SEO tips for your WordPress Blog

I took some notes from Google’s Matt Cutts conference at WordCamp 2009 San Francisco. Matt Cutts is one of the heads of Google. He talked about how Google search works and how can you improve your Wordpress Blog for Google.

He says that Wordpress is agreat 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 optimze 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.

Apply Katamari Philosophy

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.

Continue reading

Optimizing your Blog for Bing

Microsoft has been ignoring the advancements in the field of Search Engines and also Targeted Advertising. However with the recent launch of Bing, they decided to start competing with Yahoo! and Google for their slice in the Search Engine business. Two days ago, on July 29th, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power the Yahoo! Search Engine. That said, it is a very smart move for every site and blog to optimize their structures and fit Bing needs. As we already know, Bing has a different algorithm than Google. Given Microsoft’s aggressive nature in fighting competition, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate them.

Bing Search Engine

The recently re-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.

Continue reading

Optimize your blog for Google Images

In this article I will give you some very good tips to optimize your site for Google Image Search. Of course I am always referring to Google in my articles, because I take it as the default search engine. but these tips are going to work for all the other image searches like Bing and Yahoo Image Search. The advantage of image searches is that you will get spidered pretty fast, since there are no such things as a Sandbox. Image Search is a good way to get initial traffic while you build and establish your Blog as a solid site.

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”.

Wordpress Logo

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.

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”.

Wordpress Logo

Wordpress Logo

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.

Continue reading