Even with a plethora of blogging platforms to choose from, Wordpress is still the platform of preference for many. So what makes the Wordpress CMS so different? First off, it’s extremely helpful when creating a website that makes a difference. It offers both ease of use and a streamlined system. But one of the biggest benefits that you achieve by using Wordpress is that it gives you an upper edge over the others when driving traffic to your site. The kind of features that come bundled in Wordpress are enough to boost your search engine rankings, which can only be done if you are able to utilize the full potential of Wordpress SEO. But in order to receive the most benefits from the SEO abilities of Wordpress, you’ll need to ensure that your settings are correct. The odds of securing the upper placements from the great search engines, such as Google, rapidly go up once you concentrate on perfecting the tiny, yet critical, details. While most types of traffic that your website receives will be beneficial, this article will help you discover why utilizing the SEO benefits of Wordpress will increase free, organic traffic from web searches. Make sure you get yourself a taste of the IM Eye Review

The “tags” tool within Wordpress is one of the most effective tools available. When people write up posts, they tend to ignore the tag options. Tags help search engines to properly index and rank your posts by keyword. Tags are simply keywords that are “tagged” by the author to show specific relevance to the topic or focus of the blog post. These tags need to be relevant to the post and give a description of it.

So how exactly do the search engines utilize tags?

They use them to categorize your posts appropriately and index them faster. It’s a simple step that’s well worth doing, and it only takes a few moments to add your tags once your post is complete. You should also do some internal linking. In other words, cross link your blog posts to other related posts. There are two ways to do this – either by adding them in yourself within the text of your post or by using a Wordpress plugin that will do the work for you. When you create a post that you feel should be seen by a lot of people, you can assign it an importance by linking it to many other posts.

Add relevant categories to your blog, they will arrange and tidy up things. In order to be clear to your visitors and as well as search engines, you have to have your content in the correct order. Organization is the name of the game, so get rid of clutter and make it a point to streamline your information. Another great way to add even more keywords to your blog is to take advantage of the permalink function which adds the category of the post within the URL itself. Not only will this give yet another boost to your SEO, but it will also help your readers see right away what they can expect from the post simply by reading the URL. The important application that you will need for this step is the IM Eye Review.

Altering the permalink structure of the blog is the most critical SEO consideration, and numerous individuals who work with Wordpress fail to compensate for this. Why is this essential? If you leave the permalinks as normal they only contain numbers. This is why you need to have the title of your post in its URL. Go to the option settings and customize your permalinks.

Do you wish to have more users visiting your webpage’s? Through search engines, higher number of people will be driven to your website. The SEO should be an important part of the online marketing strategy designed by you. While designing a search engine marketing plan, you must make use of those strategies that will be more advantageous as compared to others. The strategies which should be included in the marketing policy are discussed below. Should you be concerned with developing your internet profit creating activities, and want to become a lot better online professional, then a gadget which I should recommend you to check out is The Best Spinner.

The foremost thing people get started with for SEO building inbound links and submissions. However they fail to understand that they are missing out on a very significant aspect of SEO. The main elements is the website optimization and inside links which needs to be pad attention too. You also need to concentrate on the website link and pages. It is very crucial that you make use of keywords in headline and page title for gaining quality results. It is important that you concentrate on your site initially for SEO plan.

Offsite optimization is a must if you want to start with link building and this procedure includes submitting links to the search engines as well as the online directories. Also make sure you submit sitemaps because only then your web pages would be correctly indexed. Making use of related keywords and also placing the site under the correct group are the major points of consideration.

Article submission is the next important factor that can be helpful. A lot of people say that this is one SEO tool which is really very easy to practice but then the benefits that are gained form this cannot just be overlooked. You can get good quality back link to your site with this because majority of the articles submitted by you will be related to your site. Publishing a few press releases at regular intervals can also be a great option as they have the abilities to generate good traffic.

Another way through which you can gain traffic to your site and earn huge is by becoming a member of the forum or blog related to your offerings. In these sites you will be able to post comments and your link. In case you are a regular visitor of these sites large number of audiences will be attracted. The links that are shown on these sites are very important. On an alternative note, if you would like to improve any online marketing plans so that you can attain substantial changes in money, then I would absolutely advise you to check The Best Spinner Bonus, a revolutionary emerging product!

