Wordpress SEO - SEO for Wordpress sites

Workspace Junkie WordPress Theme: Theme for Company profile

2011-12-13T21:47:00.000Z

Junkie introduces Workspace theme today. This Wordpress theme is really cool for companies, corparates, creative agencies, freelancers or general busineses.

Buy Workspace Theme NOW

Here is the screenshot of Workspace theme's homepage:

Some cool featureds of Workspace theme:

Advanced Theme Control Panel
Auto-sized Thumbnail Management
Text/Image Logo Switcher
Fully Widgetized Sidebars
Advertisement Management
Localization Ready
Analytics/Stat Management
Built-in FeedBurner Support
Threaded Comments
Gravatar Ready
Custom Page Templates
Custom Widgets
Dropdown Menu Navigation
Smooth Tableless design
WordPress 3.2+ Compatible
Cross-Browsers Compatibility
Forum Support
Lifetime Upgrade

Workspace theme single package: $29.95
Club membership (All Theme-Junkie themes): $39.95

Buy Workspace Theme NOW

Download Latest Wordpress Source, version 3.3

2011-12-12T12:57:00.001Z

Latest Wordpress Founder Matt Mullenweg emailed us to try his latest version of Wordpress, 3.3, named Sony.

This newest Wordpress includes a new drag-and-drop uploader, hover menus for the navigation, a new toolbar, improved co-editing support, and a new Tumblr importer.

Download latest version of Wordpress here!

Try it here: http://wordpress.org/news/2011/12/sonny/

WordPress has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and in this third major iteration we’ve added significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports. Check out this short video that summarizes the things we think you’ll find are the cat’s pajamas:

And happy day!

Download Lastest version of Wordpress

2011-12-01T21:16:00.000Z

The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 3.2.1) is available in two formats from the links to your right. If you have no idea what to do with this download, we recommend signing up with one of our web hosting partners that offers a one click install of WordPress or getting a free account on WordPress.com.

Click here to download

Or you can visit Wordpress official download page at http://wordpress.org/download/

Have a great feelings.

WordPress won Hall of Fame CMS 2010 Open Source Awards

2010-11-23T02:41:00.000Z

(WordpressSEO) - WordPress won Hall of Fame CMS 2010 Open Source Awards .

The Open Source Awards is a contest that aims to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source projects.

The winners of the 2010 Open Source Awards are listed below.

To identify the excellence among Open Source projects, public votes for the finalists in each category were combined with ratings from a panel of Judges.

Packt Publishing has no influence, input or say in the finalists or winners of any Award category. To read more about the judges that helped to select the winners in the 2010 Open Source Awards.

Hall of Fame CMS

This category is reserved for those CMSes that have won the Open Source CMS Award at least once in previous years.

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Hall of Fame CMS category in the 2010 Open Source Awards.*

Winner: WordPress

1st Runner up: Drupal

2nd Runner up: Joomla!

Congratulations to WordPress and a thank you to Drupal and Joomla! for taking part in the Awards this year. It's great news for Wordpress SEO guys also!

More at http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home

6 coolest plugins to do SEO for WordPress in 2010

2010-11-02T03:29:00.000Z

Google constantly updates his algorithms. Thus professionals who work in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry need to update their skills and knowledge all the time.

Wordpress is a cool blog and CMS. I like its SEO capacity too.

But many wonder which are the best WordPress Plugins for SEO in 2010? Within the past year, a lot of changes have been implemented that have affected how search engine optimization works. The growth of social media sites, Google’s “Caffeine,” “Real Time Search,” and “Personalized Search,” are a few of the primary catalysts.

Best WordPress SEO Plugins

I believe the following WordPress plugins are especially relevant and valuable for search engine optimization in 2010.

