Many entrepreneurs and new internet users aren’t web savvy, i.e. they aren’t knowledgeable about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other internet technicalities. In fact, they even don’t know how to buy a domain name and setup their web hosting and install WordPress.

Why? The reason is that people are in hurry and don’t find time to learn, or they’re totally from different background. They may be more business savvy than web savvy.

They simply want user-friendly content publishing software where all they do is drag and drop and click a button to share their content to the world, just like using Smartphone. That’s where WordPress comes in.

WordPress was designed to be user-friendly and allows visitors quickly publish their content without knowing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and share content using social sharing devices.

WordPress is:

1.    User-friendly as they’re extremely easy to install and create a professional-looking sites

2.    They have TONS of FREE as well as premium (less than $30) website templates to create eye-catching designs

3.    Enhance site’s performance, functionality, and usability with FREE plugins

4.    It’s open source platform, have a community of developers, and is TOTALLY free

5.    Extremely easy to download and install … you can have your own website within minutes, not hours!

6.    Is SEO-friendly

Is WordPress SEO-friendly?

Yes … WordPress is a SEO-friendly platform, meaning you just use few plugins like all-in-one-SEO pack, Google sitemap, and SEO Yoast, and few social sharing sites and continue to publish content on your site, and Google takes care of your site’s ranking. Amazing, isn’t it?

So, will SEO & WordPress make a winning combination?

It’s a definite yes. I will outline several points to support this claim, so bear with me. But before that, let me ask you a question. In the past, have you used any other free blogging platform, like Blogger, Tumblr, to publish your content? If yes, I would like to ask for your experience using them (please comment below).

To be blunt, I have found that Blogger and Tumblr are great platform for sharing your content as bookmarkers. Not meant for publishing content for a well-established site. You simply post few excerpt of your content on blogger and Tumblr with a backlink at the end of the post to bring additional traffic back to your personal site.

Now, you can either have a dynamic (PHP and MySQL programmed) site (if you know how to program or hire a programmer and pour out your hard earned money (usually more than $500 or $1000).

Or, you can go the most opt route … register a personal domain name ($10/yr), buy web hosting ($30/yr), download and install WordPress from its site, use a premium theme (less than $45) and FREE SEO and social sharing plugins, and create a brand new professional looking site … within a day and under $100!

After installation, here’s how you can optimize WordPress for SEO:

Step 1: Perform Keyword Research

In addition to site optimization, as a blogger, you also need to take care of optimizing your site and content based on keywords that people are searching constantly in high volume to find information, products, and services. For proper optimization, you need to perform keyword research to get a list of profitable keywords.

There are several ways to find profitable keywords, like using FREE tools such as Google Keyword tool, WordTracker tool (7 day trial), and KeywordDiscovery tool, among others to help you optimize your site for search engines.

No matter which tool you use, create a list of keyword you can create your blogs posts around so that they become visible when other search for it.

Step 2: Optimize your WordPress for SEO

Log on to your WordPress dashboard, and change the default settings like permalinks to make a URL SEO-friendly, use Google Sitemap plugins to submit your sitemap to Google for indexing, use all-in-one SEO pack to optimize your site (site’s name, description, home page description, title tags, and so on).

Plus, you must also remove all default content (dummy content, links, and comments) from WordPress blog. It’s easy, simply go over each section through dashboard, click the pages, or blog posts, comments, and links, and delete them … permanently.

Step 3: Write Content

After your site optimization, the next thing you want to do is publish content on your site … regularly. Don’t just copy and paste content from other sites, use links more than necessary, or stuff keywords in order to influence search engine rankings.

The best way to write content that will be read by wide audience and admired is to research the topic from several different sources (forums, blogs, comments, etc), pull out the main points, and write the whole content in your own words.

Make sure no articles get published before they’re thoroughly revised at least 3 times. This way not only the content will be grammatically and punctuation error free, but you will also become a better writer “in the process.”

Lastly, make sure each blog post is targeted to your audience. Write content around the main keywords and focus on that topic. Avoid fluff or filler words just to make it long. Write short and descriptive sentences, always guiding the readers to the next point.

