META tags describe the content and keywords that illustrate your blog or web content. It contains important information for search robots to use in adding your blog posts to their search indexes. Several search engines use the information within these tags as part of their algorithms.

You can download a Wordpress plugin that will automatically generate and publish Technorati Tags and HTML Meta Keywords based on the full content of your post.
Once generated, tags can be manually edited to ensure the tags are relevant to the content. Manually editing your tags is recommended because if you have written a post about Ipods and have not mentioned a term, such as “Apple” then it will not appear as a tag, so there’s an audience group that you’re possibly missing.
The plugin is called AutoMeta and it can be downloaded here

If you use Wordpress then you can take advantage of all these plugins that are very easy to use and install. These plugins will help to get your site ranked more quickly in the search engines so web users can find your site.

All in One SEO Pack - This fantastic plugin lets you optimise your individual pages and posts of your blog site. For search engines by allowing you to tweak the title, generate Meta tags and avoids indexing of duplicate content.

SEO Title Tag - Title tags are perhaps the most important features in regards to search engine optimisation (SEO). Did you know that your post titles are also used as title tags by Wordpress? Yu can change this by using SEO title tag plugin, which will allow you to change the tile so they are search engine friendly.

Google Sitemap Generator - This plugin will create a Google compliant XML-Sitemap of your Wordpress blog, which helps Googlebot to index your site much faster and index new posts.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Rather than have a sitemap written in XML that users to your site can’t use you can use the alternative Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. You can create a sitemap for your visitors so they can navigate your site more easily. The sitemap is updated automatically whenever you add new content.

Sociable – You can allow your visitor to submit your site to popular bookmarking sites like Digg, Furl, Delicious, Reddit, and Netscape etc. By submitting your site to these bookmarking sites your content will be indexed much faster.

Link to Me -A script that allows visitors to link to your posts. This will help to build you incoming links that in return effects search engine ranking position (SERP).

SEO Friendly Permalink Structure – You can create SEO titles using pemalinks. The good news is you don’t need any plugin to do this. It can easily be done from your option page in the admin panel. I have written an article about this called “How to create SEO titles using Permalinks“. This article will tell you what permalinks are and tell you in 5 easy steps how to change your permalink.

Ultimate Tag Warrior – More and more blogmasters are starting to use TAGS on their site in addition to only categories. You can set up tag clouds which will tell your visitors what keywords are most popularly by displaying that keyword in a bigger font to the rest. The bigger the font the more popular the keyword, hence encouraging visitors to read the content. Visitors like tag clouds because they can find what they are looking for a lot faster and very easily.

Related Posts - This superb plugin will also increases the number of internal links inside your site and makes your posts appear more important to search engines. This plugin will encourage readers to click on similar topics to the posts just read rather than have them leave the site.

Automatic Pinging - You can allow automatics pinging by services such as Technorati, Feedburner, myyahoo etc. Automatic Pinging allows you to automatically notify blog directories and search engines that your blog has been updated. The bigger your ping list the higher the chances of receiving traffic from those sources. You can change the ping list on the Options - Writing page inside you admin panel. The more places you ping, the more chances of your site received traffic and getting your site crawled.

Get Traffic from your Images – People tend to forget that they can get traffic from the images they use. When you use images on your site, try to always use Alt tags or use the description box whenever you insert a new images.

SEO Slugs – Also know as post slugs in Wordpress, which is found on the right hand side of a Wordpress post. I don’t have this plugin yet but I’m thinking of using it because up till now I’ve been manually changing my post slugs by removing words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ to improve search engine optimisation.
For example, when you publish a post with a title like this:
” Top 13 SEO related plugins for Wordpress”, Wordpress automatically uses this title as your post slug, which is not SEO friendly as it sounds like spam. This plugin will strip out ordinary words like “what”, “you” or “can” from your post slug to make it more search engine friendly.

Search Hilite - When someone is referred from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Wordpress’, the terms they search for are highlighted with this plugin.