SEO Smart Links – This SEO-friendly plugin can automatically link keywords and phrases to related comments, posts, pages, and categories within your site. This makes less prominent pages or older content more relevant and crawl-able for search engines, and keeps site visitors engaged. It also lets you set “nofollow” tags on URL’s and create custom keyword lists with automated URL hyperlinks for individual terms.
I Love Social Bookmarking - I.L.S.B. is a great way to encourage blog readers to rank your post on popular social media sites. In the past year, sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn have become major resources for driving relevant traffic to quality site content. This plug in inserts an attractive drop-down menu next to your blog posts that allows readers to submit or rank your site content on a number of popular social media sites, without leaving your blog.
WP to Twitter —Twitter is an ideal space for (viral) content sharing since users are constantly engaged in niche conversations. Now that Google’s Social Search indexes tweets at the top of SERP’; more tweets/retweets = more indexing power. WP to Twitter is a plugin that automatically tweets a tiny URL link to new blog posts or blog edits on your site. Without any additional effort, your content is distributed to a relevant, willing audience; this can drive relevant traffic and increase your presence in social search results.
WP-Super-Cache —This plug in contributes to your site speed and it helps your blog load faster. The number of pages on your blog that a search engine will index on a daily basis increases with speed. If indexing each page is a quicker endeavor, more pages will be indexed. WP-Super-Cache creates static html pages from your WordPress blog so your server will present this file instead of the much denser PHP script. This will also help fortify your server when it is receiving a high amount of traffic, which can result from all your other great SEO strategies! This is because this plug in serves a static html page to 99% of your site visitors.
Robots Meta — Robots Meta automatically inserts “nofollow” tags on internal site links that are irrelevant to search crawlers; this keeps search engines from wasting time indexing unimportant pages like results, login, and admin pages, instead directing crawlers to index primary site content.
SEO Slug — Blog post titles typically get an h1-h3 heading, which makes them very important in terms of keyword optimization. SEOSlug optimizes blog post titles to improve search engine visibility by editing keyword strings. It removes conjunctions from titles, (words like “as” and “if”) to allow crawlers to more readily crawl main content keywords as a fluid string.

Guest blogger Alex Stetson works for a Boston-based digital media firm that specializes in web design, web application design, website audit service, and internet marketing.

SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide from Jimwestergren

2010-07-22T04:19:00.001+01:00

Quick Facts

There are 55 million blogs out there, if you don’t stand out you will have no chance.
The first second of a visitors attention is the most crucial.
Your main traffic should come to articles and posts inside your blog, not the home page.
Search engine rankings relies heavily upon the quality and quantity of links to your blog when they determine the ranking.
The best way to get links is by natural recommendations from other bloggers or web site owners.

Section 1: Optimize Your Blog

Usually the WordPress themes are well designed and structured already but there are a number of things you really should do to improve it for better optimization for search engines.

Using the best URLs

To enable the permalinks is easy and you have probably already done that, just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel. But what format is the best to choose? The structure /%postname%/ – nothing else. This is best because your URLs to your articles should never change. And if you have it like this it does not matter if you change the category of the article or republish it with a new date, it will always be the same URL (more about that later). And if you happen to have two posts with the same title it is not a problem as WordPress will automatically add “-2″ in the end.

Have you been using the wrong format? Well, if your blog is not totally new you should not change. It is not vital and for the next time you make a blog you know how to make it right.

Handling URL Canonization

Every WordPress blog has an issue in which there are 4 different URLs for the same post and this has to be fixed to prevent dilution. Follow my guide on how to fix it here.

Title Tags

The title tag is the most important HTML-tag in terms of SEO.

Here are different versions you should use inside the located in theme/header.php

Optimum ranking:

For branding purposes:

The best title tag solution for advanced users

Either install and properly use the SEO Title Tag plugin or do the following:

Download and install this plugin.
Replace with the context in header.php on single.php, page.php and category.php.
Work out the best titles for the different versions and use the plugin to create different versions of category.php and single.php with their own versions of title tags. For example if your category with ID 5 is “SEO News” you could have the following title tag in single-cat-5.php:
SEO News: <?php { wp_title('') ;} ?>
In category.php you could have: <?php { wp_title('') ;} ?> | Your Name

Headings

Headings are defined by HTML with H1 (largest) to H6 (smallest). You need to use them in your articles when you write. Your article title should be in a main heading (H1), sub headings with H2 and small headings with H3.

Make sure that in theme/single.php this code is wrapped in H1 so that it looks like:

If your theme designer already used a specific CSS design for the heading tags you can do like this:

Open up theme/single.php and add
to the top after and
to the bottom before .
Add then add for example the following lines of CSS to your CSS file:
.singleheadings h1 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX} .singleheadings h2 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX} .singleheadings h3 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}

You can change your quicktags by for example using this file instead (also add H2 to the file) so that you easily can insert heading tags when you write.

