Here are some of the results at a glance:

• 20k+ new visitors
• 100 new subscribers
• And 23 new links so far (and counting)

But this is not what I didn’t expect. What I didn’t expect is something else. Soemthing that has a more long term benefit.

Yes I am talking about search engine traffic. Only 16 or so hours after this post got on to del.icio.us front page, I started getting search engine traffic for the keywords in the post title.

The post was titled: “20+ free web design ebooks and guides“, and I did title it with the intention to maximize the SEO benefit. What I didn’t expect was that search engines will pick the post so quickly and put it high up the ranking page for its keywords.

If I had made the title cute, funny, provocative, or interesting but keyword-less, it wouldn’t have received more than the temporary direct traffic from the links. But since I kept the proper keyword in the title, people who linked to the post used the title as anchor text, and the post got more and more credibility in the eyes of search engines with every new link.

Now, as a result, even though the social media traffic is slowing down, a new and constant trickle of search engine traffic has opened up which will continue for a long time.

Moral of story?

Resource lists and linkbaits are created for the sole purpose of getting links. Links clearly outweigh other short term benefits such as a temporary spike in traffic.

Always keep the keywords that describe your post in the title of your resource lists and linkbaits. Don’t give it a meaningless title such as “x resources for these people or this task’. Nobody is searching for ‘resources’. People search for specific things with specific keywords, so be as helpful as possible. Think of your post’s title as a summary of the contents to follow, and describe what exactly it contains.

I’ve made this mistake myself. My first post that reached del.icio.us front page was titled “54 typography resources every designer should bookmark“. Even though I cleverly left a hint in the title suggesting that it was a bookmarkable list, I could have used a better, more search engine friendly title for the long term benefit.

Your thoughts?

What about you? How do you title your linkbait posts?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Any blog, on today’s web, should create quality linkbait in order to be seen by more than a handful of visitors. The web is unlike all other media. Here, the success awaits those who understand the web regardless of how influential or rich they are in real life.

You must have seen, for example, that blogs run by individuals outrank multi-million dollar companies in SERP’s, and naturally get more traffic, and can potentially earn more money from the Internet than their rich and influential competitors.

Considering the diversity of niches present in the blogosphere, it’s hard to pin down exact topics that always serve as quality linkbait, but there are certain general topics that seem to have a penchant for going viral.

I’ve been looking closely at the trends on social media sites to see what kinds of topics are often voted up and appear again and again on the popular lists. And there are some topics that are clearly more popular from the rest among general geeks. Below are five of those topics that, if used wisely, make for great linkbaits.

Sex

Who doesn’t like sex? It’s the best thing that has happened to human beings during their evolution! No wonder people, especially youth, are attracted to sexual references.

Some tips on creating sex-related content:

• Make a list of sexy wears for geeks
• Highlight top x sexy woman in a specific field
• Criticize the unhealthiness of certain sexual practices
• Cover a news story that involves sex abuse
• List interesting laws regarding sex in some countries.

Blasphemy

In other words, spark controversy. Say bad things about what a major group of people love or respect. OK.. don’t say outrageously bad things, but it doesn’t hurt to play a devil’s advocate once in a while!

Whichever niche you may be in, there is bound to be a figure, an ideology, or a company that has a major fan following. What you have to do is peek under the hood, find the shortcomings of figure, ideology, or company in question, and nitpick!

Here are some ideas:

• Criticize a religion
• Find fault with a widely loved product
• Slam a popular company
• Make conspiracy theories
• Condone a despised activity

Warning: Use above techniques at your own risk as they could really harm your brand.

Unusual images

An image is worth a thousand words, or in our case, a thousand blog posts. Because of their quality of conveying even difficult message intuitively, images tend to go viral more rapidly than any other piece of linkbait.

There are plenty of unusual, funny, and grotesque images on the web that stay unnoticed. If you highlight such an image, or collection of images, with a short commentary, you’ll create a fine piece of linkbait with minimal effort.

