Why does an optimized homepage title for your blog offer great value to your SEO efforts and adds visibility to your whole blog?

The homepage title is one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO. You can easily find proof of this. Go to google.com and type in anything you like. Look at the first few results and you will see that these sites do have your search query near the beginning of their page title and they do have it within the page content.

We will now come to how to change the default setting of how WordPress displays the homepage title to a highly optimized manner without using a plugin for that.

By default, most WordPress themes will show the homepage title like this:

YOUR BLOG TITLE » YOUR POST TITLE

This is defined in the header.php within the respective themes folder. You will find the following near the top of the file: (without the spaces, I added.)

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> » <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

This is not very optimal for SEO purposes. bloginfo(’name’) is the title of your blog and wp_title(); represents the title of a single post. We want to have the post title being shown before the blog title.

Changing this into a more optimized presentation of your titles is very easy.
You just have to move your post title before your blog title. That´s it.
All you have to do is to open the header.php from the themes folder of the theme you are actually using.

Find this code near the top of the file:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> » <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

and change it to: (again, skip the spaces I added!)

<title><?php wp_title(); ?> » <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>

Now save the file and upload it to its themes folder. No second step, we are done. Look at the top of your browser window. This page is titled

What will be more important when someone would search for it? I moved the post title to the beginning and slightly changed the title. By default, this page would have been titled

If you want to learn more about this, please read these great articles related to this topic:

• How To: Make Search Engines Like Your WordPress Blog
• Wordpress Hacking for Better Blog Titles
• SEO A Wordpress Blog - The Optimal Title
• Blog SEO - How to Optimize Your Blog for the Search Engines
• Reverse Blog Name and Post Title in WordPress Title
• Better SEO Page Title for WordPress
• SEO for Wordpress
• Google your Wordpress Blog

Please let me know, whether this was useful for you or not. Thank you.

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What does duplicate content mean, why can it be dangerous for your search engine ranking and how to avoid creating duplicate content?

There has been a very intensive discussion about duplicate content in the last few years. It has become a big problem for some site owners, mostly because they just did not know about the problem and even that they were actually running into it without knowledge. So let us first take a closer look on what this problem basically is.

What is duplicate content?
Search engines are constantly trying to improve the quality of their results as they want to provide the user with content which fits best to his or her search term.
If a search engine is indexing a webpage with content which is duplicate to content on another site, they would waste space in their index database, processing power and time on indexing this content once more. So they tend to decide which of these two (or sometimes even more) pages with the same content on it seems to be the most important one. The other pages might not be indexed and can therefore not be found by users of this search engine.

How to avoid duplicate content?
Most websites can be reached via more than one URL, http://www.domain.com AND http://domain.com - This can be a problem with search engines treating those versions of the URL as two different domains, which will result in content existing multiple times. This can be solved easily, you just have to add the following to your .htaccess-File:

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

Read here on drostdesign.com how to implement this to your site. Try it with my domain, just entering marcorichter.net into your browser will redirect you to www.marcorichter.net as a result of the above changes to my .htaccess-File.
Additionally, if you are using Google Webmaster Tools then you can tell Google which domain you prefer as your main URL.

Is WordPress a problem?
WordPress is giving you several capabilities of managing the content of your site and can be considered being some kind of content-management-system. But some of these features may cause trouble for you as WordPress could render almost 100% of your content as dublicate content. Oleg Ishenko of seoresearcher.com has written a very detailed article on how to make your wordpress blog duplicate content safe. It is definitely worth reading if you are running WordPress and are new to the duplicate content issue.

Maybe you are a more visual person, you might rather like viewing a video on this. Here is one from Michael Gray from Graywolf’s SEO Blog explaining how to avoid duplicate content in your wordpress blog.

What is behind duplicate content?
The way, search engines try to recognize duplicate content and how they try to rank the right pages, but not the copy cats is somewhat technical and not so easy to say, as each search engine will have its own way to handle this. If you want to know more about the background of this, Todd Malicoat at Stuntdubl SEO is providing some great background research on How to Remedy Duplicate Content and Magical % Thinking. Great article, thanks Todd.