Navigation

Most of the link power is coming to the home page of your blog and gets distributed evenly among the rest of the links on that page. So in additional to having a good navigation structure for your visitors also do the following:

Have links to the most important articles and pages from your home page. That can easily be achieved by making a category with your best articles and using the WP Category Post plugin to make a list of them on the index.php file.
Install the Related Posts plugin and have your articles link to similar articles.
Also link yourself to previous articles you have written.
Place the attribute rel=”nofollow” on links that are totally useless for search engines such as to RSS feeds for the blog and comment links. In case you want to remove the nofollow on the comment links make sure you check the author links before approval as it is important that you don’t link to bad sites from your blog.
You should not have hundreds of external links on the home page, if you have that I recommend that you place them on a separate page.

Site Map

A Site Map is where your visitors go to navigate and find specific articles and posts on your blog. It is also a place for search engines to find links to all your pages on your blog.

Use my article on how to make an automatic WordPresss Site Map and add one for your blog. I prefer that you make the first version in the guide.

What about a Google Sitemap?

It is not needed. There is no reason for a WordPress blog with a proper navigation structure to submit a Google Sitemap other than for information purposes. A Google Sitemap does not improve your ranking, only crawling, and that is not a problem.

Design

Everyone has different tastes about design but here are points to think about when you design your blog:

Keep the design simple, very simple.
Have the body text big with big and clear headings.
For some reason blogs are not liked in the big social network sites (like digg, reddit etc) so make your theme unique and try to make it look like a site and not a blog.
Make sure nothing steals attention from your text.
The text width should not be longer than one and a half alphabet, even shorter.
When a visitor reaches an article on your blog, the text should be seen instantly. Have the text as far up as possible. A visitor should not have to scroll to reach the content.
If you are not making decent money with ads I suggest you to erase all ads you have on the blog.

References to follow:

Web 2.0 how-to design style guide

What About the Meta Tags?

There are various WP plugins out there for this but to be honest and frank I can tell you that they are not worth the effort. The meta keywords tag are not used anymore (or extremely little) in the ranking calculation and while the meta description tag can show up in the SERPs I consider the snippet of text the visitor gets being better.

CSS Positioning

It has been said that by providing the important content first in the source code it will make a positive difference in your search engine ranking. I am not sure if this is true, but it won’t hurt to do it. For example on this blog the navigation on the left is in the bottom of the code.

Section 2: How to Craft Your Articles

You should read the entire section of Authoring High Quality Content by Mr. Fishkin but I give you here a very quick summary as it relates to this article.

First the most important quote:

One Great Page is Worth a Thousand Good Pages

While hundreds or dozens of on-topic pages that cover sections of an industry are valuable to a website’s growth, it is actually far better to invest a significant amount of time and energy producing a few articles/resources of truly exceptional quality. To create documents that become “industry standard” on the web and are pointed to time after time as the “source” for further investigations, claims, documents, etc. is to truly succeed in the rankings battle. The value of “owning” this traffic and link source far outweighs a myriad of articles that are rarely read or linked to.

Write articles or posts that serves as a stand alone document. This means there is everything valuable collected on that page on that specific topic. For example a stand alone document on “SEO for WordPress” should have everything on that page and the reader should not need any other articles on that topic.

Better 1 great article that you revise 10 times than 10 smaller ok articles.

To do this you can also rewrite and republish your old articles with the current time to show up again as the latest article.

Include links to more reading if applicable

Withing or at the end of your article you should link to other sources so that the reader can read more if he is interested. You can also use this as sources if you got your writing materials from other places.

Headlines

You should write the kind of headlines to your articles that:

Contains important keyword combinations or phrase for ranking
Describes with great interest what the article is about
Makes the reader want to read it and clicks on it in the SERPs
And is short and to the point

Section 3: Increase User Interaction

Use polls from for example Poll Daddy.
Increase the commenting field for longer user comments and better interaction. This also provides more unique content to your articles.
Install the Subscribe to Comments plugin.
Actually do reply to your commenters and answer their questions.
If you revise an article based on a comment, do link and give credit to the commenter.

Section 4: Get Links

The art of writing the kind of content that get natural links is called link baiting. See my article on that with a list of ideas here.
Post your link baits on the major social network sites such as digg, reddit and the others.
Install my Link to Me Textbox WordPess Plugin which provides an automatic HTML box of code for easy linking to you.
Regularly link and reference other bloggers in your field in your posts to get attention from them. You loose nothing of it and many of them will return the favor and link to you. Also comment on their blogs to make them discover your blog.
Read and follow my Link Building Guide

This article will be regularly updated and the URL will never change. Feel welcome to bookmark and or link to it. Let me know if there is something I should add. Thank you.

Source: Jimwestergren

Wordpress, SEO and SEO for Wordpress

2008-11-06T22:30:00.000Z

To do SEO for Wordpress, we need to clarify some basic concepts.

