Easy Social Promotion - Addmefast!


Today I’m going to introduce a website with you called Addmefast!

What is Addmefast?

Addmefast is free social exchange network which helps you grow your social presence. Currently thanks to Addmefast you can get more and more Facebook likes, Facebook subcriptions, Google circles, Google +1 , Twitter followers, YouTube views , YouTube channel subscription, YouTube Video likes , Pinterest followers, Soundcloud music listening, Digg followers, StumbleUpon followers and Website hits .

How to get started

If you have already registered and logged in, you can do the following steps:

You can add your pages/accounts/music videos/websites clicking on the green button '' Add Site/Page''. You have to choose a network type, input title (if necessary), then add the URL or username/ID and set CPC * (Cost (points) Per Click for your Site/Page - min=2 and max=10) and then click the save changes button. After this, the link you have added will appear in ''My sites'' section. If you want to pause campaign for one of your site/page - click on the pause button(CPC=0 automatically). If you want to start it again, you can click on the start button (CPC=5 automatically) and then change your CPC. You can delete the link that you have added whenever you want to take into consideration that the link that you have removed can't be added anymore by another user but you. You can add unlimited amount of links for any type of network.


How to get points
  • You can get free points by liking/following/viewing/subscribing/listening to the others pages/accounts/videos/profiles/music.
  • You can receive daily bonus points (100).
  • You can choose their affiliate programs to earn more free points. You can share your referral link where you want, you can also use "Share on Twitter" and "Share on Facebook" buttons to do it quickly on Facebook and Twitter. If new user(s) (coming from your referral link) registers on Addmefast network and becomes an active user(s) you earn 200 points for each. Anytime you can check your referral status here.
  • You can buy points via Paypal.


Services Offered By Addmefast:

 

Adding Your Sites / Pages to AddmeFast is easy and only takes seconds:


Earning Points is fast, easy and convenient, because you won't have to leave the addmefast member's site.


As you can see on the image above, you can earn up to 9 points for giving one Google +1 to another member's site. You can use these 9 points and get several +1's for your own site. The higher the number of points you are willing to give to another member for voting for your site, the faster the votes will come in.

In the beginning, I thought that it will take forever to get some votes. However, it only took about one hour to get 50 Google +1's and Facebook likes.

Of course, you can also buy points. This is a great option if you do not want to spend time visiting and voting for other member's sites.

All in all AddMeFast is a great service if you are looking for a cheap (Free) and FAST way to get tons of Facebook likes, Google+1, Twitter followers etc.


* The higher your Site's/Page's CPC, the more chance you have for it to be visible. You can add unlimited sites/pages, Add web page, or facebook, google plus, etc. pages. Increase your site/page media activity. Get more and more fans, followers and likes. All categories of site/page are allowed (cars, food, music, fanclub, artist, film) except adult content. All sites with the adult title, link or content will be disabled.

Additional information

Addmefast doesn't sell likes/subscriptions/followers/views/hits. 
Addmefast will never request for usernames or passwords of your social network accounts and will never post, tweet or update status from your accounts.

The information of your account will never be reachable for the third party unless you agree. Only In the case of selling any or all of our business to a third party your information may be shared.


For questions, further information, requests or comments please feel free to contact
Addmefast supports stuff via support centre.


Join AddMeFast Now! (It Is FREE + You Will Get 100 Points Instantly!) - 



Win an iPhone 4S at SEO Olympics 2012!


Dear Readers!

I've just discovered this in my G+ News feed.

SEO PowerSuite is offering an amusing contest program for search engine optimization professionals. It's a SEO contest dedicated to the Olympic Games. You can win iPhone 4S - if you don't have one yet.

The rules of the upcoming contests will show up in your email box on July 30, as well as on Facebook and Twitter channel, so hurry to join in. You'll be getting an email notice prior to each of the new contests - 5 over the two SEO Olympics weeks.

To get all the announcements, tips and hints first hand, as well as connect with the rest of your National SEO Team, make sure to follow us on Facebook and keep a close eye on our Twitter news:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/linkassistant
Twitter: http://twitter.com/seo_olympics

And don't forget, the more people join your team — the higher your chances to enter the draw and win. So call your friends and colleagues to join in and enter the first SEO Olympics day with a sure–winning team!

