Know SEO Blog » wordpress

Link Building.. What are trackbacks and Pingbacks?

Jimmy — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:29:14 +0000

A trackback and a pingback are essentially the same thing, so I’m not going to go into the difference. All I’ll say is that the trackback is the older method and the pingback is the newer. What it does is inform other blog owners that you are linking to their page in a post. Sometimes, this will get you a link on the blog owners post page.

If you have ever seen, under the comments sections, something that says TRACKBACK or PINGBACK, these comments are automated. If you pingback a blog owner, often times they elect to automatically link back to the page that linked to them. These pingbacks can be very valueable and I highly recommend that you take advantage of them.

Anytime that you cite another blog, if you link to it, you can have WP send the pingback. You can turn this option on under Settings/Discussion. Although the link back will be recipricol, if you get a successful trackback/pingback, it will often be from a blog that has more link weight than you do. Recipricol links are not as good as one way links. They are however, still valueable expecially if the other site is more respected than yours.

Making your Blog Comments Count – get them indexed!!

Jimmy — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:19:09 +0000

Today’s post is going to be on the art of aquiring links through blog comments. Blog commenting is not fun, so I’m going to show you how to get the most out of your blog comments and links. I’m sure that many of you have had the experience of blog commenting, waiting for the links to roll in, and then they never hit google. What a waste right? Hopefully after reading this this will not happen to you again.

So our objective is to get all of the comments that we have made noticed by google bot so we can pick up our sweet links. If you simply post a comment, then there is a reasonable chance that search engines will never pick it up. The solution is to gently guide the search engines to check out those links. I’m going to give you a quick easy way to do this. Please, be creative and try different ways to make this work for you.

1. First thing to do is to make a list of all of the pages that you made a comment on. If you make a comment, and it goes through, save the link in a notepad document.

2. Now sign up for an account at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start a blog. Now write a post that includes links to all of the comment pages that you saved.

3. Now sign up for an account at digg.com. Now submit your wordpress or blogger post that has the links to digg.

That is all there is to it. If all goes well your digg page will be indexed quickly. It will spit google bot out at your free blog, and your blog will spit google out to all of the links that have your comments on them. Now I’m not saying that this is a fool proof method or 100% successful. This method can however be applied in a number of different ways boosting its effectivness.

Note: Don’t use your own blog to post links to the comments you made. You’ll be turning your 1 way links into recipricol links and screwing up the link weight.

Submit your RSS feeds for more traffic. Links Included

Jimmy — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:14:25 +0000

Ok, this post will be short and sweet. To generate some more traffic to your site, why not submit your RSS feed. I’m making it quick and easy for you. All of the links below are quick, 1 step submission sites to make it extra easy. By submitting your RSS feeds to all the links below, you will notice more bot traffic checking your pages. This should get you listed in more databases and search engines, which can eventually equal more links and traffic. Here is the easy list:

And don’t forget to sign up on technorati and claim your blog. I got the links above from this link. The above are the live links under submit blog and blog rss feeds that don’t require you to sign up to submit a url. If you have the time, try all the links on the page, make accounts at all the sites and submit your RSS everywhere.

Don’t let spam scare you. Keep your comments on!

Jimmy — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:17:35 +0000

This post is meant to dissuade your from automatically shutting down your comments and trackbacks as some out there would have you do. Now I will admit that setting up a blog does leave you open to virtual harassment by spammers, but you don’t need to make your blog “air-tight” to allow it to succeed.

Really what you are dealing with is “Free-speech” and it is a doubled edged sword to the blogger. By allowing comments you allow interaction with readers and by allowing trackbacks you allow interaction with other blogs. While this is all well and good, this interaction can often be a nuissance to big sites, but will rarely keep you tied up with a site that is growing.

Not only do I recommend that you allow comments, I suggest that you allow users to link back to their website. Now I know that some are scratching their heads, saying “why would I allow a competitor to put a link on my site?” Believe it or not, this will benefit you in the long run. First, those blog owners who are in your niche and just starting out need links and they know it. Because of that they are usually motivated to leave thoughtful relevant comments in hopes that the blog owner will allow it. Getting a discussion going in comments is a good thing, and a good way to get someone to bookmark your site. Sometimes they are not even interested in your site, but they are interested in seeing responses to their comments. If you don’t allow users to link back to their site, you are repelling good comments.

If you are attracting blog owners who are leaving legitamate comments, then visit their site and do the same.

