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.
How can you backup and restore your WordPress blog database? If you’ve been blogging long enough, you might have heard the words “Backup Your WordPress Database Regularly!” Well, this is quite true. Don’t take it with a pinch of salt! A healthy backup of your database could one day be THE ONLY means of restoring your blog should something go wrong such as a bad plug-in installation or an attack by blog hackers.
For a second time since I started blogging, this database backup of a thing, as some would call it, has saved me a lot of headache. Recently I messed up my blog’s permalink structure and my saving grace was the day before’s database backup.
DISCLAIMER: This tutorial is provided as it is. I shall not be held responsible in any way should you encounter problems like loss of database and entire blog/website along the way. Use this at your own discretion. It worked EXCELLENTLY well for me and should do the same for you hopefully!
2. Go to Tools in the sidebar of your dashboard and click on Backup
Under Backup options as shown below, select “Download to your computer” and click on “Backup Now”. When the backup is done you’ll be given an option to choose where to save the backup. Save the backup and you’re done.
Note: I strongly advice you schedule a daily backup of your database as issues could arise at ANY TIME. Simply navigate down the Backup option page to Scheduled backup. Select the once daily option and select which tables you’d like included in the backup. Type in your email address, click the schedule backup button and all is well. Check to see if your first backup gets delivered successfully the next day.
How To Restore WordPress Database
The guide below will help you restore your database in no time using the backups that have been made in the past. I’m assuming that your current database has been damaged or is behaving erratically.
1. Log into your FTP account and Delete everything in the /wp-content/cache directory.
2. Log into PHP MyAdmin and select your wordpress database. It’s mandatory you remember clearly well the name of your wordpress database especially if you auto-installed it using Fantastico.
A list of all of the tables contained in the database will be shown. As shown below, click on Check all to select all the tables then select the Drop option to delete them PERMANENTLY.
You’ll be prompted to confirm the Drop action
Choose Yes and all tables will be DELETED with this result displayed on your computer screen
Now that the database for wordpress is empty, let’s proceed to uploading our database backup file
Click on the Import menu as shown above and then browse to the location of the backup file as shown below. Once you’ve done that, click on go and wait for the upload process to finish.
A successfully database restoration will show you something similar to the message below
Once the whole restoration process is done, log into your dashboard and make sure everything is working okay. Don’t forget to browse your site to see if it’s functioning as expected.
How to Get Traffic? If I look back at the failed web sites I created between 2002 and 2008, and especially those that didn’t profit me in any way, shape or form, I can see one common denominator – traffic. It’s literally the key to everything online – if you have targeted traffic in abundance then you’re laughing all the way to the bank.
That’s why I’m always looking at ways to siphon traffic from relatively unknown sources; those that haven’t already been exhausted or so competitive that the return on investment (whether that be time or money) isn’t justified.
So, given that I’m pretty much certain that you want more traffic – here’s some lesser known traffic strategies you can use to get a foot up on your competition.
1. Document Sharing Sites and Ebook Directories
Over the last few months, I’ve been taking article marketing to the next level. Instead of simply writing a 500 word post to directories, I’ve been looking at ways in which I can leverage my article content to get added exposure in a variety of different formats. One thing that’s worked really well for me is to write short e-books on the subject of my niche and distribute to a variety of e-book web sites. The statistics show over 2,000 visits and more than 30% opt in over the last 3 months.
At the end of the day, the success of this strategy simply boils down to value. If you can provide useful material in your book and you add the occasional reference to your opt in page or blog then book writing is a very useful strategy. I’d also recommend including a note at the beginning of the book to give the reader the rights to give away the book to create that viral capacity.
Not a fast writer? I write my books with Dragon Naturally Speaking 10. Simply talk into your headset and the software will transcribe for you. You can have the book done within the hour.
YouTube, the search engine with the most searches (even more than Google) yet a thousand times easier to rank for. Is it about time you started video marketing to the masses? I like to create videos from my article content to create as far wide reach as possible.