For join this contest program, click http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-olympics/register.html & register for collect your bonus points.

Hope you didn't miss this chance to grab 20 extra points to your Olympic score ever before the contests have started:
http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-olympics/personal.html

You may watch the scores here: http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-olympics/stats.html

White Hat Organic Search Engine Optimization Strategies





White Hat Organic Search Engine Optimization Strategies


In order to get more visitors to your website, and convert these visitors to buyers increasing the sales of your products or services, you need to be on the first page of search engines result pages. The big question now is. Are you on the first page? If your answer is NO, then we have all you need to get you there. We have developed and tested the best white hat organic search engine optimization strategies which guarantee your website a first page ranking on your chosen keywords. This strategy does not only get you to the top of the first page, but they also make sure that you stay at the top.

With more and more people relying on search engines like Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo and more for their everyday information and to find products and or services online, and with more than about 90% of them clicking on the links found on the first page of these search engines, you can't afford not to be on that first page if you want your website, product or service to be successful online. And our white hat organic SEO Strategies, which are based on years of development, research, tweaking and re-tweaking to meet every search engine algorithm change is just what you need to get a share of the thousands of visitors that click on links found on the first pages of search engines, and converting these visitors into potential and actual buyers for life. We base our SEO strategies to get the best results possible on:

1. Professional SEO Services
2. Organic SEO Services
3. Ethical SEO Strategies
4. Search Engine Marketing Services
5. Search Engine Optimization
6. Seo Marketing
7. Google Search Marketing
8. Search Marketing Company
9. Online Search Marketing
10. Digital Marketing Agency/Company

Professional SEO Services

We provide you with the most professional SEO services in the industry. For all your onsite and offsite search engine optimization needs, we have the most reliable, trustworthy and customer oriented services. Our expert search engine marketing professionals will work with you closely from the start to the end of each project, to make sure that you are happy with our services and to guarantee the best results possible. If you need to optimize your website to be more search engine and user friendly, that is making the most out of the keywords chosen for the website, while at the same time providing the best content which is readable and informative to your visitors, and then our professional digital marketing services are meant just for you. Also, if you are more interested in just some offsite SEO services so as to give your website and sales an added push to the top, then don't hesitate to contact us for a quote.

Organic SEO Services

With our many years of experience and research, we do not only pride ourselves with organic search engine optimization services that will get you on the first page for your chosen keywords on Google which is one of the world's widely used search engines, but our organic search engine optimization services will also take your website on the top of other search engines such as Baidu, the most used search engine in China and Asia, Bing-former MSN Bot and Microsoft's search engine, Yahoo and Ask and many other minor and local search engines for the same keywords.

Ethical SEO Strategies

Ethical SEO Strategies, also known as white hat SEO are search engine optimization strategies focused on short term and long term results, which follows all the major search engine's guidelines and requirements for website and webpage Online Search Marketing. These strategies, unlike black hat SEO strategies, are adored by all search engines, as such; your website will be more search engine friendly, thereby increasing your ranking on search engine result's pages. With our ethical SEO strategies, which has been tested over and over again, and adapted to changing search engine algorithm and guidelines over the years, and always coming out with positive results, your website's traffic and visitors is sure to skyrocket.

Search Engine Marketing Services

For years, SEM or Search Engine Marketing has been looked upon as the under lying block of many companies' online website marketing strategies. The logical reasoning behind this is that, when somebody searches for a particular word or words and your site shows up, that person is basically a potential visitor and a potential buyer of whatever product you are selling or services you are offering. But if your website is not found on search engines and search results, then you are missing out on a large amount of potential website traffic, which studies have shown is one of the most qualified as well as highest converting traffic online. With our Search Engine Marketing Services, we can simply be an extended part of your marketing department and can assure that your site gets seen by that hungry and thirsty visitor who searches for your targeted keywords, by blending our search engine marketing services into your other marketing objectives.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization generally abbreviated SEO is a process whereby a website's or webpage's visibility is improved in search engines' organic search results. There are basically two ways to optimize a site for better search results. Onsite SEO-involves working on the website's or webpage's content, Meta tag, Meta description, and image titles, descriptions and Others Meta tags to make them more search engine friendly and hence search engine optimized. Offsite SEO on the other hand involves more on the interaction of your site with other sites and generally through linking the site's pages to other website pages with related or unrelated content depending on some considerations such as page rank, and traffic rank. But to be frank, there isn't any magic solution or approach that works for all websites. That is why we will analyze your site, its pages and content, keywords as well as your competitor's so as to create a unique and well-informed strategy specifically for you to ensure your search engine optimization campaign is an utmost success.