Before posting an image, see:

• If it’s funny in an unusual way
• If it’s ‘photoshopped’ but realistic
• If it resonates with a particular social media community you are targeting
• If it’s awe-inspiring
• If it’s of something yet largely unseen and undiscovered

Life-hacks

Life-hacks are workarounds, tips, tutorial, and how-to’s, that make certain aspects of life easy. One of the blessings of the internet is that people can share with one another solutions to common problems, step-by-step walk-throughs of complex procedures, and any tips, tricks, and shortcuts that simplify tedious tasks. Therefore, if devised carefully, a particularly useful life-hack can become an instant hit, and get you loads of links.

Some ideas for life-hacks:

• Refute common myths (e.g. Creativity is a gifted quality)
• Write a step by step tutorial that solves a common problem
• Define a procedure that makes dealing with a certain emotional state easy
• Discover multi-functionality of a commonly used device/software (e.g. WordPress as a CMS)
• Start a new life-hacks blog (everyone and their mom has one these days, and they are all popular. Just get yourself a bunch of productivity books from Amazon.com and start copying!)

Resources

Last but not least, the good old resources. I am sure you have seen those top 5 to top 101 lists of resources on almost every blog. These are called resource lists.

Creating a resource list is not difficult. There is nothing you have to write on your own. All you need to do is a bit of research to come up with a medium sized resource list. The bigger the list, however, the more time you have to spend to acquaint yourself with the subject at hand.

Good practices in creating resource lists:

• Format the list in a unique way (e.g. images aligned to left, and descriptions on the right)
• Categorize the list in different sections, and start every section with a descriptive heading
• Use images in the list to mark new section if the list is fairly big
• Keep the descriptions small and links prominent
• If possible, write your own descriptions

There are plenty of other ways to create linkbaits that you’ll know by observing popular social media sites.

Be sure to share your linkbait techniques with us in the comments!

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

So let’s get started already!

Optimize page titles and permalinks

Normally, your post title also becomes the page title and post slug (permalink, post URL) for the post. While it’s certainly not bad for SEO, you can define custom page title and post slug for optimal results.

Changing a post’s title tag – For this tweak, you’ll need to install SEO Title Tag WordPress Plugin. SEO Title Tag lets you define custom page titles for your posts.

Once you activate SEO Title Tag, a new field with the label “Title Tag” will appear under your Post box on Write Post page. Here you can write a title that will appear in the browser’s title bar as well as in SERPs.

Changing the post slug – To change the post slug, enter custom text in the Post Slug panel (on the right side of write post area). For this post, for example, I’ve entered “wordpress-seo-tips-tweaks-hacks“.

Advantage of this hassle? You write post titles for maximum attraction for your regular readers and social media visitors. Since search engine users are generally not that savvy, you create page titles they can easily understand. Plus, you can enter different keywords in post titles, page titles, and post permalinks, making your post all the more likely to show up on the top of search results when a related search is made.

Optimize images

Images can open up a whole new stream of search engine visitors for your blog. I’ve wallpaper sites where 80% of my traffic comes from Google image search, and on Blogging Bits, I am already getting quite a few hits from Google images.

If you post a lot of images on your blog, optimizing your images for search engines can be a worthwhile effort.

Here is your image optimization checklist:

• Enter your keywords in the alt tag. Alt tag lets search engine robots ’see’ your image.
• Enter a description in the title attribute.
• Define width and height of your images.
• Enter keywords in the image name. Example: “lg-lcd-monitor.jpg”.
• If possible, place the image in a directory that also has your keywords. Example: “lcd-monitors/lg-lcd-monitor.jpg”

Here’s example code for an optimized image.

1. <img src="lcd-monitors/lg-lcd-monitor.jpg" alt="Widescreen LG LCD monitor" title="A new widescreen LG LCD monitor" width=400 height=380 />

Optimize links

Links are one of the most important factors that determine your page’s value in a search engine’s eye. Knowing how you should link to internal and external pages will improve your rankings a lot.

Keep the following guidelines in mind when creating new links.