Please let me know, whether this was useful for you or not. Thank you.

Want to improve your blog´s SEO quickly? You have come to the right place. I collected 10 ways to improve it in 5 minutes or less. This list is an idea of Skellie, who recently held a promotion offering 5 viral article ideas. This is one from the E-Mail she sent me. Thanks for that great service, Skellie.

10 ways to improve your blog’s SEO

1. Concentrate on the key factors
   Don´t waste your time working on every little tweak you read about somewhere. Check your blog on the key factors of Google optimization and you are done with 95% of the whole thing.
   
   
2. Get rid of all that waste
   You want search engines to index your content? Then give them content, get rid of everything unnecessary and declutter your blog.
   
   
3. Dump your duplicate content
   Especially when using WordPress, you might have a problem with having the same content available under different URLs. Don´t confuse the search engines and get rid of your duplicate content now.
   
   
4. Give Google a map of your site
   Google knows everything, right? Do they? Move on to the safe harbor and provide them with a sitemap of your blog so they won´t miss a single page.
   
   
5. Do you know, what ?p=138 means?
   Can you guess, what that page might be about? This one is easy when you are using WordPress, just a few clicks are needed to optimize your permalink structure.
   
   
6. The <title>-tag is important
   Does it say something like myblog.tld on each and every page of your site? Your content is different every time, and so should your page title. Improve your page titles to be relevant to the content.
   
   
7. Get links, get links, get links
   You can start with some free links before you get to the real work. Here are 11 ways to build links to your blog.
   
   
8. Create something viral
   This one works without your hands on needed. You just have to set it up and watch your inbound links coming in. For me the viral recommendation carousel worked very well. Give it a try, it´s never too late to have your own.
   
   
9. Link back to you
   When writing a new post, try to find an older post which is relevant to the new one and put a link to it and get your readers deeper into your blog. Growing up an internal linking structure is what I´ve done in this post. Hey - it works.
   
   
10. You want even more?
    I compiled some DO´s and DON´Ts in blog SEO before.
    
    

Do you recall the good old days, when blogging first hit the internet, and Blogger.com was all the rage? It was fairly easy for people to get top rankings back then, initially, but now it is really difficult to be seen anywhere near the top. What about blog and ping, does it really help to get you indexed faster? How many sites using this method have stayed alive for more than 6 months?. Here are a couple mistakes you should avoid concerning duplicate content, if you want top ranking.

Template Duplication
Think about this…if there are millions of bloggers out there with the same template, how does that affect ranking? Let’s say you are using Wordpress.org for your templates, are there others out there using that same Wordpress template? If there are millions of people with the same template website, isn’t that ultimately duplicate content?.

We all know Google HATES duplicate content, and this includes duplicate templates. Making your template unique may be something worth putting some time and effort into, if you want to find yourself in the top 10 pages of Google. One thing that has always remained consistent… give google what they want and you WILL reap the rewards.

Jumping On The Latest Craze
When each new fad, latest tool or software first comes out…everyone is rushing out to get their piece of the pie. Not long down the road everyone is using it and once again the duplication factor comes into play.Of course, when this happens, Google has to take a stand…then everyone is looking for the next big thing.

While many are focused on the craze for high ranking, trying out the latest new strategy or tool, it might be smarter to avoid all those tactics and stick to the basic foundation. Instead focus everyday on doing what you do better than the others.

Rule of Thumb
Stick with the basic foundations and reap the benefits long term. It really is pretty simple to benefit long term if you just do what Google wants. While Google may seem like they are out to get you at times, their main goal is to give the searcher a good experience. This should also be your goal.

If you are truly giving your members what they want, putting their needs above all else, and basing your business on how you can best meet their needs, success will follow.

To sum things up, next big craze, fad, tool or software that comes around, be aware of the duplicate content rule, and by all means, do not use duplicate templates. Stick to the basic foundations and strive to do better everyday than the masses. This will ensure you have a strong foundation, so you can reap the benefits for years to come.

