Optimize WordPress Tags With HeadSpace

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your WordPress blog is by driving traffic to it through search engines. Google is not a switch that you can turn on to open the traffic floodgates. But you can always try to optimize every aspect of your WordPress for SEO to make sure you show up higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs). There are plenty of things you can do to optimize your blog for search engines. But what you can’t afford to do is ignore your title and other important tags on WordPress. Your title tag is one of the most important SEO factors you can optimize your site for. It may not get you to the top of the search engine rankings by itself, but it certainly helps.

WordPress is a dynamic system, which is optimizing your title tags for your individual pages, categories, archives, and posts can be tricky. But thanks to HeadSpace, you can easily automate the tagging process and not only save yourself a lot of time but also increase your rankings dramatically.

As the above image demonstrates, you can optimize every single page on your site for search engines. You do want to pay extra attention to your homepage as its the heart of every SEO campaign. Your posts are also important, so make sure you use keywords that give you the best shot at getting ranked. HeadSpace makes it easy to automate the tagging process. All you have to do is use the special tags available to you to get the title tags you are looking for:

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10 Best SEO Plugins To Optimize Your WordPress Blog – Part I

WordPress is a wonderful platform that not only lets you build up your website fast, but it also comes with many enhancements that let you optimize every aspect of your website and get more out of your efforts. That includes increasing your traffic as well. If you own a blog and you write posts on it on a consistent basis, you want to make sure you drive lots of traffic to it to get the best value out of your work. You can always advertise or leave comments on other blogs, but you shouldn’t ignore the organic search channel. Getting free traffic from Google, Yahoo!, and even Live.com is a must if you want to make it on the Internet. In order to do that, you need to optimize your website for search engines. WordPress may be search engine friendly but it’s not optimized for organic search. Your permalinks, title tags, slugs, and … all play a big part in you gaining the best ranking possible on search engines such as Google. So you want to make sure you have the best settings on your website to get the most free traffic.

There are lots of plugins that you can install on your WordPress blog to optimize it for organic search, but you want to make sure you don’t go overboard and damage your blog’s performance in the process. With that in mind, here are 10 cool plugins that help you get more free traffic to your blog:

1. All In One SEO:  All In One SEO is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It not only allows you to optimize your title tags, but it makes it so easy to no-index pages that could be deemed harmful towards your search engine rankings. It automatically generations your title and descriptions, which means you save time.

2. Virtual Silo: Virtual Silo is a cool plugin that makes it easy to no-follow those spam comments and any other factor that can hurt your search engine rankings. You can also create a silo structure on your blog to maximize your search engine rankings.

3. Broken Link Checker: what you don’t want to do is leave broken links on your blog. Search engines certainly won’t like it. Use Broken Link Checker to find out broken links or image links.

4. Google XML Sitemaps Generator: creating a sitemap by hand can be a hassle. Some people are more scared of XML than spiders. Either way, Google XML Sitemaps Generator makes it so easy to generate and keep your sitemaps up to date.

5. SEO Smart Links: a very cool plugin that automatically links to your related posts and makes it so easy for your visitors to navigate through your pages easily.

6. SEO Friendly Images: a lot of people forget about their alt and description tags for their images. It’s true that alt tags are not as important as they used to be but you can still get traffic from Google Images, and besides it’s a best practice to have them. SEO Friendly Images makes it easy to get around this issue.

7. Advanced Permalinks: Advanced Permalinks is truly a life saver. Let’s say you didn’t know how to set up your permalinks properly when you started your blog. You can always change your permalink structure but that could affect your rankings immensely if you don’t go about it the right way. This plugin makes sure your old pages are redirected to their new location via 301 redirect.

8. Permalinks Redirect: Permalinks Redirect another simple plugin that lets you optimize your URLs and get rid of all those weird characters in some of your URLs. It 301 redirects them to a more search engine friendly URL.

9. Nofollow Links In Posts: Nofollow Links in Posts is a great tool for anyone who want to control what they link to and whether they want to dofollow or nofollow their links.

10. Robots Meta: Robots Meta is another cool plugin that lets you nofollow your comments and other pages on your blog. You can also control what pages are indexed on your WordPress blog. You can also easily add your Google Webmaster Tools account information and track your results properly.

There you have it: 10 wonderful SEO plugins for WordPress. But there is a second part with more cool search engine optimization plugins. So stay tuned! In the meantime, don’t forget to share your favorite SEO plugin for WP below.

Addressing Duplicate Content Issue on WordPress

Running multiple WordPress blogs can be time consuming and challenging at times. If you are a one man company and you intend to get into the adsense business, you are going to have a tough times creating and managing hundreds of blogs, unless you are using a service such as WordPress Direct. You can also grab PLRs and use them on your site as content. But one problem that most folks forget about is content duplication penalty.

Duplicate content is frowned upon by Google, and you can be penalized heavily by Google if your content is deemed to be duplicate of someone else’s. In essence, having duplicate contnet on your blog is the fastest way to get yourself into the supplementary index on Google. Many folks believe (incorrectly) that using private label articles helps them get around the duplicate content issue. But that can’t be further from the truth. If you can buy the articles and others can do too, then you are going to have duplicate content.

That’s what I love about Synonymizer. This cool plug-in allows you to spin words around and make your articles unique. In other words, this is like injecting steroids to your automated WordPress blog. What makes Synonymizer different from article spinners is that it not only spins all your blog posts, it directly works with WordPress.