Seo Marketing

Search engine optimization marketing or seo marketing is a process whereby a website or company focuses its marketing strategies on seo. This means that they entirely rely on higher ranking on search engine search results for potential sales. This can either be done through sponsored listings on specific search terms, or through organic search listings. We can save you time and money by doing all your seo marketing for you, while you just seat back relax and focus on taking orders and making your customers happy.

Google Search Marketing

With the many search engines out there, and with each of them pulling out new guide lines for webmasters to follow in order to get higher ranks in their search results, it becomes obvious that you have to choose what search engine to focus your efforts on. That is where (put your website name here) comes in, with a fully comprehensive Google search marketing campaign tailored to suit and please the biggest search engine with the highest user monthly and global searches. With our Google search marketing campaign, you will get your website's ranking focused particularly on Google. We will send you to top of both local Google search results, if your business is concentrated in a specific geographical location, and international search results, if you are more global. This is a one in all Google search engine solution for better ranking on Google.

Search Marketing Company

As a leading and specialized search marketing company, you can trust us with all your seo requirements. We have been around for a long while now, and the reason of our success as a search marketing company is the fact that we help our clients to generate a steady flow of traffic to their websites from search engines that they would never have imagined possible. Whether you are looking for a customized seo solution for your website or an offsite seo campaign to boost your traffic and sales, our team of highly experienced seo experts can help you get your website at the very top of search engine results. By integrating all our white hat seo strategies and innovations into your goals, we provide you with the perfect search engine marketing solution you need.

Online Search Marketing

While your marketing team focuses on your offsite marketing, let us focus on your online search engine marketing, since it is what we do best. We can easily intergrade into your company's marketing department to boost your company's visibility online, and hence increase traffic, and potentially increase sales. And all this will only cost about half or less than what you might spend on training your own online search marketing representative, not to mention that we are also experts in the field. So you will get a team of expert’s working day and night to make sure that you succeed online, And for far less than you can ever imagine. Request a quote now, to get an online search marketing campaign customized to your website's needs.

Digital Marketing Agency

The world is becoming a visual place. That is why we have put together a digital marketing agency, which is focused on optimizing your website for video searches and other related digital searches. With the ability of users to fine tuned their searches to specific kinds of information like videos or audios, it is primordial that your website is also optimized to be able to capture some of these fine tuned searches, And our digital marketing company do just that. Since many other seo service providers completely ignore these strategies, this means less competition in these searches and easy ranking for you at the top of the search results.

WordPress SEO - Another Definitive Guide By Yoast

The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For WordPress Sites

WordPress is one of the best, if not the best content management systems when it comes to SEO. That being said, spending time on your WordPress SEO might seem like a waste of time, it most definitely is not. Optimizing your site to the best practices outlined in this article will help you improve your rankings, gain more subscribers and have a better website in general.
As I take quite a holistic view on (WordPress) SEO, meaning that I think good SEO should be engrained in all aspects of your online marketing and PR, this guide covers quite a lot of ground and is therefor a long read. Check out the table of contents below for some quick jumping around.

Updates to this WordPress SEO article

This article has been kept up to date with the best practices for WordPress SEO since early 2008 and the release of WordPress 2.5, the most recent update was on March 28th, 2012, with WordPress version 3.3.1 being the most current release. The goal of this article is to let all the info of all the different articles I wrote about the topic, here and on other sites, fall into one big piece: the final WordPress SEO tutorial.
The first versions of this article were heavily based on using a plugin called HeadSpace and a series of other plugins. I've since released my own WordPress SEO plugin which replaces quite a few of those. That plugin has proven so powerful that sites like SearchEngineLand, The Next Web and Mashable now all use it. This WordPress SEO plugin is very stable and ready to use and this article now assumes you're using it.
If you're using another SEO plugin, like All in One SEO pack or Ultimate SEO, but would like to switch and make use of my free and extremely powerful SEO plugin, I've written a migration guide for you. It's a really easy process. If you're not using an SEO plugin yet, grab my WordPress SEO plugin and get going.
As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will continue to keep this article up to date with best practices. Be sure to subscribe to my WordPress & SEO newsletter to receive notification when I update this article.