ADVANCED STRATEGY:

If you know PHP or a scripting language, then you can automate this process. Run a CRON job, that goes through your comments everyday saving urls from comments. If the page is a blog, go to most recent post page and leave a comment saying:

“I enjoyed this post, great blog you have here. Thanks for the visit to my site!”

or something stupid that has a good chance of getting through moderation.

A lesson on Keywords

Jimmy — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:45:14 +0000

This post is more for beginners and deals with selecting good titles to use in your blog posts. If you typically blog about news, celebrities, sports, music, or anything popular than chances are you can generate more traffic by picking better titles to use.

Just as an easy example, lets say you write an article about the death of “Popstar X”. Because there will be tons of competition in the form of other blogs writing on the same topic, you need to be picky about your title.

“Pop-Star X Dies” – is not going to work.

“Legendary Performer Pop-Star X dies suddenly” – is much better.

Because the big sites will pick up the traffic for “Pop-Star X”, you need to include interesting and relevant keywords in your title to pick up some search engine traffic. Also, if the news is breaking, vary the title more drastically and get your post up ASAP. There is some value in getting your post indexed first.

In general, because your site is small whenever you go for a keyword try to think about what terms you can add to make the kw more specific but still relevant.

Also, if you have All-in-1 SEO installed, then your tags are also marked as meta-keywords. If you have a unique take on some breaking news, make sure that you use the tags to your advantage.

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Get Indexed Ever FASTER!!

Jimmy — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:38:46 +0000

This is an expansion on Get your blog indexed by google fast!!

For this technique you need an existing site, hopefully a blog to use (some of this will work without an existing site – keep reading). It is really not that difficult, but I classify it as an intermediate technique because you have to already have a site.

An existing blog works perfect for this because the front page is constantly changing, and constantly getting crawled by search engines. To make this work, in step 3 in the last post you compile a list of 5-10 blogs that you can comment on. Now what you want to do is save all of the urls from the pages that you commented on. You can also click on the comments page and get that seperate url. If you want to be really sneaky, grab the RSS feeds from the comments and save urls from those.

If you have a blog and you don’t care about a shameless out of place post, then write a post that has hyperlinks to all the pages (not the feeds) that you want indexed, and add your new site to the blog roll. If you have a respectible site, then add your site to the the blog roll, and add the links discretely to the blog roll also. The idea is to get the pages that you want indexed and followed on the front page of your blog. Keep the link to your new site in the blogroll so it stays on your page for a while. Delete the links to the comment pages off your blog roll, or delete the post that you put them in after a week.

You can do this part without an existing blog. Do this at your own risk…

Now what to do with those RSS feeds? I don’t think anyone would mind if you used a ping service on the feed. I don’t want you to abuse any one service, so just search for “blog ping” and use something that comes up. Don’t go abusing the servers because you can get your ip banned for exessive use. Send 5 out over 5 different servers, wait 20 mins and send the last 5 out and you should be fine.

Get your Blog Indexed by Google FAST!!

Jimmy — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:42:27 +0000

Ok, so you have set up your blog, configured it correctly and now you are ready to start attracting traffic. The first step is to get your pages indexed by google and the other search engines. You are however, one lonely site in the middle of cyberspace and noone knows about you. We will change all of that.

We will use a 3 step approach to getting indexed quickly. You should already have your blog set up for SEO and need to have 2 plugins installed: Google XML Sitemap and MetaBlogPress Ping Optimizer. If that is not done then read this first.

1. Compile a sitemap with the Google XML plugin. Then, start an account at Google Webmaster Tools. You can use your gmail login if you have a gmail account. After you login, click add a new site.

To verify using a Meta-Tag is easy. Copy the tag that google gives you. Go to WP-Admin, then settings, then All-in-one SEO. At the bottom, paste the google Meta-Tag in “additional home headers” and update the info. Click verify on Google Webmaster Tools and you are done!!

Now we need to tell google about your sitemap. On Google WT click on Site Configuration and then Sitemaps. When you are on that page, click on Submit a sitemap. Now in the box that comes up after yourdomain.com/ type in sitemap.xml and click submit. Now we are done with that.

2. Next we are going to use the power of Digg.com. Start an account with Digg, and write a page about one of your posts. Although you may never get traffic from Digg, their pages are indexed very fast and if everything goes correct, the Digg page with your link on it will also be indexed fast, pointing google’s little spider right to your blog. You may also want to claim your blog at Technorati, set up a Squido-Lens, or start a profile on a social networking site and leave a link for your blog.

3. Now we are going to have to use our brains on this one. Think about what terms people may use to get to your blog. Search for blogs similar to yours that are popular. Compile a list of 5-10. Now everyday for the next few days, you are going to post a comment on all of those blogs linking back to your website.