• Place keywords in anchor text. (anchor text is the link text you click on)
• Define the link target by placing appropriate keywords in the link’s tittle attribute.
• When linking to popular sites that don’t need your link juice (e.g. Google, Youtube) or internal pages that you don’t want to rank high (e.g. Contact page) add “rel=”nofollow” to the links.

Add noindex to archives

To avoid duplicate content issues, use noindex for category, archives, and tags pages. A noindex meta-tag will prevent search engine crawlers from indexing these pages.

This can usually be achieved by adding the following line in the head section of your header.php file (Presentation> Theme Editor > Header).

1. <?php if(is_archive()){ ?><meta name="robots" content="noindex"><?php } ?>

Thanks to Ryan Cladwell of Performancing for this handy code snippet.

Remove unnecessary links

If you have a more tag and a comments link on every post, and of course a post title, you have three different links pointing to the same page. This can affect your rankings negatively (again, because Google may think these links point to different pages).

To remove the “#more” text from your ‘Read More’ link, replace the following line in your wp-includes/post-template.php

1. $output .= ' <a href="'. get_permalink()
2. . "#more-$id\">$more_link_text</a>";

with

1. $output .= ' <a href="'. get_permalink()
2. ."\">$more_link_text</a>";

Removing comments link – To display comment count under each post on the home page as well as category pages, but without a hyperlink, replace the following line of code in your index.php file (Presentation > Theme Editor > Main Index Template)

1. <?php comments_popup_link() ?>

with

1. <?php comments_number() ?>

Removing hyperlink from post title on single post page – This one is easy. Go to Presentation > Theme Editor > Single Post and edit the following line of code:

1. <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>

to

1. <?php the_title(); ?>

Redirecting permalinks – If you remove the trailing slash from your post’s permalink, you’ll still be able to access the page. This is not only bad for SEO (for reason already given) but it also lands you in trouble if your post gets heavily bookmarked at del.icio.us and your bookmarks are divided between two different URLs.

There should be a way to manually add a rule to your .htaccess file to redirect permalinks to a single location, but I much prefer Permanent Redirect WordPress Plugin for its ease of use.

Your tips?

Any SEO tips for WordPress you want to share with us?

Note: This post was written for blog writing contest at Daily Blog Tips.

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

A mere ebook can make you seriously rich.

Creating and selling a reasonably priced, instantly downloadable ebook is the kind of blog monetization strategy many bloggers have only just come to realize. I usually see it as the next step in blog monetization. The first one being revenue through adverts.

It’s fairly easy to write and create an ebook if you are well-versed in your niche, but the real problem arises when you think of ways to market your ebook. This seemingly daunting problem can delay, or worse, maim your plans.

Many full time bloggers have sold ebooks with such success that even they didn’t expect. It’s time to discard the thinking that people don’t buy information products online, and that bloggers should keep on churning out free high quality content.

Breaking: Those who enjoy reading your free content would not mind paying a few dollars to read your premium content.

It’s not my intention to sell you on the idea of selling ebooks. This post is for the converted who are trying to figure out ways to market their ebook.

I usually don’t go into too much detail, but this post warranted detail. So here are 11 strategies for successfully marketing your ebook.

1. Create hype and anticipation

You know it works. You must have seen the teaser ads on TV where they show a brief intro of a new product or service for weeks before revealing the full commercial. Regular TV users curiously wait for the full commercial that contains more information about the new product. And they become more likely to buy the product when it finally comes out.

To adapt this tactic for your medium, you need to blog about your upcoming ebook project and ask your readers for suggestions. This way, you’ll not only make them a part of your project, but also get their feedback and increase their anticipation.

Since your readers will already have made up half of their mind about buying the ebook, they’ll be more likely to make up the other half after the ebook launch.

2. Use word of mouth marketing

Your readers are your ebook’s first buyers. And they care about you and your efforts. Ask your readers for the following favors:

• Email their friends to urge them to buy the book.
• Tell their colleagues about the ebook.
• Mention and review the ebook on their blog if they have one.
• And promote it on social media.