4. Bonus: Share your content – If you have a great content, but no one knows about them, what’s the use? Therefore, make sure you spend at least few minutes to promote your content on bookmarking and social networking sites.

There are several free WordPress plugin, like ShareThis, that will make it easy for you and others to bookmark and share content on their social profiles if they think it would benefit others.

In this article, we just showed you why WordPress and SEO would be a winning combination for your online business. WordPress is free, easy to use, and flexible, and more importantly, designed with SEO in mind.

If you publish your content regularly and share them, within 3 to 6 months, you have a chance of ranking in the first of Google … without spending a dime!

 
If you wanted to learn the secrets to being ranked on search engines, then here are top 10 helpful tips to improve your search engine rankings.

1. Buy aged domain name over new ones – Google often delays domain age for all new domain names, up to 9 to 12 months, before it will show up in search engine results for any major keywords you are focusing to rank for. So, the best you can do is to use your existing domain name, unless you really have to buy a brand new one.

2. Optimize your site and content to humans, not for search engines – Search engines like Google are always looking for content – blog posts, articles, pages, etc – that are created around the search term (keyword phrase) that most people type in their search box.

Those people who are typing keyword phrase relevant to your content are most likely be the members of your target audience. So, it always pays to optimize your site and content to their requirements.

But if you don’t have a clue as to who your target audience are, you need to find them … one way or the other. To learn more about your target audience, visit other blogs, sites, forums, and other communities relevant to your niche where they usually hang out and start listening what they are saying.

This information will decide how your site’s design, keywords, and content will be around.

3. Perform keyword research – To optimize your site and its content properly, use free keyword tools like Google Keyword tool, KeywordDiscovery, WordTracker tool, etc. Collect master list of highly “relevant” keyword phrases relevant to your niche and find few more relevant variations of it.

On the other hand, never use general keywords like “treatment” or “website” as they never tell anything about your site.

4. Design site’s structure and navigation around major keywords – If you look at your keyword list, you will find that people are looking for products and services in several different ways.

For example, if you’re selling toys, look at your keyword list on how people are searching for them. Are they looking for toys that improve their child’s IQ, or are they searching for specific branded toys?

With this information, you can create the site’s structure around those keywords.

5. Make your site “search engine crawler-friendly" – Although SEO can’t read JavaScript code (menus and links), can’t interpret Flash and graphic elements on your site, but it doesn’t mean you can’t use them on your website. You can use graphical elements in your web page, but, you need to make it search engine crawler-friendly by placing HTML link tags to every page on your site.

HTML links doesn’t always have to be text-only links, though. You CAN use graphical navigation as long as they’re wrapped inside a standard anchor tag.

6. Insert keywords in link alt tags – Make your links, or anchor text as descriptive as possible to help search engines crawlers know exactly what they are. You can always describe your page you’re linking to using your main keyword phrase inside the anchor text as well as image alt tag.

7. Write high quality content around your keyword phraseIf you want your site to be successful, you need to optimize your site’s content by performing on-page SEO. Search engines needs to find as well as read copies on your site so that they know how to classify it. Don’t make your copies lied buried in Flash and graphics.

Create your copy around the most relevant keywords. Insert keywords so that it reads natural, but avoid “keyword stuffing” as it will only penalize your site.

Likewise, know that there isn’t any specific number of words or keyword phrases needs to be in each page. Just focus on creating useful, original, and interesting articles your target audiences are searching for.

8. Insert keyword phrases into your copy’s title tag – Title tags have a lot of weight in search engines because they’ll show up as the link to your site in search engine results. So, it makes sense to write a descriptive and unique title tag with keyword phrase in it.

9. Stay Up-To-Date With the SEO

There are several blogs that write on SEO strategies, every year, not to mention they offer FREE downloadable SEO ebooks on their site too. Plus, dozens of great SEO books publish each year.

So, make sure you grab at least one of those to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest SEO trends and techniques.