404 Notifier –Ever frustrated when you get 404 Page Not Founds errors with no warning I know I do because I know it effects my search engine rankings. This plugin is great because it will send you an email every time your site gets the 404 errors so you can resolve the problem quickly.
Meta Tags – For every post you create you can have unique Meta tags. This can help attract visitors to your article more by highlighting important keywords known as Meta Tags as well as these keywords being ranked by the search engines.
Dean’s Permalinks Migration - This plugin allows you to modify your permalinks so they look tidy instead of having ugly characters in your url structure. You can also use this plugin to help you remove the category base showing in your url which lot of people don’t like. I have written an article on how to do this manually which can be found by clicking here or you can use the plugin to make this more easier for you. Having a proper permalink structure is important for search engine rankings.
What Would Seth Godin Do? - This plugin will display a prompt at the beginning of your first post asking your readers to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. For more information read Top 3 Wordpress plugins to increase RSS readers
Google Website Optimizer Plugin - The Google Website Optimizer Plugin incorporates the Google Website Optimizer into any Wordpress posts and pages. It permits WordPress blog users who are registered with Google’s Adwords program to place the tracking code necessary to run headline and copy checks to establish which blog content makes the best conversions.
WordPress Text Ads – Do you use Text Link Ads? If you do then you know you pay 50% of all your advertisement sales. With WordPress Text Ads plugin you cut out the middleman hence allowing you to sell text link ads directly to advertisers from your site and pay no commission. You can buy now for $127, however there is a free downoad available too.

All the above plugins mentioned could improve your search engine optimisation as well as earn you money. If you know any similar plugins then please let me know by leaving a comment on this page.

Someone wrote a comment on my site saying they liked the way the links ended with .htm and if there was a plugin to do that? So I decided to write this article with the purpose of being able to share with you exactly what I did. What I did is very simple and can be done very easily from your wp-admin panel. It is called Permalinks and can be customized by going to Options - Permalinks.

What is Permalinks?

Permalinks basically means permanent URLs to your blog posts, categories, archives and pages For example, the Permalink for this blog post is:

http://bloggerholic.com/search-engine-optimization/how-to-create-seo-titles-using-permalinks-31.htm

You can customize your permalink structure very easily from the WordPress admin panel. I recommend you do this because firstly it looks a lot better than the default look (http://example.com/?p=N) and secondly, it has a significant effect on your search engine optimization. If you don’t change the default Permalink structure, then your url will look something like:

http://domainname.com/index.php?p=13where 13 is the post number.

You can see that the default structure users question marks and numbers that look ugly, however WordPress offers you the ability to change this so you can have it look the way it does on this site.

There are three types of permalinks:

Default: (not very pretty…)

The default looks like http://bloggerholic.com/?p=123 Where p=123 is the post number. The reason why they use this as the default is because it works on all server environments like Linux and Windows. A lot of people don’t like the default look though for obvious reasons, it doesn’t look professional as some of the other options.

The three other options you have are:

1) Date and name based:
http://bloggerholic.com/2007/07/01/sample-post/

The above will show the date the post was created as well as the name of the post title

2) Numeric
http://bloggerholic.com/archives/123

3) Custom
You can specify what custom structure you want to have. Now this is the option I go for in all my sites and this is the structure I specify:

/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%.htm

If you have more than one post with the same name then it can cause confusion so that’s why I add post_id%.htm at the end.

So now my url for this page for instance will be……

http://bloggerholic.com/search-engine-optimization/how-to-create-seo-titles-using-permalinks-31.htm

Other options you can specify as your custom structure are
/%postname%
/%year%/%postname%/

I’m sure you get the general idea now

The title of your post will become part of the url for your post. Now you can see the big SEO advantage here can’t you? You are now able to use those keywords as part of your url which increases your chances of being found by the search engines.

5 EASY STEPS TO CHANGE YOUR PERMALINK

1. Login to your WordPress administration panel
2. Select Options->permalinks from the navigation menu
3. On the permalinks page, you will see a list of “common options”. Select the option you want to go for taking into consideration the tips i have written in this article. I recommend the custom structure.
4. Click on “update permalink structure”
5. Now you will some code at the bottom of the page. You need to copy and paste this code into the file “called .htaccess and it can be found in your www root folder. Save the file and upload.