If you feel shy, you don’t have to ask them directly. Create a list of recommended actions similar to the above list and urge your readers to help you out. What happens is, even if they don’t go out and start promoting your ebook right away, they’ll remember your ebook whenever their friends and colleagues have the needs that your ebook fulfills.

Don’t be surprised if you get overwhelmingly supportive response from your readers. It’s only a teaser of what to expect later in your campaign.

3. Give away free sample chapters

People love to taste the food before deciding that they want to consume it as a meal.

Also, there is a certain charm attached to Free offerings. We are instantly drawn to the things that bear the word free.

If you have a fairly lengthy ebook, it will be a good idea to give away the first few chapters for free. This will not only attract the hesitant buyers to your ebook, but also give your real buyers a taste of what to expect in the full package.

Once your prospective buyers consume the free chapters, they’ll be itching to read the whole ebook. And what other choice do they have than to buy the ebook?

4. Create a landing page for your ebook

A simple page with a photoshopped cover of your ebook, a description, and a ‘buy now’ button is not very appealing.

Spending time on creating a landing page for your ebook is worth the effort.

Create a special page on your blog that is meant to convert the prospects into buyers. A good landing page must contain:

1. A descriptive heading.
2. A hype-less description.
3. A list of chapters from the ebook.
4. An appealing list of practical benefits one can get from reading the ebook.
5. Testimonials from your satisfied readers and well respected bloggers (This is a must have).
6. And of course a buy now button.

Remember, your landing page must not look like an ad. People have grown aversion for ads. Keep your description as friendly and realistic-looking as possible.

5. Keep the price reasonable

Keeping in mind that people are attracted to free offers, they are also more likely to buy cheap products.

Internet is the ultimate treasure chest of free content and information. We expect the information on the internet to be free. If it isn’t free, we expect it to be the closest thing to free. We expect it to be cheap.

An ebook is an information product, so we naturally don’t want to empty our wallet for an ebook.

Keeping your value-packed ebook reasonably priced (or very cheap) is going to make you more money than if you put a high price tag on it. Why? Simply because the number of people buying a cheap ebook will far exceed the number of people who even think of buying an exorbitantly priced ebook.

6. Get other bloggers to review your ebook

Every bloggers has a unique group of readers who trust the blogger’s recommendations and follow his advice.

You can tap into the audience of other bloggers in your niche by getting them to review and recommend your ebook. Leo Babauta, the author of Zen To Done ebook, has successfully used this strategy.

Send the bloggers with large audience personalized emails, and offer them a free copy of your ebook. Ask them to kindly recommend the ebook to their readers. Some might ignore your email, but many will respond positively, and a few will review your ebook on their blog too.

7. Buy reviews from related blogs

Don’t worry if the above strategy does not work as expected. There is still hope for you. You can buy reviews from related blogs through services such as PayPerPost and ReviewMe.

These reviews will cost you money, but if you spend the money wisely, the return on investment will be huge.

If your pocket and conscience allows you (which they should) to pay the bloggers for reviewing your ebook, do it. Otherwise, stick to free and less devious strategies.

8. Share profits with referrers

Sharing is caring. If I refer a buyer to you and make you money, I’ll be more likely to keep sending you new buyers if, as a result of sending buyers to you, I make some money too.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book has made thousands, if not millions, with this strategy. Almost every guy related to SEO and internet marketing is a passionate promoter of SEO Book, simply because he can pocket some cash on referring buyers to Aaron Wall.

By giving your affiliates a share of the profits, you’ll make sure that the stream of buyers never stop, and you make constant profits in the long run.

9. Grab testimonials from the A-list bloggers

I’ve mentioned this strategy before, but I am going to emphasize it again.

People don’t buy on the internet unless they trust you. Internet is a playground of scammers and fraudsters. So it’s only wise to use one’s money with caution.

To get people to trust you and your ebook, you have to get your customers AND the trusted and respected bloggers to recommend your ebook.

