SEO Tips - Free Search Engine Optimization Tips

wordpress - display posts according to categories

Most Wordpress themes come with this feature - Recent Posts - included automatically but if you prefer to display recent posts depending by category you have to some simple modifications.

In case the theme chosen by you has already this feature you must find her, usually in sidebar.php and looks like this:

<h2>Recent Posts</h2>
<ul>
<?php get_archives(’postbypost’, 10); ?>
</ul>

Before you make these changes i suggest to backup sidebar.php to avoid any inconveniences in case something goes wrong. After you found that code all you need to do is to change the code with next one:

<ul>
<?php $recent = new WP_Query(”cat=1&showposts=10″); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”>
<?php the_title(); ?>
</a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

Where say cat = 1 must enter the number assigned to the category for which you want to display recent posts. This number can be found in: Manage - Categories page.
To set how many items to display modify here: showposts = 10, where 10 is the number of items you want to display it.
It is quite simple and I do not think you have problems with implementation.

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SEO Friendly URL with Mod Rewrite from Apache

What is Mod Rewrite?

According to Wikipedia:

A rewrite engine is a piece of web server software used to modify URLs before fetching the requested item, for a variety of purposes. This technique is known as URL rewriting. A concise URL is easy to remember, and less time-consuming to type in. If the URL can be made to relate clearly to the content of the page, then errors are less likely to happen. More details about mod rewrite here.

Ok now that we have seen what Mod Rewrite actually does we will start on learning how to actually rewrite your URL.

If you have a website and your pages links form are : index.php?id_cat=10 you can optimize them to look like 10_keyword.html with a little effort and knowledges.

Create .htaccess file in root or edit if exists and add the following lines:

#Options +FollowSymLinks
#RewriteEngine on
#RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)-[a-zA-Z0-9-_]*.html$ index.php?id_cat=$1 [L]

If you don’t have knowledges about mod rewrite you can use some mod rewrite generators like Mod rewrite generator 1 , Mod rewrite generator 2 or try Google.

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Optimization for Google

Important factors in optimizing for Google:

* web domain age
* domain name
* links to the site (IBL - Backlinks) and obviously their quality
* content that is offered to visitors

Web Domain Age

Google gives a great importance to old and stable site’s, this is obvious because is one of the major factors used to rank it in the search engines.

Domain Name

You can choose domain name keywords, then you will have more chances to be on the first page result.

IBL - Backlinks

Links to your site should be from the same niche , links from old websites is important too , they can redirect traffic and increase page rank.

Content

Create unique content, quality and quantity. Google search for sites which are periodically updated and have rich content. Do not try to make clones of your site, duplicate contect is penalized by google.

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What is PageRank?

In previous posts we talked about what are backlinks and anchor text , today i will talk about pagerank.

Many wonder what is the Page Rank (PR ™) and what role it has in relationship with the search engine optimization (SEO). PageRank is a value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other factors.

Formula developed by Google to determine a web pages pagerank:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Where:

PR(A) is the PageRank of a page A
PR(T1) is the PageRank of a page T1
C(T1) is the number of outgoing links from the page T1
d is a damping factor in the range 0 < d < 1, usually set to 0.85

It also means that if a page has no links to it (no Backlinks) will receive a low PR of 0.15 (1 - 0.85).
A sure way to gain Page Rank is to submit your site to web directories and make link exchange with websites from the same niche.

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Anchor text of a link

In previous post , what are backlinks , i was talking about backlinks quality, but still i have not written anything about the anchor text of a backlink. It is an important factor, as well as many others who value a backlink.

What is an anchor text?
I already explained this in Essential Terms post , Anchor text - is the hyperlinked words on a web page , the words you click on when you click a link. For example, in code <a href=http://www.allseotips.com />Free SEO Tips</a> the anchor text is “Free SEO Tips”.

Everybody knows that it’s indicated to have IBL from sites with the same niche, and keywords that makes link to the site must be relevant.
Anchor text of a link becomes more relevant and more powerful if the keyword which connects to the site or page has assignet TITLE on him.

How you see which is the most powerful site on a google search after anchor?
Type on Google allinanchor:keyword

How do you see what anchor have your links?
Go to Google Webmaster Tools> Statistics> What Googlebot sees where you found “in external links to your site”. Those are anchor texts refer to the pages of your site.

