Here’s an on-page optimization tip for your Wordpress driven blog. Click on one of your posts…is your blog’s name the first thing listed? If so, that probably isn’t optimal for internet marketing purposes. But no fear, changing the title tag to something more SEO-friendly is simple. In your WP backend go to Presentation->Theme Editor-> and select the “header” theme file. (Just so you don’t nuke your site, I’d make and save a backup copy in notepad or something)

Here you can change the information (and its order of appearance) between <title> and </title>.

*Note: Sometimes you cannot edit these theme files because they are locked. In this case you’ll need to FTP a copy to your hard drive, edit it there, and FTP overwrite it back on the server.

As far as what to include and how to order it, I’d suggest the following:

1) Make your blog post name show up first. That way you are spitting out all kinds of new information (hopefully) relevant to the theme of your blog. The search engines weigh the information closest to the beginning of the title tag the most, so make your titles count.

2) Next, add a phrase with keywords relevant to your site or theme. This is totally optional but it’s nice to have your targeted keywords included in the title tag. For example, if your site is designed to help people find truck driving jobs, set it up like: “Blog Post Name Here - Truck Driving Jobs - Blog Name Here”

3) Finally, include the Blog name. Gotta give some love to your site, right?

This method of on-page optimization for your WP blog ensures that the information at the beginning of your title tag (which, again, is weighted most heavily) is new for each post. Otherwise you are wasting that precious space by filling it with something static in every post, like your blog’s title.

Do you use a Wordpress blog as an internet marketing tool? If not, go start one and come back later, and if you do, read on. How would you like to bump up your page rank on that Wordpress blog with a simple plugin?

I can’t guarantee results, but here’s the logic behind it. Oftentimes people will link to a domain name by typing something like “turnsharp.com” instead of “www.turnsharp.com“. Wordpress is smart enough to accept both. But, you want to make sure that a singular domain is getting credit from the search engines for both www and non-www backlinks. If it isn’t, your domain may be treated as two sites and your page rank will be split between the two. Which is, obviously, not good.

Some argue that Google has fixed this problem, but I’m not convinced. And anyways, it’s better to be safe than sorry, right? One solution is a Wordpress Redirection plugin created by the foul-mouthed genius, Dax “the Hammer” Herrera, found on the WebGuerrilla site. This will redirect traffic and ensure that you won’t have a split page rank problem.

There seems to be a lot of confusion amongst internet marketing newbies about meta tags and title tags. Just browsing the web I can sense their anxiety…so with that in mind I’d like to take a moment to clarify matters. Hopefully this will help some people sleep better at night.

There are actually quite a few types of meta tags (for a pretty comprehensive list see SubmitCorner’s Guide). But no fear, there are really only two meta tags that 95% of people need to concern themselves with anyways. Theses are the Meta Description and the Meta Keywords. Even more important than these, however, are the Title Tags…so despite the fact that they aren’t technically meta tags, they do serve a similar function. Here we go, from least to most important.

META KEYWORDS: This is the less important of the two meta tags. Years ago, webmasters were able to add meta keywords to their sites that supposedly had relevance to the content. Problems arose when cunning individuals learned to abuse the system by adding numerous, irrelevant keywords to their meta description tags to drawing all kinds of traffic. (It got ugly when porn sites stuffed Disney themed keywords into their meta tags, etc.) So as a result, Google got wise and doesn’t give much (if any) weight to Meta Keywords. Other engines may, however, which makes them worth adding. It certainly won’t hurt, but don’t expect it to really help.

META DESCRIPTIONS: Meta description’s are designed to allow you to give a brief summary of your site’s content for the search engines to crawl. These can help you rank on keywords that you’re targeting. Don’t expect Google to gather and present theses descriptions word for word however in its results, however. Sometimes Google does its own thing and creates its own results descriptions from the content on your page. Adding meta descriptions is certainly worthwhile however.

TITLE TAGS: Besides original content on a site, this is perhaps the most important part of on-page optimization. Having static title tags will hurt your chances of ranking well. An easy way to test if your title tags are static is to do a Google search for site:yoursitehere.com. If each of the titles are unique, great! If not, this is good news as well, because with a little work you can help your site become more visible and better optimized for engine searches. Ensuring that each page on your site has unique title tags that include target keywords will really pay off.

If you didn’t get the title reference you’ve got to check out Red Stripe’s hilarious ad campaign.

There have been lawsuits going around against companies that physically edit portions of movies and rent them to the general public. Directors and artists associated with these films feel that these edited films compromise their artistic license.

I couldn’t really empathize until this morning when I discovered that Associated Content edited the carefully crafted articles that I’d submitted to their site (changed titles, links, etc). You are allowed to add pertinent links as appendages to articles, but for internet marketing purposes these links don’t hold much weight. No anchor text=no bueno.

Jeers to Associated Content for editing anything beyond punctuation and grammar.

If there is one thing I’m sure of, it’s that SEO is not an exact science.

One of the main purposes of this blog is to serve as a repository of information that I learn and gather from the constant trial and error that this business requires. Today I’m toying with original content, for example. As fas as internet marketing goes, almost nothing beats it. What is difficult to quantify, however, is how its placement affects its potency. In regards to link value, how much better is an article that’s submitted to a site with relevant content than the same article submitted to a generic article submission site? Of course it’s better, but how much?

While I conduct an ongoing search for that answer (that I’ll be sure to chronicle), you can read a Jim Boykin rant that has to do (sometimes) with this subject.

P.S. The Link Ninja eats Link Monkeys for breakfast.

So today I downloaded a trial version of Directory Submitter (v2.4 Demo). I’ve always been wary of this type of link building, but I’m working on some in-house projects that wouldn’t be harmed by its potential negative effects…so I thought I’d give it a try. It seems that a common concern with this type of software is, “will I get my site kicked out of the index by Google if I use a directory submitter program?” The reason that they’re typically worried is that they think that with the click of a button, this software will instantly add hundreds of backlinks to their chosen site. Well, you can rest assured that this is not at all the case (don’t pretend you’re not a little disappointed to hear that). Even with this software, the submitting process is laborious. Yes, it does fill in form entries with preset information, but no, it cannot fill in the tedious “are you indeed human?” verification boxes. It does, however, provide a nice list of ‘FFA or better’ places to submit your links. So overall its a mediocre tool. Not too fast to get one kicked out of the index, but perhaps not fast enough to be worth your time.

Keep an eye on the Link Ninja. He has an eye on you.