If you email the bloggers politely with a free copy of your ebook, and ask for a review, some might think you are demanding too much from them. So if they ever reply back, ask them to give you a short paragraph of feedback. Chances are they won’t disappoint you.

If a kind blogger reviews your ebook, copy a few lines from the review and slap it on your landing page as a testimonial.

Getting testimonials from the customers is slightly easier. Grab their emails before finalizing the purchase, and email them a week later to ask them if they liked the ebook and if they would like to give their feedback. You can automate the whole process, but I’ll leave the details for another post.

If you don’t feel comfortable with the above process, simply put a line on your landing page urging the buyers to give their feedback about the ebook. Many will get back to you with positive reviews.

10. Advertise on online communities

Online communities are great free advertising places. Throngs of people frequent niche specific forums to get help and advice. All you have to do is find the right forums to tap into the forum–loads of prospective buyers.

Some forums such as Authority Blogger Forum and BlogCatalog allow you to announce your unique content in a separate thread. You can take such opportunities to advertise your ebook.

But remember, don’t come across as spammy, and don’t bother creating such a thread if you haven’t been active on the forum before.

You can also place a link to your ebook landing page in your forum signature, and post on the forum often in a hope that people will notice you and trace you back to your blog.

11. Write follow-up posts and talk about your ebook’s success

Your marketing efforts don’t stop with the launch of the ebook. You still have some readers who want more proof that your ebook is worth reading before giving you cash.

What they want to see is a proof that others have bought the ebook. So how are you going to convince them?

You’ll have to write follow-up posts and boast about the huge success you have seen with the ebook sales so far, giving them all kinds of stats and quoting positive reviews from other bloggers. Tell them how surprised you are at the enormous response you have received about your ebook.

To revive the buzz, release ebook updates, and make special offers such as discounted ebook price for a limited period.

Just keep things alive. Don’t let your ebook die in the flood of regular posts.

——————

Making money with an ebook is a hot trend in the blogosphere, so cash in on the opportunity, and make some regular, steady income. The kind you have only dreamed of so far.

Your thoughts?

Will you ever publish an ebook? If so, when will you do it and what will it be about?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

After successfully running a free backlink giveaway a few weeks ago, I got the feel of what kind of response to expect for such an offer.

So I am doing it again, but this time with a bit of twist.

All you have to do is subscribe to my RSS feed (if you haven’t already), get the secret word from the bottom of any post, submit your link, and BAM!

You are supposed to submit only one link per blog every month. Moreover, I’ll change the secret word every month to keep things fresh.

5 Winners will be selected randomly at the end of every month, who’ll get all the attention of Blogging Bits readers for a day or two, and a permanent backlink!

Find out more and submit your link on link submission page.

Your thoughts?

What do you think? Would this free backlink giveaway be as successful as previous one?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

I imagine that every blogger gets link exchange requests. It’s often difficult to decide whether to accept the offer or not. Sometimes spammy requests will inundate your inbox and you’ll utterly despise the idea of link exchanges. It’s normal to associate negativity with something that mostly comes across as unpleasant.

I too, as all other bloggers, get link exchange requests very often. Since I’ve made it so easy for others to contact me with a dedicated contact page and a nice contact form, it seems like an open invitation for many bloggers to present their link to me for consideration.

I am not against the link exchanges if the links are relevant to my topics, and I urge you all not to form a bad opinion about exchanging links with other bloggers. But make sure you consider the following points before accepting or rejecting a link exchange.

• Make sure the site is relevant – You wouldn’t believe that I’ve got link exchange requests from a real estate blogger and a church blogger. In their case, the decision was straightforward for me. I don’t want to link to a totally irrelevant site no matter how good it is. Do you?
• The site is not a content scrapper – Sometimes a site looks legitimate, relevant, and contains high quality content, but on closer inspection it turns out that it’s a splog, a collection of scraped content. Splogs, of course, are not your cup of tea.
• The site provides value to your readers – A site can be relevant but it might contain regurgitated low quality content, or news clippings from other sites and blogs. I don’t recommend linking to such sites for an extra backlink, because if your readers click through to the site and find it invaluable, it undermines your credibility.