Where is good to put links with anchor text?
In your content.

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What are backlinks?

Basically backlinks are a link from another website to your website.

Backlinks are one of the most important aspects you need to consider when you’re trying to build a higher ranking in the search engines. In conditions in which your page focuses on a topic (for example music), Google analyzes the content of the web page and positions in a search. But how does this work? There are millions of pages talking about the same topic, why would you on the first page in Google? It’s simple, Google count links to your page and will receive a ranking (page rank) following which it will determine the position in the search engine according to the backlinks to your page.

The number of backlinks which recommend a site or a page is an important factor because the number of backlinks influence the positioning of sites to search. The quality of backlinks is an important factor. I said earlier that the number of backlinks sites is an important factor, but if the IBL sites are of poor quality, then this number is almost irrelevant. IBL sites must be of quality,the quality is not given only by the Page Rank, but by age, or the popularity of a site.

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Monitoring the results

In order to see the results that the SEO campaign had, you must know where you started. At the beginning of the campaign, write down somewhere the average traffic in the last month and the positions in SERP for the keywords that you are going to optimize.

You can check the SERP of the site for a keyword with:

Seomoz

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SEO Linking

We speak of 3 different types of links which help with SEO:

1. Internal links – from one page from the site to another page of the same site. These links help with faster indexing the site by the crawlers but also transmit the authority between pages. For example, if the main page of the site is important and has many links, adding an internal link on it to a secondary page, you can increase the importance of the latter. With internal links and with the no-follow attribute you can control what the SEO specialists call “internal link juice”.

2. External links – links from your site to other sites. Here it matters, as much as possible, to add links to sites which are relevant for the field of your own site. For example, if you have a site about cars, it is best to add a few links to other important car sites. I will give you a concrete case.

3. Inbound links (IBL) – links which others make to your site. Not only will you receive traffic from the sites where your links are posted, but they will also send you their link juice. The more important the site you receive link from, the more Google will consider your site as being important and will raise it in SERP, will take it out of supplemental index or will completely index it. The form of the IBL is also important on the respective site: you mostly benefit from an increase in SERP if the IBL comes to you with a keyword in the anchor text. So, for the site with the eggs, an IBL will have more value if the link is added as “Colored Eggs” than if it is added as “visit an interesting site HERE”.

IBL’s are the most important and are outside your control (with internal and external you have complete control) so you must obtain them through 3 methods:

1. Link exchange – you ask for a link on another site, at the same time adding a link to them from your site
2. Paid linking – you buy a link on another site
3. Quality content – by writing a quality content, you will receive links to other sites, which will contribute to raising the pages with the respective content and implicitly of your whole site. He quality contents can be virally extended, so it has unlimited potential.

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On-Site Optimization

On-Site Optimization refers to the optimization of the website “infrastructure”:

1. Tag <title>
2. Meta tags
3. Alt tags on the images
4. Text formatting (headings, bold, italic)
5. robots.txt file

The title tag is maybe the most important here, not only for the SEO but also for the CTR (click through rate) in the SERP (search engine results page). The title of each page must be different, so that it won’t be considered duplicate content, but it should have 2-4 keywords. For example, a page title of type:

Kw1, kw2 – site name, description with kw3 in it (in my opinion the most appropriate method)

Most of the meta-tags are informative, the only ones that mater being the meta description and meta keywords. Whatever is written in the meta description will appear as title in SERP. It’s important to have one or two keywords here too.

The headings, bolding and italicizing the text matters less, but it matters. Obviously, keywords are bolded, not something else. The idea is that the search engine sees the mark-up as a bolded word, so it decides that it is more important than the rest of the page and might be a keyword.

Robots.txt is a file in the root of the site from where you can control the way that the SE crawlers index your site. You can ask them not to index certain pages with the no-index attribute or not to transfer from the authority of the site (for example pagerank) with no-follow. With robots.txt and some internal linking, you can control the total PageRank on the site and focus it only in some important pages.

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Choosing a good domain name

There are a few tricks we can use to choose a SEO friendly name for the domain. For example, the domain containing keywords will be much more visible. But it’s not good to exaggerate and give names to your domain like: www.keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4-keyword5.com because in this case here is a great chance that you will be penalized. Choose a name for your domain as short as possible , even if a domain name can contain even 67 characters. It is preferable that the users can access your site by typing a word as short as possible.

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