Synonymizer is compatible with RSS2Blog and WP Auto Blog. Better yet, you can work with HTML, Javascript, and even PHP. And you are not limited to PLRs. You can also work with RSS feeds and still avoid duplicate content penalty. If you are one of those Adsense guys or just want to use auto-blogging solutions to keep your blog updated when you have no time to do it yourself, Synonymizer is a must have (see the video here). Who says you can’t be a lazy blogger?

Keep Track of Your WordPress Blog with Stattraq

If you have been involved in the blogging world, you are probably familiar with the importance of tracking your blog’s stats. So what do I mean by blog stats? The number of visitors you get everyday, the hits, the browser type these folks use, their surfing habits and more. Sure. You can get all this with Google Analytics (GA), but wouldn’t it be nice if you could access these info right on your WordPress blog, without having to log on to Analytics every single hour?

Stattraq allows you to keep track of everything that goes on your blog. You get the following information from Stattraq:

• Hit Counter: shows you the number of hits and your hits trend over a specific period of time.
• User Counter: Stattraq can track the number of visitors who come to your blog by putting a cookie on their computers.
• Page Views: shows you how many times your pages are viewed and for how long
• Browser: shows you the browsers used by your visitors.
• Referrer: shows you who has referred folks to your blog. In other words, where traffic is coming from.
• Search Terms: shows you what search terms have brought folks to your site.
• SE Saturation: shows you how many of your pages are indexed on major search engines.
• IP Addresses: shows the IP addresses of folks who have visited your site.

Stattraq is not a super Analytics software, but it gets the job done. The software is for free, and it’s easy to install (you can get it here). But here is the catch. You should still use your Google analytics for more comprehensive analysis, but you shouldn’t have to check it on a daily basis if you use Stattraq.

Optimize Your WordPress Blog’s Title Tags For SEO

Search engine optimization is one of the issues that folks who are new to WordPress grapple with in their early days of experiencing the WordPress platform. I can’t tell you how many times I have read in forums about how folks are looking for a simple way to change the title of their home page. It’s not really that hard, but I am going to show you an easy way to do it without having to program at all: SEO Title Tags WordPress Plug-in.

SEO Title tags is an amazingly simple yet powerful plug-in that allows you to change the title tag of your pages, your posts, everything else. Once you install and activate SEO Title tags, then you can go to your settings page in your Dashboard and define a title tag for your home page + you can optimize the description tag as well.

You can also customize your titles for each and every post using the title tag section that is added under each post once you activate the plug-in.

So as you see, you don’t need to be a PHP or HTML programmer to optimize your blog for organic search. For everything SEO, there is always a plug-in, thanks to the good folks behind the WordPress Open source community.

P.S. this plug-in is a free plug-in.

SEO Plugin: Virtual Silo Advanced SEO Plugin

I don’t know if you have heard of the concept of creating silos for your webpages instead of just creating sitemaps. Silos are arguably more search-engine friendly, and at the end of the day, they give search engine robots pathways to go through your pages more easily. In case you don’t know what a Silo look like, please take a look at below:

As you may know, search engine robots discover relevance based on numerous factors such as keywords, anchor texts, LSI (related terms that you can figure out using Adwords Keyword tool), and other factors. By only having one link in and one link out, you can not only pass PR effectively through your pages, you can also pass relevance more effectively. Bleeding PR has been one of my biggest headaches and that’s why I started reading on the concept of Silos. Silos are in essence one level below Blackholes (no we are not talking about astronomy here). But before you get to the Blackhole level, you want to make sure you implement the Silos technique to pass rank through your pages.

If you have a thousand pages, then changing your structure to make Silo happen is time consuming and next to impossible. That’s why I am grateful to the creator of Virtual Silo. The plugin is so easy to use, and it works right out of the box. Best of all, no programming is required to implement the Silo structure for your WordPress blog in a second.

Virtual Silo comes with many options, but you can see from above that you don’t have to do any programming whatsoever. You check a set of radiobuttons, and you are on your way. Keep in mind that the above values are what I use for my blog and may have to be different for you blog. My WordPress blog was a mess so I had to change the default values to account for a few problems.

Virtual WordPress Silo is one of the best and worthy SEO plugins that I have found on the web. The goal here is not to smash atoms, but to do a simple process for a huge blogs. And Virtual Silo accomplishes that brilliantly. You can also get Silo for Joomla but that’s outside the scope of this blog…

How To Add Breadcrumbs To Your WordPress Theme with NavXT Plugin

I am sure you are familiar with the concept of breadcrumbs. These are those little handy links that show up at the top or bottom of pages and help you navigate through websites. Breadcrumbs are highly recommended for SEO, but they are not necessarily easy to generate for WordPress blogs. Now I say that as it is possible to implement a customized Breadcrumb system for your WordPress plug if you know PHP inside and out. But if you are just a blogger who want to take advantage of breadcrumbs to make your site easier to use, then you should check out Breadcrumb NavXT.

NavXT allows you to create highly customizable crumbs for your WordPress blog without too much fuss. Now some WordPress themes may not quite work easily with this plug-in but most of them do. Basically, all you need to do is to add the following code to your header.php file:

The administration panel for this plugin is very easy to use and allows you to customize all pages such as archives, author pages, and even static front pages. You get to define what you want to see on your breadcrumb here.

Now if you are an advanced user, I highly recommend activating the Core version of this plugin instead of the administration version. The reason is that you can make this plugin perform faster without the administration panel. But you will need the following code to make it work:

The breadcrumbs are often used to boost search engine rankings. The search engine robots love these, and you should definitely consider having them if your theme fits one of these. This plug-in is for free and you can download it right here.