makes sense for me to participate in the community. Make sure you add them to your ICQ, MSN, Skype or any other messenger you use to stay in touch with them and exchange advice and ideas.

When I started participating in forums and building a circle of friends, I didn’t do it to get links to my site, but if I asked all of the friends I have made to do me a favor, I could probably generate many links in a week to any kind of related site. Building relationships isn’t easy and quick, but it can be fun and very rewarding on a lot of levels. You must give in order to receive.

If the keywords appear in headings, page titles, and other important spots on the page, a search engine will see this as more relevant than a page where the keyword appears once in the middle of the page. In addition to positioning, link popularity and other factors contribute significantly to your page’s ranking. Since there will usually be a good number of pages that have just the right mix of relevant keywords and position, link popularity makes a good “tiebreaker” for search engines to use when ranking pages.

Closely related to link popularity is “link relevance” and weighting. This means that a link to your “New York Real Estate” page from a page that actually contains those words is more relevant than a link from an unrelated page. The text used in the link itself is very important. Google’s “PageRank” system is the best documented, and most discussed, of the search engines’ link analysis methods. Basically, Google’s PageRank is a quality of web pages. Every page has some level of rank, and it flows from one page to another through links.

The amount of PageRank that flows from a page is divided between all the links on that page, which mean that the more links that point out of a page, the less PageRank flows through each link. PageRank comes to a page from incoming links. So the more relevant links you have pointing into your site, and the more popular the sites linking to you are, the better off you’ll be. The more pages you have in the index, the more PageRank you have within your site. As I’ll explain later, you can take some control of how PageRank flows within your site, which can help you boost the profile of your the important pages in your WordPress Blog.

You can download it here. This WordPress plugin will create a compliant sitemap in the format supported by most Search Engines, including the most popular ones, Google, Yahoo and Bing. Like I said above, Sitemaps are very useful because they give valuable information to the search engines.

They will know how often to scan your site, which pages are more important, which have a lower priority, etc. The advantage of using Sitemaps is that you are able to view reports on crawl results and statistics. You’ll also see the most used search queries to find your site and the search queries that get the most clicks.

First, I recommend to build your Sitemap and then submit it to Google Webmaster Tools here. Make sure you verify it following the steps on that page. Make sure to identify yourself as the owner of the site and to validate your submission.You can also submit it to Yahoo here. For both services you need a Google and Yahoo accounts. If you don’t have one yet, make sure you sign-up. It takes only 5 minutes.

You can check the Wp Themes Planet Sitemap Here.

To create an “Excerpt”, just go to “Posts -> Add New” and write your article as you always do it. When you finish, switch the editor view over to HTML. Look for the “more” tag in the HTML menu. You can check the sample screenshot below. You will need to insert the “more” quicktag somewhere in your article where you want to split your article. The “continue reading” link will appear where you insert the “more” quicktag.

Quicktags are like HTML tags, but they only work within the WordPress platform. Excerpts are really recommended for long articles. The most important advantage of using excerpts is that you will have unique content in each page. For example in front page, your blog will display the first paragraphs of your post. However in the single page of that post, your full content will be displayed, which means that search engines will love your site and only one single page will display some of your content. That way you will totally avoid duplicated content. My WordPress Theme Patagonia was coded to avoid duplicated content in all the other pages. So, if your article is long enough to use an excerpt, your content will only be displayed in one single page.

Let’s continue with the tutorial. After adding the quicktag, you need to select the content above the “more” quicktag and copy-paste it into the “Excerpt” box. This can sound a little confusing, so I added a few screenshots below.

First you select the content just above the “more” tag, then you “copy” it (right mouse click over selection and copy). Remember to do this on the HTML view of your WordPress editor:

Then you go to the “Excerpt” box just below the post editor. There you paste your selection as you can see here:

And finally the resulting post.

That is it!

The recently launched Bing Search Engine platform with upcoming versions of Windows OS is about to make Microsoft’s new search engine one of the biggest and most important players in the world of searching. Thus, it is very important to get good rankings in this new engine if you want the share of traffic they can give to your Blog.

So, what exactly they lay emphasis on? As with many of the other big Search Engines, Bing places heavy emphasis on unique site content. They allow higher keyword density than Google Search does. For Bing, it is recommended to keep your pages at least 200 words long and include phrases which people commonly use. Another important point of Bing is having your Blog CSS and HTML validated. I made sure that my WordPress Theme Patagonia is 100% Valid CSS level 2.1 and XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Yes, Bing goes to the point of asking Webmasters to ensure that their pages and blogs are HTML validated too. They have a strong preference for well-written code. If a Website’s coding is poorly written, it appears that Bing downgrades the site’s search rankings heavily. So, you won’t have any problems here when you use my WordPress Theme Patagonia, which is both, CSS and HTML 100% valid code.  As with Google Search Engine, Bing gives a lot of relevance to the number and quality of sites that link to your pages.

Another point to take into consideration is a well-designed and optimized sitemap with good link text. This will help the Bing spider to crawl your site and ensure that all pages are properly indexed. You can find some good site maps plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory.  According to Bing, your Title tag should be less than 80 characters long and should be attractive enough to make the surfer click on the link and visit your site. Bing doesn’t rank based on Meta Keywords and Site Description. However, they seem to place importance on meta tags, so adding appropriate meta tags for each page will be a very good move. Bing recommends that a single HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB in size. So, make sure that you limit the size of your Web pages to a reasonable limit.

Some good points you should take in consideration:

_Avoid dashes, hyphens or other useless characters in your domain name.

_Keep the domain name as short as you can.

_When possible, try to opt for a .com domain name.

Domain naming is just one part of SEO. There are many other aspects as you can read in my other articles. Of course, a Blog can still have good search engine traffic, even if they have an abstract domain name. But they are working hard in the other aspects of SEO optimization. I think the best option is to optimize as many aspects as you can. That way, your chances will eventually increase.