Need your website reviewed?

If you need an outside look at your WordPress install, you might consider our Website Review. The results of this review contain a full report of improvements for your site, encompassing my findings for improvements in different key areas such as SEO to Usability to Site Speed & more. For the cost of €595 (which is less than $800!), you'll receive a report that represents a much larger value in turn-over and profit. Get it now!

Table of Contents

1. Basic WordPress SEO

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 are a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.
The first thing to change is your permalink structure. You'll find the permalink settings under Settings → Permalinks. The default permalink is ?p=<postid>, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the setting to /%postname%/:
Permalink Settings for WordPress SEO
To include the category, you select "Custom Structure" and change the value to /%category%/%postname%/. If you previously had ?p=<postid> as your permalink WordPress will take care of all the redirects for you. This is also true if you change from /%postname%/ to /%category%/%postname%/. If you change from any other permalink structure, you might want to consult my article on changing your WordPress permalink structure and the tool that you'll find within it.
1.1.2. WWW vs non-WWW
You need to think about what you want your site to show up as, www.example.com or simply example.com. Make sure that in your general settings, under Settings → General, the version you want to show up is properly reflected:
List your site with or without WWW for WordPress SEO
You will also want to set this correctly in Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure to set up your site with Google Webmaster Tools and set the preferred domain, you can find this setting under Settings → Preferred domain:
Google Webmaster Tools Preferred Domain
1.1.3. Stop Words
The last thing you'll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is remove so called stopwords. Words like "a", "and", "the" etc. As of version 1.1.6, my WordPress SEO plugin 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.
This is generally not something you want to change after posts have gone live. If people have already linked to it, try to not change the permalink anymore and if you do, make sure the post is properly redirected. In most cases WordPress should redirect the old URL to the new one but if it doesn't you need to make the redirect manually.

1.2. Optimize your Titles for SEO

The title, the contents of your page's <title> tag,  is one of the single most important factors for ranking in the search results. Not only is it the literal title of the tab or browser window, it's also the first line people see in the search results, followed by the URL and the snippet, usually the meta description combined with a date:
WordPress SEO  result snippet
On many blogs, the title for blog posts is still "Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title" or "Blog title » 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.
This means the ideal title for that plugin page on WordPress.org would actually be "WordPress SEO by Yoast > WordPress Plugins > WordPress" instead of what it is now. 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.
1.2.1. Controlling titles with the WordPress SEO plugin
You can control your SEO titles with my WordPress SEO plugin. There are two parts of the plugin that control these. First of all, as soon as you install & activate the plugin, you get an SEO section in your admin. Navigate to SEO → Titles and you'll see so called Title Templates (as well as meta description templates but we'll get to those later). For my site they look like this:
Title Templates for the WordPress SEO plugin
There's a bunch of variables you can use in the titles and meta description, they're all listed and explained on the bottom of the settings page. Be sure to check whether the template actually works and you're not getting a duplicate site title for instance. If this is the case, you might need to check the "Force rewrite" checkbox on the same page or follow the instruction on that page to modify your template.
For the other pages, I have the following settings:
  • Categories, Tags and other taxonomies: %%term_title%%  Archives %%page%% &#8226; %%sitename%%
  • Search pages: You searched for %%searchphrase%% &#8226; %%sitename%%
  • 404 pages: Page not found - Error 404 &#8226; %%sitename%%
  • Author archives: %%name%% &#8226; %%cf_role%% at %%sitename%%
The last one shows you a very cool feature: you can use %%cf_<custom field name>%% to use a custom field, this can be either a post custom field, sometimes known as post meta value, or a user meta value. In this particular case it's the custom field "role" I use to store the role of a user within my company.
1.2.2. Optimizing individual posts
So now that we've set decent templates, we can start to optimize individual posts and pages. For that we use the snippet preview added by the WordPress SEO plugin:
snippet preview from the WordPress SEO plugin
This preview will automatically take the values you've already filled in in your blog post and apply them to your template, but you can also override the title completely using the title field just below it:
Title field in the WordPress SEO plugin
If you hit the Generate SEO title button on the right it will pre-fill that field with a title based on your template which you can then adjust, or you can write one completely by yourself. The counter will show you how many characters you've got left.
For titles the following things are important:
  • They should always contain your brand, preferably at the end, so people may recognize you in consecutive searches.
  • They should always contain the keyword you think is most important for the current post or page, which we'll call the focus keyword from now on. The focus keyword should preferably be at the beginning of the title.
  • The rest of the title should entice people to click.