Note: This a guest post from Veronica Routtu
“Success Begins When You Take The First Step”

You could be the next guest poster here on my blog,

When reading about SEO, you have probably come upon terms like black hat, blue hat or white hat. Didn´t you know, that every person in the SEO world is enforced to wear a hat? Go out to some other SEO blogs and check the bloggers photographs on their about-pages.

Just kidding, sorry. But what is the story with all these hats and their colors in SEO?
It is about the SEO philosophy someone is following and the methods he or she uses. They all have their individual colored hats on.

White Hat
The White Hat guy decided to rely on producing more and better content and optimize pages for visitors first, and search engines second. They often have great marketing know-how and do utilize it to bring up their sites to where the traffic comes from. They do not want to see the quick results. They understood, that it may take weeks or even months to receive some love from search engines.

Black Hat
Black Hat SEOs do utilize any technology available to push their sites (or their customers sites) to top ranking positions in search engines. This includes SPAM methods and any other unethical technique of optimization for search engines. But this also includes a very high risk of being banned from the search results pages.

Blue Hat
The Blue Hat people are mixing up their tactics op optimization. They do concentrate on creating valuable content for visitors but know how to promote it by using some little black hat methods as well and try to stay within the limits of the search engines rules.

Please tell me, what color YOUR hat shows? Do you use black hat tactics for your blog? Was it succesful? Let us know and drop a comment. Thank you.

Tip: The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog Don´t miss this ongoing series.

I just stumbled upon a post on Kassper´s blog about key factors on Google optimization.
He lists up 8 factors, that are highly important when it comes to optimize your blog for a better ranking on search engines. Here they are:

1. make sure your new pages link to your old ones
2. add a sitemap to your blog
3. use title optimization
4. use relevant keywords in your posts
5. submit your site to web-directories
6. use robots.txt files to prevent non-relevant content being scanned
7. submit your site to Google
8. write content for your readers - not for search engines

I agree with most of them but I want to go a little deeper into these.

Make sure your new pages link to your old ones
Links are what you need for a high ranking in search engines. They are the veins of the Internet. When your blog grows bigger and bigger, there will be a large number of posts on it maybe hundreds of them. Don´t let them disppear. While writing a new blog post, chances are you will talk about a topic, you have talked about in an earlier post. Put a link to your older post then.
This keeps your readers sticked to your blog as they find even more information about the topic they are interested in and therefore reading your new post.
Don´t let them go away without showing them ways to get deeper into that topic. I put up some links to older posts here in this one, you will see them while you read one. Just follow those links to get deeper inside.
Installing an internal linking structure on your blog can really help you with your search engine rankings.

Add a sitemap to your blog
Especially when you are using WordPress, installing sitemaps for your blog is very easy. Remember to install an XML-Sitemap for the search engines, plus an HTML-Sitemap for your readers to help both of them to access all pages of your site easily.
There are plugins for WordPress for both type of sitemaps. I made a list of must-have plugins earlier, don´t miss it.

Use title optimization
I have already written an article about relevant homepage titles, so just go ahead if you want to read more about this. As the title of your pages will be a very important factor for your search engine ranking you are strongly recommended to keep an eye on this.

Use relevant keywords in your posts
Where would you pages go without having keywords on it? Try to use keywords from the long tail as well.

Submit your site to web-directories
Though there are some directories on the Internet, I would recommend submitting your website to, with 99.9% of directories out there, you will end up wasting your time. Why? Just look, where your site will be listed within the directory. In most cases, this will be on a page like this: www.directory.tld/category/sub-category/page/54/. How many people do you think would browse through all of this just to find the link to your site? Feel lucky, if you notice more than one visitor from there.

Oh, you need links to raise the PageRank of your site? Take a second look at the URL above. There are directories with a PR 6 or PR 5 or something available - some are even free to submit to - but go away from the directory´s homepage, go right onto the page, where your link will be placed and check the PR of that one page. Guess what? Again 99.9% of them will have… Right: PR 0 or even NO PR.