Having spent the last 6 years Client side as Head of eCommerce and agency side managing digital marketing teams, one constant has been confusion in new platform builds over what a “search engine friendly” website actually is.

eCommerce solution providers advertise optimised platforms and Clients demand search engine friendly sites; do both mean the same thing? Rarely. Client side eCommerce managers can confuse technical and content optimisation, leading to miss-matches between expectation and delivery. A technically optimised web platform does not necessarily mean that keyword planning and meta content optimisation have been carried out.

This blog provides a tick list of the core elements that you should specify in any RFP or ITT when scoping a new eCommerce platform. They act as a starting point for SEO dialogue, enabling you to push vendors on specific areas of optimisation expertise. Please note the list is not in any order of priority.

1. 301 redirects to preserve search engine rankings
2. Avoiding duplicate content and use of the canonical tag where relevant
3. Dynamically generate search engine friendly URLs for product and content pages e.g. www.yoursite.com/category-name/product-name instead of www.yoursite.com/productdetails.aspx?pid=037012&cid=144&language=en-GB
4. Ability to specify / edit URLs for individual pages via CMS – important for campaign landing pages and microsites
5. Support for linking of product pages and content pages to improve internal linking – should be delivered via the Catalogue Management tool or CMS
6. CSS absolute positioning for text links on product list pages to ensure the first link for each product is keyword rich
7. Dynamic XML sitemap that is submitted on a regular basis
8. HTML sitemap that is auto generated based on your catalogue and site structure
9. Support for rich snippets within platform – encoding of data in RDF format e.g. customer ratings & reviews
10. Custom 404 error page and automated report to flag error pages so your internal team can take action (you can achieve this through a separate monitoring tool such as Indiabook)
11. Robots.txt file is provided and you can access and edit when required
12. Core provision for meta content (title, description, keywords) that is auto generated when you load new products and content pages and can also be edited easily from within the CMS
13. Text links in navigation not images; if coders are using sIFR (flash replacements) push them for clarification on how this is being done to ensure it complies with accessibility standards
14. Keyword optimised H tags within html for headings – structure for use of H1 to H6 to provide a relevant hierarchy of content
15. Ensuring flash objects are search engine friendly
16. Ensuring pdf content is readable e.g. captions for images, document meta data
17. Graceful degradation – when elements like JavaScript are disabled in the browser, key content is still visible to search engine spiders/bots as well as to visitors
18. RSS feeds to support product and news announcements e.g. deal of the day
19. Page load time to meet agreed threshold but make sure you define how load speed is measured e.g. after all page elements have loaded – this factor will be included in Google’s algorithm in 2010
20. Social media content such as blogs are hosted on your primary website domain using an SEO friendly blog engine (e.g. Wordpress is better than Blogger) – blogs usually sit on a sub-domain such as blog.yoursite.com to ensure you benefit from the search engine juice.

It is essential that your site specific SEO requirements are accurately documented during your project scoping phase to ensure you evaluate the relative optimisation strengths of potential vendors.

Please note that this checklist does not attempt to tackle bespoke areas of website optimisation that relate to business specific commercial goals. You may have more detailed needs for elements such as Google Sitemap (e.g. separate news sitemap) that will need thorough mapping. My recommendation is to make sure you have the essentials covered and then work with an SEO specialist (in-house or outsourced) to overlay the detail.

I would welcome comments and recommendations based on your own experience. Is there anything you think missing from this list?

By Eldred Curwen

What is 301 redirect?

301 redirect is the best method to preserve your current search engine rankings when redirecting web pages or a web site. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”. After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name. You implement the 301 redirect by creating a .htaccess file.

What is a .htaccess file?