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

Now that we've got proper titles, we should start to focus on meta descriptions. The meta description can be used by search engines to show in the snippet, it's the black piece of text shown beneath the URL. The meta description is usually only used when it contains the keyword the searcher was searching for.
Some plugins, most specifically the All in One SEO plugin, use so called "automated descriptions". They use the first sentence of a post to fill the meta description by default. That's not very smart. That first sentence might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject.
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).
So, use the meta description field you find in the WordPress SEO plugin to write a meta description. Make sure it entices the reader to click through and make sure that it contains the focus keyword of your post or page at least once.
You'll notice I do not mention meta keywords. I don't use them and neither should you, for an explanation, read this: meta keywords and why I don't use them.

1.4. 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:
SEO Friendly Images settings example
Using the proper alt attributes for images is also something that is checked in the Page Analysis functionality of my WordPress SEO plugin.

1.5. XML Sitemaps

To tell Google and the other search engines that your site has been updated, you can use XML Sitemaps. My WordPress SEO plugin contains an XML Sitemap module by default that you just have to enable. Go to Settings → XML Sitemaps and click the checkbox:
XML Sitemaps
As soon as you've checked the checkbox and hit Save, it'll give you some options but in most cases you won't need those. It generates an XML sitemap for all your posts, pages, custom post types and all your taxonomies like categories and tags and (if applicable) other custom taxonomies.
When you publish a new post or page, the XML sitemap is automatically submitted to Google & Bing allowing them to easily (and quickly) find your new content.

2. Template Optimization

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 the breadcrumbs from my WordPress SEO plugin. You find the settings for the breadcrumbs in the SEO → Internal Links settings page.

2.2. Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an <h1>, 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>. Your sidebar shouldn't be crammed with <h2> and <h3>'s either etc.
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 and my article about the Heading Structure for your Blog (from which a lot applies to non-blog WordPress sites too).

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 three things to increase the speed of your WordPress.
  1. 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.
  2. Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend W3 Total Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.
  3. W3 Total Cache works even more magic when combined with a CDN like MaxCDN. Read more about WordPress CDN stuff here.
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 use VPS.net myself, and they've proven to be better than most everything I've seen in hosting, but I've got great experience with Page.ly too. If you want to know more be sure to read my article about WordPress hosting.

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.

2.6. HTML Sitemaps

For some sites an HTML sitemap might be nonsense, especially when your site is really a blog, for more corporate type sites with several levels of pages an HTML Sitemap might actually be very beneficial for both users and search engines. I've written an article on how to create an HTML Sitemap Page Template which would be a good start to get one going for your WordPress site.

2.7. Author highlighting

If you've found my site through a search you might have seen that results from my site get an author image in front of them:
rel author - Google Search
This is called an "author highlight". Most of the work needed for that has to be done in your theme, I wrote an extensive post on what is needed and how you can do that: rel=”author” and rel=”me” in WordPress.