Use robots.txt files to prevent non-relevant content being scanned
Not only does a robots.txt-File help you with preventing search engines from indexing content you don´t want to appear in search results, especially in WordPress there is some danger of creating duplicate content because WordPress tends to make your content available via different URLs. Right after publishing this article - as long as there is no newer article being posted - you´d be able to read it by using several URLs. You could just visit my homepage - it will appear first as long it is the newest article. You could visit this article directly, or visit the October 2007 archive or you could visit the SEO category on my blog.

With some tweaks within WordPress and by using a robots.txt-File you can prevent search engines from finding all these different URLs showing up the same article.

Submit your site to Google
I don´t agree with this one. It is not necessary to use Google´s form to submit a new site to them. First, it does not show any effect - I have submitted new sites using this form and there is no evidence, that their crawler even comes visiting that new site. Getting indexed by Google can be achieved much faster by getting links to your site from other sites that are being crawled regularly.
I succeeded in getting a new site indexed by Google within 24 hours by doing nothing more, than putting up 2 links to it on sites I know being crawled every day.

Write content for your readers - not for search engines
As I have announced a few day ago, I have been invited to be a guest blogger over at canimakebigmoneyonline.com and I have written an article about Mistakes in Internet Marketing there, which covers the difference between writing for search engines and writing for your readers. (I will put up the link to the article here, as soon as it has been published).

Does your blog have a sitemap? If you want your blog to rank well in searchengines, you will definitely need a sitemap, or better two sitemaps. One in XML and one in HTML.

What is a sitemap
A sitemap generally is a list of links to all pages of your website. It helps visitors (the HTML) or searchengines (the XML) to access all of your site´s pages.

HTML Sitemap

A sitemap in HTML is for both, visitors and searchengines. It might look something like this:

• Category: Blogging
  • Linktrains - good or evil? September 7th, 2007
  • Committing to blog regularly September 3rd, 2007
  • Finally, it is mine August 31st, 2007

You can see an example of my sitemap here.

A visitor can go to this sitemap and find a complete list of your site´s pages and easily access them with just one click.
The same goes for searchengines, their crawlers will access your sitemap and, follow the links they will find there and then index every single page.

A HTML-Sitemap should be linked on your homepage. In WordPress you could create a Page to put your sitemap on, like I did. (See top of this page) Why? Imagine, some of your pages are stored somewhat deep in your site´s hierarchy and a visitor might have to click several times in your navigation to reach it. Google will give a lower authority to this page as it appears not very important being on the 4^th or 5^th level. Having a link to the sitemap on your frontpage will take it closer to the top of your site´s hierarchy and a searchengine will consider it to be more important.

In Wordpress, an HTML-Sitemap can easily be created by a plugin you can download here: www.dagondesign.com

Installation is just as simple:

• Download the .zip-file and uncompress
• Upload the entire dd-sitemap-gen folder (not just the files inside) to your plugins directory
• Activate the plugin in your administration panel
• Configure the plugin in the options panel (under DDSitemapGen)
• Simply add the following line to a WordPress page (where you would like the sitemap to display):

<!-- ddsitemapgen -->

Note: For those of you using the new rich-text editor - be sure to click the ‘html’ button to edit the page source directly. Otherwise Wordpress will wrap code tags around the line which generates the sitemap and it will not work properly.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is only for searchengines, not for your visitors. They will probably never see it. An XML sitemap gives searchengines a complete lists of URLs of every single page on your site. Same as with the HTML so far. Your XML sitemap might look something like this:

<urlset>
 <url>
  <loc>http://www.marcorichter.net/</loc>
  <lastmod>2007-09-02T07:16:03+00:00</lastmod>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  <priority>1</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

As you can see, this is not really readable to a normal user. Have a look at my XML sitemap, if you like to see the whole XML-File.

There is another plugin which will create you sitemap for you. Download it from Arne Brachhold.