But what if you get a lot of high quality, relevant, and legitimate link exchange requests, but think that you can’t accommodate so many links in your sidebar?

Sidebar links and blogrolls are so old school. There is a much better way to accommodate all the links and still have infinitely more space left. I am talking about inline linking from within your posts. Most of the time, the other guy wants only an extra link to his blog, and he understands that you can’t give him permanent front page space. So the only other way is to link to him from within your post.

If you want to provide value to your readers, link to a post of your own choosing, and keep in mind that the link should be a natural part of your post.

What is your link exchange strategy? Do you find it unethical to exchange links with other bloggers?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Note: I wrote this post with light hearted humor, and I don’t mean any offense to the respected bloggers.

Ever since Google came out openly with its stance about advertisers and link sellers who try to manipulate Google’s PageRank algorithm, there has been a great deal of unrest in the blogosphere. You can hear angry voices coming from virtually all directions.

I really find it laughable that many of the well reputed bloggers have succumbed to the temptation of crying foul against Google. They think Google has penalized them for selling links, OK fair enough. Wait.. they also think that Google is manually penalizing their site to rank low in SERPs, and that Google has unleashed sinister spies to trawl through the world wide web to catch the criminals red-handed. This is where their paranoia becomes evident.

Here are four reasons why their concerns are unfounded.

Google isn’t God (or a Satan) – Even though it feels good to think of Google as an omnipresent cyber entity, this really isn’t true. For one thing, human beings have the tendency of idolizing and demonizing certain individuals to the point that they lose their humanity. They become super-humans or sub-humans.

While Google isn’t an individual, and this whole argument isn’t taking place in the real world, our tendency to demonize an entity is still very much alive.

So why do you think Google would take the trouble of manually manipulating their algorithm to throw your site in the dark pits of obscurity? Google has better things to do than mess with individual bloggers who think very highly of themselves. Really, Google doesn’t care about you. All the ups and downs your site has seen are algorithmic changes. Don’t forget that, for Google, your site is just another site out of millions of millions of sites on the net. A few thousand subscribers do not make your site a pivotal point of Google’s decision making.

Warning: Google PR is updating – Wait till the update is over before you declare an all out war against Google’s evil regime. It is commonly observed that while Google PR is updating, the PR of many sites changes rather erratically. Heck, on the last PR update, one of my sites plummeted from PR4 to PR0, stayed like this for a whole week, and came back with PR5.

It’s a lot wiser to stay quiet and wait for things to settle down than go crying on webmasters forums that you have been penalized by the evil Google.

You don’t have evidence to support your claim – and personal experiences don’t count as evidence. You suddenly started ranking low for a keyword you always ranked high for? Nothing unusual. This happens all the time with thousands of sites, and they aren’t necessarily being penalized. Google gives everyone a fair share of traffic, and unluckily your turn is over.

Long nights at computer are taking their toll on you – You need a break. This has worked for me many times. Whenever I feel desperately paranoid and pessimistic, I unsticky myself from the chair, get out, and shut off any kinds of thoughts about my online life. Fresh gusts of outside air work wonders. When I come back, I am less paranoid and more willing to improve my sites, because, obviously, while I was being paranoid, my competitors were improving their sites.

The long and short of it is that Google changes its algorithm from time to time to deal with new black hat SEO techniques of mischievous webmasters. This, in essence, means that Google may actually be penalizing you for going against their policies, but it’s no warrant for you to start making premature claims about.. bah – getting manual penalty from Google?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Do you write Search Engine optimized posts? Can your posts be found by the Search Engine users searching for something you write about? You may not know the answer, and if so, you are probably not aware of the impact a good SEO strategy can have on your blog.

You probably despise the idea of writing content for the Search Engines, it may seem dishonest to you because you may think of it as disloyalty to your readers, but do you know that good SEO practices have nothing to do with the search engines? Yes, you heard me right, good SEO practices to promote your blog are aimed at search engine users not the search engines themselves.