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:
  1. date based
  2. category based
  3. 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/<author-name>/, 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 and disable some archives

Using the WordPress SEO plugin, make sure to prevent indexing of archive pages that do not apply for your site. You do this under SEO → Indexation, where you'll find the following options:
Indexation Settings WordPress SEO Plugin
The settings above are the settings for my site. As you can see, I've completely disabled the date based archives, as I don't use those. Any date based link will redirect to my homepage because of this setting. I've left all other archives untouched, but I have checked the top checkbox, which makes the subpages of those archives be noindex, follow by default. So you'll never land on page 2 of an archive on my site from the search engines.
On smaller sites it might make sense to noindex either the category or the tag structure, but in my experience noindexing those on yoast.com does little to no change at all.
There is one type of archive that is noindex,follow by default as well in the WordPress SEO plugin: the search result pages. This is a best practice from Google for which a setting is left out as you should just have that anyway.
A lot has changed in how Google handles paginated archives recently when they introduced their support for rel="next" and rel="prev" links. I've written an article about that: rel="next" and rel="prev" for paginated archives, which is a bit too technical to fully list here, but suffice to say my WordPress SEO plugin takes care of all the needed changes automatically.

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don't think you need author archives, use WordPress SEO to disable the author archives. Also, if you don't think you need a date based archive: disable it as I have. 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, in fact, there are several plugins that deal with this. My favorite one by far is WP-PageNavi, maintained by Scribu, one of the best WordPress developer around. If you have the Genesis Theme, you can just enable numeric navigation under Theme Settings → Content Archives.

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. WordPress SEO automatically nofollows all your login and registration links, but you really shouldn't have a login link in your template in most cases.

3.5. Canonical

In february 2009, the major search engines introduced the rel="canonical" element. This is another utility to help fight duplicate content. WordPress has built-in support for canonical link elements on single posts and pages, but it has some slight bugs in that. It doesn't output canonical links on any other page. With my WordPress SEO plugin activated, you automatically get canonical link elements for every page type in WordPress.

4. A site 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!
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 are quite a few related posts plugins but I tend to stick with the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin or custom code in my own theme. A very good alternative is Microkid's related post plugin, which lets you manually pick related posts. This might cost a bit more time before you hit publish but might very well be worth your while.
There are also a lot of plugins that will automatically link certain keywords to certain posts. I do not like this at all as I find it to look very spammy.

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 MailChimp, 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 my own comment redirect 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 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 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. Note that some people think this is spam, and that laws in several countries might prohibit the use of this. I can't tell you, because I'm not a lawyer.
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. Measuring Results

A good SEO campaign relies on not only implementing changes but also measuring the impact of those changes, seeing what works and doing more of that. Two great Analytics packages to measure results are Google Analytics and getClicky. For both of these Analytics packages I've written plugins, my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin and my getClicky plugin.
You can also measure results by tracking rankings, the problem with rank tracking though is that it's hard to determine "real" rankings because of personalized and localized search results. Really the best outcome of being great at WordPress SEO is to get more traffic.
Another great source of data is Google Webmaster Tools. One of the relatively simple tricks I always give people is the following:
  • go into Webmaster Tools;
  • go to "Your site on the web", then "Search queries".
  • Click on "Download this table".
  • Open the CSV file you get in Excel.
  • Replace all the instances of "<10" in the Clicks column with 9.
  • Select the entire first row and click the filter button, usually the icon is a funnel:
    filter icon
  • For the average position column, choose "greater than 5", sort Ascending.
  • Then for the "Clicks" column, sort Descending.
You now have the keywords people are finding you for in the results pages where you rank below #6. The fact that they clicked on your result proves that they found your result interesting: see if you can optimize any of those terms so you'll rank higher than a #6 average rank: use the Page Analysis in my SEO plugin to improve the page, improve the copy, ask others to link to you, etc. Be sure to read my article about cornerstone content as well.

9. Conclusions on WordPress SEO

This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your WordPress site. 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 and create great and compelling content in the process.
If you want to keep updated on the latest news about WordPress, and hear more tips as I come up with them, then subscribe to my WordPress newsletter right now. If you need help implementing all the tips in this article, or want me to review whether you've done a good job implementing it all, order a website review!

Original Article by Joost de Valk

Strategy, Process & Life Cycle - Grassroots SEO!


Below you'll find the basic layout of your 6-12 month campaign, starting with what's in your SEO strategy. Let's start with milestones. You can put your milestones into a Google Spreadsheet in bold, font 24. Paste items in between milestones respectively, as you grow in your understanding of SEO best practices and techniques.
You can also use project management tools, such as TeamWorkLive.com or Basecamp, both of which allow you to calendar your milestones and create assignable task lists beneath them.