There seems to be this misconception that video marketing is difficult and time consuming. In a recent case study, I wrote a series of articles and had the video creation outsourced for under $10 at elance.com. Failing that, you could have your videos created automatically at articlevideorobot.com although the quality is somewhat hit and miss.
Personally I like to create my own videos using Camtasia and the PowerPoint plugin (free version available at camstudio.org). You can record your screen from within PowerPoint. Simply create a slide for each section you make in your article and freestyle the commentary. It’s wise to have a link back to your site within the video and within the description of the video box too.
When submitting your videos, try a free service called at tubemogul.com to submit your videos to a ton of different video sites – not just YouTube! This is another little tip to maximise exposure, and of course backlinks.
3. Podcast Directories
By simply taking the audio file of the video you’ve created in part 2, you can get exposure from podcast directories. Choose your keywords carefully and get in the habit of submitting to the major directories, namely: podcastdirectory.com, podcastalley.com and podfeed.net.
4. Article Marketing to Publishers
One of my favourite ways of driving traffic because it has the added bonus of a strong and varied backlink profile that does wonders for your PageRank and Google search listings. There are literally thousands of web sites out there that are happy to accept your content. From ezine newsletters to high profile news web sites.
To find them requires a bit of ingenuity. I like to download the SEOQuake plugin for Firefox (available from seoquake.com) and then do Google searches such as: niche + “guest post”
If the SEOQuake bar is on and active, you’ll then be able to sort the men from the boys by ordering the listings by PageRank. It’s also helpful to have the Alexa toolbar (from alexa.com) installed so you can roughly gauge the popularity of the results.
5. Cheap PPC Methods
Personally, I love driving traffic to my sites through free methods as opposed to paying for my traffic, but when I found out about this little strategy I simply had to check it out and take advantage of it.
Google Adwords is generally pretty expensive, but the big G has recently introduced new ways of advertising on the platform. By using image ads across the content network you can drastically cut down the cost per click. In fact, the last time I used it (a few months ago), I was averaging a little over 1 pence per click.
Affiliate marketers be warned – if you’re promoting poor quality sites with the sole purpose of making a buck or two then you’re running the risk of getting your account banned, so be careful.
Over the last couple of years I’ve dedicated my time to figuring out how to drive laser targeted traffic to my web sites and the results are paying dividends. My advice to you is to concentrate on one traffic strategy (article marketing, pay per click, joint ventures, video marketing etc) and get good at it. You’re much better off being 90% good at one thing than 10% good at everything. Once you master one, you can always start to look at another. Here is a list of 16 most powerful traffic sources to drive laser targeted visitors to your web site.
Unbeatable keyword research is important. If you have a blog or website and want to get ranked in the search engines, then you probably already know that proper keyword research is one of the most important things you can do. In fact, without it, you will find that you are relegated to the bottom of the search engine results and while you may have the best product or service in your niche, no one will be able to find you!
Here are 5 keyword research tips that will help get your site to the top of the Search Engine results:
1. Breaking Down Your Niche
Unless your chosen niche is a very small subniche of something else already, you’re going to want to take a look at a broad range of keywords in your overall niche to figure out where your site can best fit.
While you can eventually compete for broad terms like “weight loss”, “search engine optimization”, “dating”, “health insurance” etc… these larger keyword phrases are extremely competitive and it could take quite some time to make traction in the search engines. Therefore, it’s usually best to find some sub-niches within these areas where you can start to rank and get traffic in less time.
What you want to do is go to the google keywords tool and type in your broad keyword phrase. From the list of keywords that comes up, you will want to pick some sub niches that look interesting to you and match with what your site is about.
For example, when I searched on the main term “weight loss”, I came up with some interesting terms such as:
Healthy weight loss
Weight loss programs
Exercise for weight loss
Weight loss for men
Effective weight loss
Weight loss guide
Weight loss information
Now what you want to do is take each of the terms that seem interesting to you from this list and then type those into the keywords tool, to get even more keyword phrases. Make note of all the sub niches that have a good amount of keyword phrases in them and consider making those the focus of your website.
