Let’s say that you spend hundreds of hours building, tweaking and promoting your site and you managed to get a #1 ranking for “real estate”. Unless you sell real estate of all kinds in every part of the world, a big amount of the traffic you’ll get will come from people who are looking for something you don’t actually have. Although you may not optimize your blog for those keywords, it’s very important that you know what they are, as it applies to your blog too.

As you work through this article, make a list of the 5-10 major keywords that describe your blog. These should be mostly single words (like “cars”), with perhaps a couple of commonly-used phrases (like “real estate”) mixed in. These major keywords will form the backbone of your site design effort, since they will help define the themes around which you will organize your blog’s content. Don’t worry too much about them right now, because this is one of the many cases where you can easily correct an omission in future. In other words, if you forget a major keyword today, you can do something about it next month and so on.

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.

The first step to understand a keyword strategy is to know how people search. For any topic or niche, there are thousands of ways that people will select a keyword or phrase when using any search engine. The more different keywords and phrases your site “ranks” for, (in the top 10 results), the more often it will show up when a member of your target audience conducts a search. Every time your site appears in the search results, there’s a chance your site will be visited. Obviously, the higher your site ranks, the better your chance for success.

Once your site appears in the search results, you need to check that your blog title and description match what that particular web surfer is looking for. The total formula, then, involves how many keyword phrases your site can rank well for, and how relevant and enticing your page titles and descriptions are. Obviously, then, increasing the number of keyword phrases your site covers will often deliver far better results than trying to rank well on one extremely competitive keyword. The best part of this, is that increasing the number of keywords actually helps you target the right audience. For example a #1 ranking for “Real Estate” even if you could achieve it, only attracts a very general audience. However a #1 ranking for “Miami FL Condos” is much easier to achieve, and far more targeted, which means higher quality traffic for your site.

He says that WordPress is a great choice if you want to do better in Google. WordPress automatically solves a lot of SEO issues. According to Matt, WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So, by using WordPress you are already taking the first big step. However, there are many things you can do to optimize your site. To rank well in google your site needs to be relevant and reputable. You have to be on topic and you have to talk about something that you care about.

About Keywords: You should use categories and tags that are also keywords relevant to your site’s content. Don’t make your categories “cool stuff”. Take a look at my categories: WordPress, Design, WpThemesPlanet, Patagonia Theme. All those categories are relevant to my site’s content. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not going to use the name of a medication as category because my site’s niche is not about meds. It’s about WordPress Themes and Blogging Articles. Take this in mind when you build your category list. Make sure to use the keywords you want to rank well for in your posts and articles.

If you are going to use keywords in your url paths, the best option is to use dashes (example: yourdomain.com/your-keyword/). The next best option is to use underscores (example: yourdomain.com/your_keyword/). Having no spaces is your worst option (example: yourdomain.com/yourkeyword/). Some time ago, I wrote an interesting article on how to change your permalink structure to “Month and Name”. With this permalink structure, the urls of your articles are going to display your keywords. The urls are going to display the title of your articles, which is a very important point of SEO optimization. However, this change should only be applied if your blog is barely new. You should not change this permalink structure if your WordPress Blog is old or already established and spidered. In that case, just take note of this tip for future sites or blogs you might open.

Matt also recommends using the Google Webmaster Tools. If you are doing a post, it is worth doing a post and then going to the Google Keyword Tool. Think about the words you want to rank well for and then type your words in to check how popular those keywords are. Don’t overdo your keyword optimization. Matt gives examples of some sites that choose a keyword to rank well for and use that keyword a lot of times in each post. You should never do that. So, to be relevant you need to find something you care about. You should write often and pay attention to the mechanics. And don’t overdo it.

Matt also talks about how do you gain a reputation. How do you get to be more known and increase your page rank. You should be interesting and write often. If you write only once in a while, people are likely to lose interest in your Blog. However, If you write once per day, every other day or at least once per week (and you write interesting stuff) people are going to come back and follow you. Having a visible RSS feed, Twitter, or any other social networking add-on button is highly recommended, so people can follow you. Matt talks about using the Katamari Philosophy. He says you should start small and start on an edge where you can do well and the build up gradually. Then you can think about embiggening that edge. You will write about more and more things and bigger edges. And eventually, over time people will get to know you. There are many other things you can do to gain reputation. You can provide a useful servive, you can do original research or reporting, you can talk and give reviews for different products, etc.

Choosing a good WordPress Theme is a very important step too. Unfortunately, not all WordPress Themes are designed to respect the mechanics of Google’s Algorithm. So, if you want a very nice and optimized template, you can download my Patagonia Theme. I worked hard to code this theme, making sure you get the most out of your WordPress Blog.

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.

So, what is the proper way to optimize an image? The first element you need to add is an “alt” attribute that describes the content of your image. You also need a “title” attribute that contains text to be displayed when the user places the mouse pointer over the image. You can add this in your wordpress dashboard. When you upload and insert an image in one of your posts, you will find a box named “title”.

Whatever you write there, will be displayed in your “alt” and your “title” attributes. If you want to edit these values, just switch the view to HTML and look for the image code.

The WordPress Logo I posted above, displays the following code, check the title and alt values:

<img title=”Wordpress Logo” src=”wordpress-logo.png” alt=”Wordpress Logo” width=”300″ height=”300″ />

Another important step to take in consideration is the text surrounding the image. Some call it the context in which the image is placed. It is recommended to add images that are relevant to your articles and posts. You can either add a caption to your image or you can optimize the content that surrounds the image.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed for more interesting articles and blogging tips!