Installation is again very easy:

Simply download the Zip-Archive and extract all files into your wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then go into your WordPress administration page, click on Plugins and activate it. After that you will have a new menu point called “Sitemap” under the “Options” menu. You can alter the default change frequencies, filename and other options there. Click once on “Rebuild Sitemap” to create your sitemap the first time.

The script needs write access to your Blog directory. Check out the WordPress Codex or have a look at the Plugin´s FAQ for help.

How to get your XML sitemap into Google
You will need to create an account with Google Webmaster Tools. On your first login, you will be prompted for your site´s URL. Add the URL and follow the instruction to verify you have lawful control over that site. (That´s easy).
After verfication there will be a link Manage http://www.yourdomain.com, click here and enter the URL of your new XML sitemap. If you use the plugin, this should be http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. That´s it, you are in. Google might take a few hours to get the data for the first time.

Note: Google will check back for updates on your sitemap, so there is no need to resubmit it.

Today, it is all about, what to DO and DO NOT when it comes to SEO on your blog.
I have collected some links to examples on every point. I hope, you will find this valuable for you daily blogging.

Important: All links open in current window, so bookmark this page.

1. Optimize your Title-tags
   • Basic SEO Tip 1: Title Tags
   • Modify title tag in wordpress posts
   • The Title Tag - A Rare SEO Question answered
2. Clean up your URLs
• Rewriting your URLs for SEO
• SEO quickies for your Wordpress blog
• URL impact on SEO
3. Tagging
• Tagging your blog
• Leveraging tagging for your blog
• Is blog tagging becoming more mainstream
• 2 types of tags and choosing your poison

Now, we will be covering some of the worst SEO mistakes. I hope the links I have collected for this part will help prevent you from making these mistakes. Please take all of them into consideration when working on your blog. Again some might only take a few minutes to be put into action, so do not miss them. They will bring your site or blog towards the top for the next months or even years. It is definitely worth it. And please, let me know about your success.

1. Are your keywords right?
   • Allways mind your keywords
   • How to Get Profitable Adsense Keywords
   • Don´t optimize your blog to death
2. Not getting links
   • Viral Recommendation Carousel
   • Simple link building tactics
   • Linkbuilding - The Ultimate Resource List
   • John Scott on linkbuilding
3. Bad internal linking structure
   • Building an internal linking structure
   • Internal linking know-how
   • SEO: internal linking
   • Internal linking strategy

Do you have encountered other SEO mistakes? Would you like to share them? Please let me know.

I want to show you how to optimize the URLs WordPress gives you for your posts by default. This default version is not very useful when you want your blog to rank high on search engines.

As the default URL do not contain any keywords of your post, this will be like a handbrake for your SEO efforts, so we will get some useful word to the URLs.

The default URLs created by WordPress look like this:

http://yourblog.com/?p=POST_ID

The POST_ID will be the internal number of your post. Could you read from this URL what that post might be about?
Probably not, so how should search engines know?

We will change this to a more speaking URL with the name of the category and the title of the post included to the URL. This might look like this:

http://yourblog.com/category/the-post-title.html

This will let you include not only important keywords - which are hopefully included in your post title - but also the name of the category, you put the post into. So you have even more place to put keyword into the URL.

Changing the permalink structure in Wordpress is easy

Go to OPTIONS » Permalinks in your WordPress admin. Check the Custom, specify below-Option (might vary depending on your WP-Version) and enter the following into the Custom Structure-Box:

/%category%/%postname%.html

Now, click on the button: Update Permalink Structure » and that´s it, you´re done.
Check the URL of your existing posts. They should show with the new URLs now.

If they don´t, no problem. Just create a file named .htaccess (WITH the . at the beginning) and put this into the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Now upload the .htaccess-File into your blog´s root-folder on your server. Depending on your hosting plan, this option might be disabled on your server. Check with your hosting company, wheher they will change it for you.

If you want to learn more about this, please read these great articles related to this topic on:

• techcounter.com
• sapphireknight.com
• leftblank.nl
• improvetheweb.com
• deanlee.cn

Please let me know, whether this was useful for you or not. Thank you.