That is about it. You also want to write one or two posts a day to get your RSS feed noticed.

How to Optimize a New WordPress Installation

Jimmy — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:54:50 +0000

This post lays out some quick and easy things you can do to make your WP Blog search engine friendly. So here goes:

After installing, log into your wp-admin page. If you installed with Fantastico or by some automated process, there is a good chance that it is not the latest version. If you see a notice on your WP dashboard, the first thing that you should do is update to the new version.

Next, start with the Settings button and carefully go through all of the options. Fill out everything that you can. If you don’t understand something you can skip over it. Here are a few important things to change.

Under writing, at the bottom replace your update service with this:

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

Next under Privacy, change the option so search engines can find you.

Now click on Perma-links. For this you have several options. What is important is that you have the post-name in the link. Select either Day and name, month and name, or ideally you can do the following custom structure:

/%category%/%postname%/

This will display the links showing the category and the postname and is the way that this site has been set up.

Now you need to download several different plug-ins to get started. If you don’t know how to install a plug-in, then go here.

Here are the Plugins that I recommend you start with:

All-in-One SEO Pack

Google XML Sitemaps

MaxBlog Press Ping Optimizer

Askimet Spam Protection – This may be included in your WP install

Download these plugins and configure them. All-in-one SEO is self explanitory. Just activate the plug in and fill out the first 3 fields.

Google XML Sitemap you have to go to settings and compile the sitemap manually the first time. Your sitemap will be yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer is a pain in the butt to register, but it is worth the hassle. This plugin keeps your blog from making excessive pings to RSS feed directories to avoid having your site banned.

Askimet usually comes with WP, so just activate the plugin, get a WP API key and you are good to go. This stops spam comments and is a must.

That should be enough to get you started, more to follow…

Installing a WordPress Plug-in 2/2

Jimmy — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 03:33:03 +0000

First read Installing a WP Plug-in 1/2

Ok now we are ready to activate the plug-in. First sign into your WordPress Dashboard. On the left hand side at the bottom click on Plugins. Locate the All-in-One Seo Pack and click on “Activate”

More or less all plug-ins are installed in this manner, so for any future plug-ins follow the above steps. Once a Plugin is installed, they can usually be configured from the Settings Menu.

To configure the All-in-one SEO Pack, click on Settings and then “All-in-1 seo” There are really only3 things we are concerned with. First turn the Plug-in on.

Next fill out the Home Description. This is for Meta-tags that search engines pick up. Google will usually use the description you put here to explain your webpage in the rankings.

Now fill out the Home Keywords. Think about what a user would search for to find your blog. If you have a niche make sure to include that in your keywords. Don’t go crazy, 5 or 6 keywords seperated by commas will do.

Home Title uses the Title of your blog if you don’t fill anything out. All of the other settings can be left as is. If you want to experiment go ahead.

Now that you know how to install a plug-in, the next article will be on how to set-up a clean install of wordpress. Even if you have had your blog for quite some time, it is a good idea to make some of the changes suggested.

Installing a WordPress Plug-in 1/2

Jimmy — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 03:03:48 +0000

One of the first things you have got to learn to be a WordPress blogger if how to install a Plug-in. To make your blog search engine friendly the easy way, install plugins that do all of the work for you!

I have learned is that it is always best to set the blog up correctly before you get traffic. Changing the structure afterward can sometimes mess with your rankings. The next lesson is going to be on how to optimize a new install of WordPress. To do this, you need to know how to install plug-ins first.

Here are some things that you need to install a plug-in:

1. FileZilla – a FTP client used to send the plugin to your host

download here for free – Click on download under FileZilla

Or any other FTP client

2. FTP login information – If you don’t know what your FTP information is then e-mail your hosting provider. First try to login using your Cpanel login and password to ftp.yourdomain.com.

3. All in One SEO Pack Plugin – We might as well install something useful.

download here for free – click on Download Now

Download and install FileZilla. Download the all in one seo pack and unzip the file. To make it easy, unzip the file to c:\plugins

Now open FileZilla. On the column on the left click my computer, c:\plugins to get to your unziped plugin. On the top type ftp.yourdomain.xxx in the host, and then your user name and password.

After you are logged in, look for a directory on the ride side called wp-content. If you cannot find it then look for a directory called public-html click on it, and then search for wp-content. After you are in wp-content search for plugins. Click on that directory. Now drag the contents of your c:\plugins diretory to the window on the right. Now your files are copied to your server!

Next post explains the rest

Installing a WordPress Plugin Continued….