When doing so, pay attention to the amount of searches each phrase gets – it doesn’t make much sense to go after keywords that get only 10 searches a month! My advice is to set the “match type” (at the top right) to “exact” and weed out anything that gets less than 1900 searches a month.
2. Going Wide
Sometimes you have to think out of the box and investigate keyword phrases that don’t have your main keyword term within them. Think about your niche and try to come up with some related topics that people might be interested in.
Sometimes if you look at the very bottom of the results that you get with the google keyword tool, you can get some ideas from there. For example, in the weight loss niche, you might also consider researching keywords that have the root phrase exercise, plus size, fat loss etc…
Going wide with your keyword research can add value to your website as you will be able to address all the different issues that your visitors might want to know about.
3. Long Tail, Short Tail or Medium Tail?
If you’ve been around internet marketing for any length of time, then you’ve probably heard the term “long tail keywords”. These are simply keyword phrases that have more “words” in them. Internet marketers like them because they are very targeted and usually “buying” keywords meaning that the person searching for that phrase is looking to buy that item.
For example the long tail phrase “green tea weight loss supplements” would be great to target if you have a page that sells green tea weight loss supplements. The person typing that phrase into Google is in all likelihood looking to buy such a product and you can typically expect a high conversion rate.
The great thing about long tail keyword phrases is that they typically have little competition so you can easily rank for that keyword phrase. The bad thing about long tail keyword phrases is that they don’t usually get a lot of traffic. So, you need to include long tail, short tail and everything in between in your keyword research strategy. Personally I would not go for any keyword phrase that gets less then 1900 exact searches a month.
The long tail phrases will allow you to start getting traffic right away but unless you have a ton of them you won’t ever be able to get a significant amount of traffic just from the long tail. This is fine if you plan to have a bunch of small niche blogs that dribble in traffic, but if you plan to build an authority type site, then you will want to include the more competitive keywords too. The long tail keywords can help you build your site while you are waiting to rank for the more competitive terms.
4. Using Your Own Stats
If you are already getting some traffic to your blog, the best way to find out what people are looking for is to look right in your stats and see what keywords your site is being found for. Using this method, I’ve found quite a few keywords that were not uncovered by any keyword tool!
Looking at your stats can give you insight as to what your visitors want as well as what the search engines think your site is about and can spawn a whole new list of keyword ideas.
5. Sizing Up The Competition
Once you have your keyword list, you need to figure out if the keywords are worth putting effort into. This means checking out the other sites that rank for that keyword and trying to see if you can “beat” them.
Now there are a lot of ways to “check out” the competition. I know some people look in google for the keyword phrase in quotes and if there are less than 10,000 competing sites, they deem it worthy of adding to their list. Another thing you can do is type allintitle:”keyword phrase” into the Google search bar to see who is targeting the keyword phrase in the title.
While these will both give you an idea of the amount of pages that use that keyword and who is using onsite SEO for that phrase, I think that the best way to determine if you can rank in the top 3 spots is to just search for the keyword in Google (without quotes) and see who the top 10 ranking pages are now.
What you want to look for is the PR of the page, the age of the domain, the number of links to the page and the strength (or PR) of those links. Then you need to make some sort of determination as to whether or not you can do similar off-page SEO in order to rank your page for that term.
Finding the right keywords to target on your blog or website is the first crucial step in getting targeted organic traffic from the search engines. If you do this step correctly, you will start to see a steady stream of targeted traffic that just keeps growing and growing!
Guest author Lee Dobbins is a full time internet marketer that specializes in website development and promotion. Visit Website Promotion Blueprint for more on how to get targeted traffic to your blog and don’t forget to sign up for her FREE 10 Step Link Building Process Ebook and Spreadsheet that will help you organize your link building efforts and start a flood of traffic to your website. You can also write guest articles and share your SEO tips.