Milestone 1 - Your SEO Strategic Plan (1 Month)
You are going to get to hundreds of ideas and tools thrown at you for keyword research, spying on competitors, finding link opportunities and elements to consider when planning your SEO campaign. Problem is, most presenters don't actually say "okay, add these line items to your research to-do list, phase 1 of 5 in your holistic SEO strategy", they just say "here's some stuff you can do".
What's in Your SEO Plan?
Below is a list of reports and actionable lists to carry over to your project management system (or spreadsheet). The planning phase can take up to a month, but will save you a lot of time and frustration later in the campaign. Remember, this is boilerplate, so you can squeeze in new research and data-mining tasks you pick up from events. Isn't it nice to have a place to start putting the "stuff"?
  1. Obstacle Analysis Report (OAR) - This report will help you discover potential crawl and indexing issues. It has little to do with content, and is mostly focused on how search engine-friendly a website is. Criteria might include: checking for broken links and duplicate content, analyzing HTML and XML sitemaps, optimizing robots.txt and .htaccess files, to help crawlers get to the content you want indexed and away from the content you don't. The OAR might also include a review of Webmaster Tools, an audit from your seomoz.org campaign, and possibly data from similar online tools. Basically, your on-page "stuff" goes here.
  2. Competitor Analysis Report (CAR) - This is your baseline report, your Day 1, your "aha" moment, where you get to discover some exciting things about your competition, and some occasionally depressing things about your current SEO performance. Having access to Hitwise is the most ideal starting point (if you can afford it). If not, tools such as Compete.com, SEMRush, KeywordCompetitor, and OpenSiteExplorer.org can give you really nice insight into where your competitors are earning links, what keywords they are getting traffic from (AdWords and natural search), and even tell you how much more money they spent on specific keywords last month versus the month prior (a keyword performance indicator). For local businesses, WhiteSpark's Local Citation Finder does a darn good job of finding competitor business citations and sorting them by seomoz.org's own Domain Authority for easy prioritizing.
  3. Link Analysis Report (LAR) - This report is fun. Using tools like those in the seomoz.org arsenal, or possibly giving Ontolo a spin, you'll be seeking out and creating an organized inventory of link opportunities. Categorize your opportunities by classifications such as: Web Directory, Business Directory, Industry Blog, Regional Blog, Industry Portal, Industry Forum, Industry Experts, Niche Social Networks, and so forth. From here you have a few choices of how to store the information. I prefer Buzzstream, an Eric Ward-approved link tracking software, but Google Docs will do the job as well. If you do use a Google spreadsheet, break your classifications into their own tabs or link building becomes unmanageable.
  4. Keyword Discovery Report (KDR) - You'll already have a boatload of data from the first three reports to help with this, possibly the most important, report. You can also explore a number of other tools to help tally up all the keyword opportunities. WordTracker and Google AdWords will provide some excellent ideas, but nothing will beat what you'll find in your own web analytics and Webmaster Tools (provided you are actually tracking conversions and/or sales). With competitor data, you can run pivot tables in Excel to learn about the frequency of keywords the major competitors appear to be receiving traffic from. Purge out the terms that are too broad or not searched enough to be bothered with, sort by relevancy and search volume and you've got yourself a list of keywords to optimize for.
Now that you have all this terrific data, what the heck do you do with it? Here's where actionable items or deliverables come into play.
  1. Put your OAR items into a To-Do List within your project management system (under the milestone of On-Page SEO)
  2. Put your CAR items into a Google spreadsheet so you can track and monitor changes over time
  3. Put your LAR classifications into one or more To-Do List within your project management system (under the Off-Page SEO milestone), put the opportunities into a spreadsheet or Buzzstream
  4. Put your KDR into a Google Docs spreadsheet, create a new tab called Content Tracking Spreadsheet with a column for just the top 100 or so keywords, and create columns to track Page Name, Title, Meta Description, Has Video?, Image Name, Image Attributes, Has 450+ words of Content? Matt Cutts Didn't Throw Up, Is Engaging? etc. In your PM system, your content writing tasks can be assigned (put the list under the On-Page SEO milestone)
Now that the technical stuff is done, you get to start the creative and social media campaign planning. Pull a group of super smart people into a room for a full day and come out with awesome link bait, widget, tools/giveaways, and other creative link building strategies to add under your respective milestones.