That’s it your done! How easy was that

Proceed to: How to remove category base from permalinks
Go back to:Wordpress for Dummies

This book “Wordpress for Dummies” provides you with everything you need to get up and running with WordPress. The book covers blogging basics, choosing a hosting solution or setting up a host, developing blog content, syndicating blog posts with RSS, launching a specialized blog (including podcasting, photoblogging, mobile blogging, and videoblogging), and even earning revenue.
It Includes help on every aspect of installing and using WordPress, illustrations from real-world WordPress blogs, step-by-step tutorials on key topics, and insights from bloggers who have used WordPress

Whether you are a beginner, novice or experienced designer, we explain all the essentials of blog creation and building a successful blog for your personal or commercial website and we guide you in the right direction. This tutorial gives you a complete and thorough understanding of the web and how it works and will walk you through all the steps to create your own blog website explaining exactly what to do from registering a domain name to marketing your website.

Contents

Domain Name Registration

• Things to consider when registering a domain
• Choosing a domain name
• What if your domain name is not available?

Blog Hosting

• Things to consider when choosing a web host
• What do I get when I host with someone
• How much does hosting cost

Building your Blog

• How do I get Started?
• Blog Software
• Freelance Web Designer

Make Money with your Blog

• E-commerce
• Affiliates Programs
• Paid Ads
• AdSense

Marketing your Blog

• What is Page Ranking
• Getting Traffic to your Website
• Search Engines
• Directories - Get Listed on DMOZ, Yahoo and More
• Link Exchanges - Add your URL to increase your links popularity

Search Engine Optimization

• External Links
• Content
• Don’t have Similar Looking Websites
• Inbound Links
• Make your links work
• Sitemap
• “Keywords”, “Description” and “Page Title”

Page Rank is Google’s measure of the importance of your page. The higher the page rank the better. PageRank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you’ve installed the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/). But the Toolbar Page Rank only goes from 0 – 10. In short Page Rank is a a bit like a “vote”, a vote that’s made by all the other pages on the Web, so basically the more votes you have the higher your page ranking is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support.

Search engine optimization is the act of making your website content more search engine friendly hence allowing increased traffic to your site via the major search engines and directories such as Yahoo and Google, permitting a higher page ranking for your site. There are many online companies that specializes in the optimization of websites and helps you by researching your keywords and optimizing your site based on the most searched keywords in your industry.

Search Engine Optimization is now becoming a thing of the past with more people opting for link exchanges and submitting in directories as a more effective means of marketing. Keys things to be careful about are as follows:

1. External Links: Don’t have too many external links on your site. Google sees these as ‘doorway” pages that mainly serve the purpose of getting the visitor to your affiliated web site. If you are to have external links then link to one or two high ranking sites under that keyword.
2. Content: and lots of it. Google loves content so the more you have on your site the better. Once you have a website with at least 20 pages, upload it and then keep updating it from there onwards. If you cant think of what content to put then look around the net there are plenty of sites that offer free web content providing you mention the authors name.
3. Don’t have Similar Looking Websites: If you go for having more than one website then make sure that all the websites have different content and look different. The last thing you want are two web sites looking exactly the same. Google won’t index it otherwise. So for example the theme, content, contact details (layout), keywords, description and page title should not be exactly the same word by word.
4. Inbound Links: the more pages your site has the better and remember to keep updating as Google checks. Build at least one page of quality content per day once your site is up and running. Google loves content, lots of quality content. At least a 200-400 page site. This will get you a good placement under a wide range of keywords.
5. Make your links work: All pages should be linked. Google doesn’t like “Under Construction Pages” so if you have any the remove them or put some content in those pages”
6. Sitemap: Include a sitemap and place this link somewhere on your home page. A sitemap is an overview of all pages of a website similar to a table of content. The pages are listed according to their title. Each page title will be linked, allowing you to navigate to that page. A site map is useful when it comes to Search engines crawling your site for listing purposes. It’s very important to have a Site Map so search engines like Google can find all of your pages. Not only that but it’s also important for your visitors as they can use the Site Maps to navigate your Website to get where they need to go instead of looking for links.
7. “Keywords“, “Description” and “Page Title“: Use effective keywords, description and page title in your site. This information not only communicates the theme of your web page to your visitors but is also considered very important by the Search Engine crawlers. Almost all crawler based search engines use the Title Tag the most to gather information about your web site and the search engines will use the keywords or the content description during the ranking process to investigate the relevance of your web page.