When a visitor/spider requests a web page, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

How to implement the 301 Redirect

1. To create a .htaccess file, open notepad, name and save the file as .htaccess (there is no extension).

2. If you already have a .htaccess file on your server, download it to your desktop for editing.

3. Place this code in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

4. If the .htaccess file already has lines of code in it, skip a line, then add the above code.

5. Save the .htaccess file

6. Upload this file to the root folder of your server.

7. Test it by typing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be immediately taken to the new location.

Notes: Don’t add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – place the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:

redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)

/old/old.htm (the original folder path and file name)

http://www.you.com/new.htm (new path and file name)

When the search engines spider your site again they will follow the rule you have created in your .htaccess file. The search engine spider doesn’t actually read the .htaccess file, but recognizes the response from the server as valid.

During the next update, the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, plus some fluctuations in rankings. According to Google it will take 6-8 weeks to see the changes reflected on your pages.

Other ways to implement the 301 redirect:

1. To redirect ALL files on your domain use this in your .htaccess file if you are on a unix web server:

redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com

You can also use one of these in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
redirect permanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
redirectpermanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html

This will redirect “index.html” to another domain using a 301-Moved permanently redirect.

2. If you need to redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com and you’ve got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

or this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Tip: Use your full URL (ie http://www.domain.com) when obtaining incoming links to your site. Also use your full URL for the internal linking of your site.

3. If you want to redirect your .htm pages to .php pages andd you’ve got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$1.php

4. If you wish to redirect your .html or .htm pages to .shtml pages because you are using Server Side Includes
(SSI) add this code to your .htaccess file:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .html .htm
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html

Frequently Asked Question:
What’s the difference in using a 301 redirect versus a meta redirect?

Meta Redirect
To send someone to a new page (or site) put this in the head of your document:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”10;
url=http://mynewsite.com/”>

Content=”10; tells the browser to wait 10 seconds before transfer, choose however long you would like, you can even choose 0 to give a smoother transition, but some (really old) browsers aren’t capable of using this so I’d suggest putting a link on that page to your new site for them.

With a meta redirect the page with the redirect issues a 200 OK status and some other mechanism moves the browser over to the new URL. With a 200 OK on both pages, the search engine wants to index both the start page and the target page – and that is a known spam method (set up 10,000 domains full of keywords for the search engines to index then meta redirect the “real visitor” after 0 or 1 seconds to the “real site” ) so using it gets you penalized.

The 301 redirect simply issues a Permanently Moved message in the HTTP header which tells the search engine to only index the target URL.

Conclusion: The safest way to redirect old web pages to the new pages or old web site to the new web site and keep the same search engine rankings is to use the 301 redirect. It will also pass on the page rank from your old site to your new site.

There is no use having a shop with no one in it! So how do you get people to visit your website?

The easiest way to find what you need on the internet today is to use a search engine such as Google. It follows, therefore, that the easiest way to get someone to your website is for your site to appear in Google, and most importantly, on the first page of the listings. Over 95% of people never visit the second page on Google!

It is easy but time consuming to promote your site in such a way as to move it up the Search Engine Returns (SERs) so that it eventually appears on the front page. There are two processes that have to be carried out.

The first is On Site Optimization and the second is Off Site Optimization which we will deal with in another article.

On Site Optimization.

1    Isolate a ‘keyword’ or ‘keyword phrase’ that accurately describes a page of your website. For example ‘Leica Digital Cameras’ might describe a page on your site about this specific type of Leica product. Try not to use just one word as they are difficult to be successful with.

2    Write about 400 words of visible text on the page. Make sure that you use the exact keyword phrase about four to six times in the body of the text.

3    Start the Article with an overall title exactly matching the Keyword Phrase and make it the largest heading size you can, i.e. H1.

4    If possible make the first line of the first paragraph begin with the phrase, but don’t destroy the sentence syntax.

5    Change the next occurrence of the phrase to bold emphasis.

6    Change the last occurrence of the phrase to italics.

7    If you have access to the html code (you’ll know if you do!) make sure of the following:

8    If you use images on your page. Make sure their tags also have the phrase in them.

The total of all these changes explains to the search engines that this page is all about your keyword phrase. But don’t just fill the page with keywords; the search engines are wise to such tricks. Use well constructed sentences that you would expect to read yourself.

The next article will explain how to show the search engines how important your page is and therefore why they should list you more highly in the SERs.

Useful sites: Google Analytics – Find out how many visitors are visiting. Google keyword Tool – Help with choosing a keyword phrase.