Most os us know how important is to have some knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get more exposure out there in the search engines. But like you and me when we started here, there are newbie people that don’t know even little tips to start applying right now in their very new posts. I’m gonna tell you some easy guidelines to start with SEO.

First tip: Optimize the title of your pages.

First of all, if you use WordPress and I hope so, you must configure the title of your pages to the most optimized way. You know that every post you write is a single page and the title of your posts is part of the title of that page. By default WordPress places first your blog’s title and then your post’s title so you have to invert them. I mean something like this:

• Binary Ant Dot Com » Blog Archive » Plugin All In One SEO Pack (bad way)
• Plugin All In One SEO Pack | Binary Ant Dot Com (good way)

This is easy to do with the All In One SEO Pack plugin. I wrote a post about All In One SEO Pack and Optimized titles that you should check it out because is one of the essential plugins for WordPress. Also try to avoid useless words like “blog archive” in the example above.

Why is it important? Because the less words you have in the title the more weigh every word has, and also it works better to place first the ones that are more relevant to the content.

Second tip: set Meta Tags like description and keywords for every single post.

Every single page must have this meta tags according to the respective content. This point is easily achievable with the All In One SEO Pack too. I have another post about How To Set Meta Tags For Your Posts With All In One SEO Pack that you should read too.

Third tip: write good titles for your posts.

When I say good titles I mean in SEO terms. You have to put keywords in it but you have to select the best ones. Which ones are best? the ones that have less competition. You have to make some searches about the topic to find the ones that could work better. For example, imagine that I’m going to write a post about cooking recipes so lets make some searches in Google:

• cooking recipes: Results 1 - 10 of about 6,810,000

It seems to be a bit of competition there so let’s narrow it. We have to be more specific on our keywords. Imagine that most recipes are about spanish cooking:

• spanish food cooking recipes: Results 1 - 10 of about 329,000

Great! Now we have twenty times less competition. Have you got the idea? Good.

Fourth tip: give more weigh to your keywords.

You have to repeat them inside your content. I’m not telling you that you have to write them twenty times all along the post, but you have to place them three or four times and at least once in the first paragraph. Also is very important to bold them because it is supposed that bold words are important for the content so the search engines put importance on them.

Fiveth tip: internal links are important.

Did you see what I did in the first and second tip? Those links to older posts are internal links. The more links you have pointing to a page the more relevance that page has to the search engines. External linkbaiting is crucial but internal is quite important too.

Ok, that’s all to start working on your Search Engine Optimization, easy steps, aren’t they?. Start with these guidelines and I assure that you’ll have good results, and they won’t take you much time.

If you liked it then share it with others

Surely you have heard about a file named robots.txt at some point. It sounds very scary, you know, robots are complex machines but don’t worry because we are not going to see anyone. This is something that has been part of the search engines since many years ago.

We must start talking about Robots Exclusion Protocol, also known as REP. This protocol let the webmasters to have some control over what parts of the site (pages) they want to be crawled (indexed) by search engines and what parts not. There are several ways to achieve this goal but the most known is the use of the file robots.txt.

Why we could want to hide some parts of our websites to search engines?

There are several reasons, some important ones are:

• We don’t want to transfer Google Juice to pages like login, admin pages, etc. It is a waste of PR.
• We try to avoid duplicate content like categories and tags sections.
• We don’t want to have files of images available for searches to avoid hotlinking. This happens when you publish for instance a picture and other website copy your picture in their content but instead of copying the file they link it directly to your server wasting your bandwidth.

How can I create my robots.txt? What content should it have?

This file is a .txt file, you can create it with the notepad. If you use WordPress and you have installed the Google Sitemap Generator plugin then you have the option of create it automatically.

This file can be as short or as long as you want but you don’t need to make it difficult. Basically there are two modes:

• Allow: something, this means that you allow the access to something, it could be a page, a file, a directory, a file extension.
• Disallow: something, similar to the point above but in this case you deny the access.

You can disallow the access to a whole directory but allow the access with the allow command to an specific file in that directory. Let’s see my file, quite simple:

Disallow: /wp-admin/   It’s stupid to let the crawler enter here.
Disallow: /tag/     this is to avoid duplicated content
Disallow: /category/     the same to avoid duplicated content
Disallow: /go/    This directory contains something very interesting I’m going to talk about soon

# BEGIN XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN    this is a comment, it doesn’t have any value
Sitemap: http://www.binaryant.com/sitemap.xml.gz    this line tells the crawler where to find the sitemap
# END XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN    this is a comment, it doesn’t have any value

You have my robots.txt here if you want to take a look. Other bloggers disallow many more parts but for me it is enough. This decision depends on the nature of everyone.