Countless number of searches are made everyday, and while searches in a particular niche may follow the same pattern, they still come in wide varieties and different combinations of keywords. Unless you know what most of the searchers are searching for, and which keywords they are using to find the relevant content, you’ll probably never rank high in SERPs, and lose a lot of potential readers.

In this post, I am going to briefly highlight how to write a post for your readers but still make it rank top in Search Engine results for your targeted keywords.

Use Keyword research tools to know what your audience is searching for

Head over to free keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker and type in the keyword that broadly defines your post topic. For example let’s assume you are writing a post on ‘environment’.

Write down the relevant keywords and ignore the irrelevant ones such as “java runtime environment”. I’ll write down the following:

1. save environment
2. environment pollution
3. problems associated with mining waste water on environment
4. protect our environment
5. help the environment by recycling
6. define environment
7. environment issues
8. littering the environment
9. and so on.

Your next stop is Google synonym search tool. Again, when you type ‘environment’, here’s what comes up:

1. climate
2. environmental
3. green
4. nature
5. earth
6. water
7. and so on.

Note these down too.

Your final stop is Google AdWords keyword tool. Insert ‘environment’ again and make sure ‘Use synonyms’ option is checked. Google gives us a massive list of many keywords combinations and keyword synonyms; some are new and some are already on our list. Write down the new relevant keywords.

If you scroll down the page, there is another Additional keywords to consider list. This list contains related keywords that may or may not contain the term ‘environment’. Write down most of these words too, because these are the sub-topics of your main topic ‘environment’. See, someone may just find your post searching for ‘global warming’ rather than ‘environment’.

Sort out the keywords list

If you have been writing down most of the keywords that came up in your searches, you must have compiled a huge list of keywords. It’s time to prune the keywords list. Since ‘environment’ is a broad subject and can be divided into many topics and sub-topics, you’ll need to delete any keywords that do not have a place in the specific topic you are writing abut.

Write a keyword rich post

The hard part of researching and sorting the keywords is done, and now its time to do the fun part. Keep the keywords list open and start writing your post inserting all the keywords you have gathered so far, and make sure you keep in mind the following guidelines.

Include keywords in Title, Headlines, and Permalinks

Search engines give most importance to these elements. Include your primary keywords in the post title, post permalinks and post headlines (h1, h2 etc.).

I have described a way to define custom post titles, title tags, and permalinks in WordPress in a guest post over at Lorelle on WordPress. Check it out.

Include keywords in opening paragraphs

Make sure your opening paragraphs contain your primary keywords. Search engines determine the content of the rest of your article from the first few paragraphs.

Include keywords, keywords synonyms, and keyword phrases throughout the post

Don’t repeat the same keywords over and over, because it will amount to keyword stuffing and can get you penalised by the search engines. Instead, use keyword synonyms and other combinations of keywords you collected earlier.

Write keywords in boldface

Enclose the keywords in strong HTML tag wherever possible. By making a keyword bold, you tell the search engine robots that this particular keyword is more important than the rest.

Include keywords in link anchor text, link titles, image titles, and image alt attributes

Whether you are linking to yourself or to external content, make sure the anchor text of links is keyword rich. Likewise, make use of the title attribute of links and images, and describe your images by placing keyword in the alt tags.

Don’t go crazy with the keywords

Remember you promised you will write only for your readers while optimizing your posts for the Search Engines too? Don’t forget that your posts will ultimately be read by the human beings. Search Engines are only a means to connect your content to your readers. If you start writing solely for the Search Engines, your writing will look artificial and insincere.

Researching the keyword before you write and using them wisely in key places can ensure that you reach your audience wherever they are, and still keep your existing readers happy.

Another good aspect of researching keywords is that it gives you many more ideas to write about. Every keyword phrase contains a topic in itself.

Do you take the time to research your keywords and write search engine optimized posts?