What is Wordpress?

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. This is the definition from Wordpress' official website.

Subjectively defined by Wikipedia, WordPress is an open source blog publishing application. WordPress is the official successor of b2\cafelog, developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg.

The latest release of WordPress is version 2.6.3, released on 23 October 2008.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization/Optimizer) is the process of making your websites become more friendly with search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, etc.), thus gaining higher keywords rankings and better traffics.

SEO for Wordpress or Wordpress SEO

Below is the definite guide from Yoast about Wordpress SEO.

The basic technical optimization: simplest stuff, highest rewards
Template optimization
Advanced technical optimization: preventing duplicate content
Altering your blog's structure for high rankings
1. Pages instead of posts
2. New wine in an old bottle: use well ranking-posts to rank even better
3. Linking to related posts
Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!
Comment optimization: get those readers involved
Off site blog SEO
Conclusion

1. Basic technical optimization

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there's a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.

1.1. Permalinks

The first thing to change is your permalink structure which shapes the URL structure. In WordPress 2.5, you'll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the "custom" setting into /%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to /%category%/%postname%/.

Once you've done that, you'll want to install the Redirection plugin, and make sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, making sure both URL Monitoring select boxes are set to "Modified posts". Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO'd permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.

WWW vs non-WWW
Another good thing to configure now you're on that screen anyway is the Root domain: Add WWW / Strip WWW one. Make a choice, and set it here, don't enable both, some search engines still can't handle that. And enable the redirect index.php/index.html one too, it won't hurt you, and might even do your WordPress SEO some good.

URL stopwords
The last thing you'll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is install the SEO Slugs plugin, this will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won't get those ugly long URL's when you do a sentence style post title.

1.2. Optimize your Titles for SEO

By default, the title for your blog posts is "Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title". For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:

Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

For more info on how to craft good titles for your posts, see this excellent article and video by Aaron Wall: Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles. I prefer to do this with HeadSpace, as that makes it very very easy. You should check your header.php though, and make sure that the code for wp_title(); contains two quotes, so it looks like this: wp_title('');. This makes sure you have absolute control over the title and don't have any annoying separator in there.

After that, go into the HeadSpace settings, and make them look something like this for your posts and pages:

For the other pages, I have the following settings:

Posts / Pages: %%title%% - Blog Title
Categories: %%category%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
Tags: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
Archives: Blog Archives %%page%% - Blog Title

With HeadSpace, you can also write optimized titles for each post specifically, overriding the settings here. This way you have absolute control over your titles, and can make sure your WordPress titles are actually helping your SEO.

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

Give each category a decent description, and use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that you actually want to rank with. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what's in the page they're clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.

Automated descriptions
In my opinion, auto generating descriptions is a load of bull, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you're thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet... If you don't use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.

Auto generating a snippet is a "shortcut", and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).

1.4. Optimize the More text

Another neat featuer of HeadSpace is that you can use it to optimize the more text, so if you use a more tag on the frontpage, you can replace the default "Read more" link with something meaningful for every post. It's small things like that that make your WordPress SEO the best.

1.5. Image Optimization

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you're helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what's otherwise hidden to them.

You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don't have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image's alt and title tag:

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

You'll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like "Home > Articles > WordPress SEO". They are good for two things:

They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt single.php and page.php in your theme, and use my breadcrumb plugin.

2.2. Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an H1 heading, and nothing else. Your blog's name should only be an H1 on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an H3.

These are easy to edit in the post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they're not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don't have to download them most of the time.

2.4. Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I've highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend WP-Super-Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.

Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I myself have a MediaTemple grid server, with a LITE MySQL container added to that.

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you're not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you're allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.

The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren't necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren't helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you'd only want on sub pages.

Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

Once you've done all the basic stuff, you'll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:

date based
category based
tag based

Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author//, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs.

In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages outside of the single page where it should be available. We're going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things.

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

Install my robots meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all archive pages, like this:

Now the search engine will follow all the links on these archive pages, but it won't show those pages in the index. Not everybody will agree on this policy, and others will tell you to just show a snippet of each post on the archive page. That'll also work, but in my opinion completely throwing them out is better.

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don't think you need author archives, use the robots-meta plugin to disable the author archives. Also, if you don't think you need a date based archive: disable it. Even if you're not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO...

3.3. Pagination

Thirdly, you'll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts...

There's an easy fix. Jaimie Sirovich wrote Pagerfix, a plugin that helps you make your pagination look like this:

To reach that, install that plugin, and change this section in f.i. your index.php:

Into this:

Do that in your index.php, your archives.php, and all other archive templates you might have.