If you liked it then share it with others

Just a quick word to tell you that next Tuesday 8th of July Google will offer a free webinar about three of the most powerful tools Google has for webmasters:

• Google Webmaster Tools:a resource to gauge the visibility of your pages on Google.
• Google Analytics: the most free useful stats tracker for your websites, it allows you to know your geographical stats, the performance of your landing pages, Adwords, keywords and many other functions.
• Google Website Optimizer: a tool that gathers information about your site that you can use to find leaks in the performance and other ways to improve your web.

As I told you all of this is for free and via Internet. If you are interested in attend this webinar here you have the article of the Official Google Blog where you have available more information and the link to register.

If you liked it then share it with others

Here we are today with another chapter of my Marketing Your Blog series and this one is also highly related with SEO. Today we will submit our blog to several web directories. Our aim here is to get more external links to our blog. The more links the more relevance we will get on search engines index. Surely some people put importance on the PR (Page Rank) juice we can get from the web directories but it is less important than you think. If one directory with PR4 links you it doesn’t mean you have a PR4 link because you are placed into a category which has lower PR than the directory’s index and also you share the PR juice with all the URLs contained in that category. However it is true that you can get a bit.

Now it is time to be sincere with you. This article was planned lot of time ago but I procrastinated it because I was lazy about making a smart list of web directories… Until today . The reason is that I found a very interesting blog with a very good selection of web directories to submit our URL. I must thank Norhafidz Nordin from Norhafidz.com for his good work selecting them.

As Norhafidz said in his article it is far better for your Search Engine Optimization to get one way links than reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are seen by the search engines as a less natural link building than the previous one. All of us know the importance that Google puts in natural linkbuilding.

Most of these directories we have in the list placed below have three kind of submissions:

• Paid submission.
• Free submission with reciprocal link.
• Free submission.

Logically the paid one has more preference over the rest because your link probably will be shown as featured link. It is not said but probably the second one in preference is the one with reciprocal link but this is not what we want, I mean, one way links. However you can do what I’m doing now, an article about web directories in which you link back all of them. This way both parts, the blogger and the web directory, get benefits: the blogger gets backlinks without reciprocal in his index and the web directory is promoted too.

Here you have the list of web directories to submit your blog:

• DMoz Open Directory Project
• Greenairo Web Directory
• Maxell Panama
• SolutioNet Web Directory
• Ns8.biz Free Submit Web SEO Directory
• Lemurgene Links Directory
• Evil Directory
• Nonar Web Directory
• eSiq Directory
• Trunek Directory
• Wisob Directory

If you want to read the other chapters of the Marketing Your Blog series here they are:

• Marketing Your Blog, #1. Comment On Blogs
• Marketing Your Blog, #2. Get Your Own Domain
• Marketing Your Blog, #3. Design Your Own Logo
• Marketing Your Blog, #4. Must Have A Favicon

If you liked it then share it with others

All of you, WordPress bloggers, know the All In One SEO Pack plugin, if not you can check it out in my article on All In One SEO Pack Plugin. Also you can have a look at my WordPress Guide. It makes a good work with the Search Engine Optimization of our blogs but most of the people only scratch the surface because they only use titles optimization and don’t configure meta-tags in the best way possible.

People configure this plugin but they place the same keywords and description for the whole blog, they don’t realize that every single post they write is a single page. Do you get where I’m going? Yes, you have to configure meta-tags for every post.

From now on you will pay attention to this box every time you write a post:

Here you must write the title, the description and the keywords for every post. This way search engines will have more precise information on the posts you write and therefore these posts will be more accurately indexed. Have a look at this example with my article about my new Nokia N81mobile phone:

Now we have the proper description and keywords in the HTML code for this article:

All In One SEO Pack also copies this description as the excerpt of the article. For those of you who don’t know what is an excerpt don’t worry. It is the short text that summarizes your article. If you didn’t know this then you weren’t using it. You can show the excerpts in your feed instead of the whole article to avoid being a victim of content scraping. It has more uses but I’ll tell you another day.

If you liked it then share it with others