Related Posts

Tweaking WordPress Permalinks For Best SEO
Glossaries And Dictionaries Of Difficult SEO Terms

This post was written on random post day.

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Luckily, it’s not that hard to know all these and more once you know of a few good places to go to whenever you bump into some new SEO mumbo-jumbo.

Below are some good SEO glossaries and dictionaries that will help you understand the secrets behind the tricky acronyms and dodgy SEO language!

The Search Engine Marketing Glossary – This SEO glossary over at SEO Book by Aaron Wall is the best one around. Aaron explains every term in an easy to understand manner and makes everything seem less scary. My favorite glossary so far.

Submit Express SEO Dictionary – This one is also very good. Everything is nicely explained. Be sure to bookmark it.

Seo-dictionary.com – If you want to enjoy a pretty layout while learning about SEO, this one is for you.

A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon – This huge post at SEOmoz does what it says it does. One of the most original glossary of explanations.

SEO Speak Translated: The Real SEO Glossary – Finally, this funny bit by Tadeusz Szewczyk will give you a good laugh.

Now, the next time an SEO geek approaches you to impress you with his SEO knowledge, you’ll face him with a confident smile rather than backing off into a humble retreat.

Do you know of any other good places that I have missed?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Permalinks are important. Permalinks in WordPress are the URLs that you see in your browser’s address bar.

Permalinks are one of the few prominent elements that appear in search engine results, therefore, it is really important to give them the best structure.

Short URLs with less clutter and more actual words fare better than those dynamically generated and with a whole lot of unnecessary strings and numbers attached. Search engines as well as human beings find the former a lot easier to read.

I contend that the shorter the URL the better. The reason is obvious, the longer URLs confuse the user, and the mouse pointer automatically goes to click the link which has a shorter, more compact URL. It’s just the way we normally see things; simple looks pretty.

Now, which one of the following is going to get my attention first?

Cut Off The WWW

WWW that precedes your URLs is unnecessary and should be gotten rid of.

To redirect the url with WWW to new no-WWW URLs you need to add the following lines to your .htaccess file (located in your Wordpress root directory) replacing domain with your own domain name.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301]

Apart from that, go to Options > General in WordPress Admin and enter your URL in WordPress address and Blog Address without WWW.

Yay! Good bye WWW!

Tweak WordPress Permalink Structure

In Wordpress the first thing you need to do is get rid of default permalink structure via Options > Permalink. WordPress gives you complete control over how you want to customize your permalinks.

Having rejected the default structure you have three other options left:

1. Date and name based (No thanks, it’s too long)
2. Numeric (Umm.. no, we hate numbers alone)
3. Custom (Now we are talking!)

So you are going to enter custom structure tags in the Custom field. On WordPress codex you can learn more about how a combination of structure tags can be used to customize the permalinks to the hilt.

We are looking for brevity i.e., shorter URLs, so the only thing you are going to enter is /%postname%/

This gives us the shortest possible permalink structure: http://domain.com/post-name/

On the same page, there is another optional field named Category base. And while you are at it, you are going to make use of it too. You are going to enter a short word to replace the word category that is attached to your category URLs. Let’s enter /tag here (or anything else that is shorter than the word category)

Again, yay for getting rid of clutter!

Long Titles Short Permalinks

As opposed to short permalinks, your post titles need to be fairly long, because titles are the first thing searchers see when your posts appear in Google search results. So, a title should summarize the whole post in at least six or seven words. Although we know the importance of titles, we do not want the titles to stretch our permalinks to fill up the whole address bar!

Luckily, when on Write Post page, you can make use of Post Slug sub-panel, located on the right side of your Write Post panel, and add custom permalinks for every post!

For example if your title reads “Learn the art of blogging” you can enter “learn-to-blog” in Post Slug. You leave out the unimportant words and keep the main key words.

Yet again, A big YAY for structring the shortest yet meaningful permalinks!

By doing all I have suggested above you make sure that your URLs are going to look pretty in search engine results, and you are going to force the searchers to click through to your blog.

Do you know of any more tips that I should add?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design