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You'll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand. If you're using the meta widget, you might want to enable the option in robots meta to replace that with one that has nofollowed links.

4. Altering your blog's structure for high rankings

Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They're diluted by one simple thing: comments.

4.1. Pages instead of posts

You've probably noticed by now, or you're seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually... not a post. It's a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a "daughter"-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that's where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.

That's why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you've changed.

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

create a new page with updated and improved content
change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
publish the new page under the old post's URL, or redirect the old post's URL to the new URL
send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you've updated and improved on your old post
wait for the links to come in, again;
rank even higher for your desired term as you've now got:
- more control over the keyword density
- even more links pointing at the article
- the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it's content and ranking

Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you'd lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone's benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that's exactly what you got!

4.3. Linking to related posts

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.

There's a load of these available, but I just use the one that comes with the Simple Tags plugin, as I've found that the easiest and best one so far.

5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!

A lot of bloggers still think that because their blog is a blog, they don't have to optimize anything. Wrong. To get people to link to you, they have to read your blog. And what do you think is easier: getting someone who is already visiting your blog to visit regularly and then link to your blog, or getting someone who visits your blog for the first time to link to your blog immediately? Right.

That's why conversion optimization is so vitally important to bloggers as well: they need to learn how to test their call to actions on their blog so that more people will subscribe, either by e-mail or by RSS. (Ow btw, if you haven't subscribed to this blog yet, do it now!)

One of the things I've found to be very important, and more bloggers seem to have found this, is that a BIG RSS subscribe button is very important, as is offering a way to subscribe by e-mail. I even offer daily and weekly e-mail subscribe options, using aweber (aff), and have found that people tend to really like those options too.

Another thing to be very aware of is when people might want to subscribe to your blog. If they've just finished reading an article of yours, and really liked it, that would be the ideal time to reach them, right? That's why more and more people are adding lines like this to the end of their posts: "Liked this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!"

Another great time to get people to subscribe is when people have just commented on your blog for the first time, for which purpose I use the awesome comment relish plugin. Which leads me to the next major aspect of WordPress SEO:

6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved

Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogs. As Wikipedia states:

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Comments are not only nice because people tell you how special you are, or that you made a mistake, or whatever else they have to tell you. Most of all they're nice, because they show engagement. And engagement is one of the most important factors of getting people to link to you: they show you they care, and they open the conversation, now all you have to do is respond, and you're building a relationship!

6.1. How should you get people to comment

The easiest way of getting people to do anything is: ask them to do it. Write in an engaging style, and then ask your blog's readers for an opinion, their take on the story etc.

Another important things is your comment links. Is your comment link "No comments »"? Or is it "No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome »"? Feel the difference? You can change this by opening your index.php template, search for comments_popup_link() and changing the texts within that function.

6.2. Bond with your commenters

Another thing to do is thank people when they've commented on your weblog. Not every time, because that get's annoying, but doing it the first time is a very good idea.

Justin Shattuck thought the same, and created the Comment Relish plugin, which I just mentiond, which sends an email after someone has made his first comment. This email is a message you can enter yourself, with for instance your feed URL, and in my case, a newsletter subscribe URL, etc.

Another option, which is a bit less obtrusive / spammy, is to install my comment redirect plugin. This plugin allows you to redirect people who have made their first comment to a specific "thank you" page.

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

Now that people have joined the conversation on your blog, you should make sure they stay in the conversation. That's why you should install the subscribe to comments plugin, that allows people to subscribe to a comment thread just like they would in a forum, and sends them an e-mail on each new comment. This way, you can keep the conversation going, and maybe your readers will be giving you new angles for new posts.

7. Off site blog SEO

If you've followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you've got a big chance of becoming successfull, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn't. Go out there, and talk to people online.

7.1 Follow your commenters

There's been a movement on the web for a while now that's called the "You comment - I follow". They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to "reward" your visitors. Now I do agree, but... That get's you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog... What I do advocate though, is that you actually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.

If you think that's a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That's a group of people you have to take care of!

7.2 Use Twitter

Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the "cool" people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.

To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.

7.3 Find related blogs, and work them

If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you'll need to rank is to be a part of the community.

8. Conclusion

This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your blog. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There's a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you'll have to actually do most of it.

If you have any comments or ideas on Wordpress SEO, please let me know. Thank you!

I hope those tips are useful for your Wordpress SEO.