Milestone 2 - On-Page SEO (2 Months)
There are thousands of smart (and sometimes silly) things you can do to optimize your website. You already have a To-Do List assigned in your project management system to square away OAR findings, and a To-Do List for your content team based on the keyword themes you want to optimize for. This initial phase of your SEO shouldn't take more than 60-90 days and typically isn't rocket science.
You're going to get all sorts of new ideas from the seomoz.org blog, Search Engine Land, SEO Roundtable, and thousands of Tweets if you follow #seo in Twitter. Therefore, if you're using a project management system, your template will be growing and growing over time.
Local and Ecommerce websites will have a few special To-Do Lists for data feed optimization, location-based landing pages, and a few other things you might extract from David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors or elsewhere.
Milestone 3 - Off-Page SEO (3 Months for the Basic Tasks, 6 for Moderate)
Mike Essex wrote an excellent post awhile back on 99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away. I also like to use my Meetup.com group to have everyone provide 1-3 creative link building ideas to everyone who requests ideas, along with some crowd-sourcing tools, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and similar services. Choose the top ideas based on the business and industry and add them to an Advanced SEO To-Do List in your project management system. You will definitely need to create several project briefs for each idea so it makes sense to the tech and marketing teams.
I keep a Google spreadsheet going that has nearly 400 link building opportunities now (thank you Eric Ward).
You'll also have a list for Basic Link Building (industry destinations and directories), Moderate Link Building (outreach, and slightly more technical than submission-based linking). Advanced link building tasks are really more of an initiative and can be tracked outside of the the project management system as ongoing marketing innovation.
Milestone 4 - Social Media Optimization (1 Month for Setup)
This milestone gets a bit tricky and requires getting in bed with those crazy socialmedia people we all love. Perform an audit of all the current destinations our SMM teams are working with and insure they all contain relevant keywords, profile links, and (if location-based) business name, address, and phone number.
Next, seek out new social media opportunities, such as niche social destinations, popular social networks that have not been claimed yet (Google+ might be a good start). You might even buy lunch for the social team, and then try to give them training on how to blog with keyword-rich links every so often. If their eyes start going crazy as if you fed them after midnight, run away and try again another day. If not, train your social team, in distributing content, video, and micro-blogging to give you a serious lift in ranking. The trick is to make them think it was all their idea.
Milestone 5 - Video & Mobile (2 Months for Setup)
Technically, you can break video and mobile into two different milestones. But for the sake of the novel this post has become, let's bundle them together. For video, I recommend having a quick chat or consult with a pro, such as Mark Robertson of ReelSEO on campaign, channel and distribution ideas. Get ready to setup some video XML sitemaps and to start distributing video to relevant sharing networks. Also be prepared to start using video ads (PPC), which may help long term placement on key YouTube videos.
For mobile, you'll want to slip ONE task in for Milestone 2, insuring your mobile users have a custom experience that's mind-blowing and award winning. The rest will revolve around the creation of mobile apps for your products, mobile search optimization, and possibly even a few short code campaigns. We love Vegas, so I'm always excited to get my MB SMS offers from Mandalay Bay).
I've Completed My Milestones, Now What?
If you get through all the milestones (6-12 months on average - some might overlap, but they don't have to), your project management system should be empty of tasks. If so, you're no longer in Production Mode, you're now in Operations Mode and need only use your link and campaign tracking tools (here's a sample) for your day-to-day SEO initiative. However, you may elect to start over and repeat the entire process annually, depending on the results from the first round.
Now you have 5-6 vehicles of SEO in an organized form. You may decide to create a page for each milestone on your yellow notepad when you attend SEO conferences and events. If a presenter gives you some cool "stuff" to do, you should be able to easily classify the task into one of these buckets, so later you can update your project management template, as though you were putting another piece into a seemingly endless puzzle; which beats the heck out of creating scribble for your crumble ball with beautiful coffee rings on it.

Article First Posted on  - seomoz