10. The Word Count and HTML Coding

Google ranks a site higher when they notice people spending more time on it. More time a visitor spend on your site, the more value Google thinks your site has.  

So, in order to being ranked higher on search engines, pay attention to the word count too. Make your blog posts at least 500 words, but anything between the ranges of 600 to 750 would also be better. If you’re a content freak, like me, making your articles around 1000 words would be great too.

Likewise, avoid using heavy HTML codes in your web pages as it could negatively impact your search engine rankings. Too much code usually means more chances of hidden bugs, errors, and mistakes within.

Well, there you have it – we just revealed you 10 secrets to rank higher on search engines. Tell us what other SEO strategies you use to rank your site higher?


 
When boosting your site’s SEO presence, one of the most critical techniques to master is creating and generating high quality links to your site. Links drive traffic to the site and they also provide a network for which your blog can associate itself with topics that are linked to the web content. Search engines love sites that have lots of strong links so including them onto your site is certainly a worthwhile tactic.  So what can you do to ensure that your website is loaded with high quality backlinks?

Use your blog to attract links

More often than not, sites that contain regular content are often well linked and well ranked on search engines. Starting a blog on your site can be a great way to generate and attract links towards your sites. By publishing regular content on your site, it will be able to allow you to link to other related sources throughout the web associated with your chosen topic area. Normally, these links should be aimed towards high ranking sites which readers are likely to visit after reading your own posts. As your audience grows, it will help increase the number of links that are associated to your blog and regularly attract high traffic levels to your site. This will make the blog section attract links easily and help make the rest of your site more visible to traffic and search engines.

Looks for links that come from sites that attract high traffic

One of the main points of creating links is to boost the number of online traffic your site receives. It’s why it’s important to research the sites where links are going to be made to see whether it would be beneficial for the site. After all, links to sites that only gets one or two visitors a day is counter-productive. It’s up to you to find sites that are ideally listed no later than on page 4 of Google for a key phrase to guarantee that the link will help drive the site forward and find more visitors once the connection has been made. Ideally, you should also direct your link searches to authority sites that are related to your topic as it will help strengthen the quality of each individual link and attract browsers who are likely to come back to the site time and time again. If you believe that the link itself is god and that the other site is a good source, you can even go one step further and ask for a link going to your page to help turn your site into one of the leading online authorities for that particular subject.

Find guest slots on blogs and directories

By far the easiest way to spread knowledge and create to your own blog is by guest posting on other sites that follow the same niche as yours. The internet has an unlimited audience and by placing your content on another site, it will automatically expose your blog to a whole new breadth of people. They may not be aware of the blog that you belong to but by having guest posts on different sites, it means that indirect links can be created to your blog just by people sharing a guest post with friends or family. Meanwhile, directories are a great place to gain links quickly as they are dedicated places in which users can find links to sites that meet specific criteria. If directories are well ranked themselves, then you can gain a lot of traffic to your page by getting a link on the site. It’s often best to target well-ranked local directories as they are often aimed towards a specific audience and can guarantee constant traffic to your page if you can find the right site.

Be wary about paying for links

Some SEO competitors will suggest that you should pay to receive links as it can be a quick way to get your site quickly noticed by search engines. Whilst paying for links can be a useful trick for a site that has only just been launched, you need to check and be vigilant about where the links are connected to. More often than not, bulk links that are bought are to sites that are not well ranked and completely irrelevant to the content that is on your site. It is best that you check the links that are included on a possible pay package and then check with the guidelines of particular search engines to see if paid links are allowed otherwise your site may be penalised for having possible black hat SEO techniques on the page.

Always check that your links are working

It’s might initially seem like a good sign that your pages are well linked to other content but you always need to keep an eye out to make sure that the links are still working. If the links have stopped working, users on your site will find out the link is dead and will look elsewhere or information hurting your ranking on the SERP. If a link is dead, you need to fix is immediate to limit any potential damage. By repairing the dead links, it will also ensure that the back links associated between your site and the linked site which will keep the traffic flowing through the site at the normal rate. However, search engines will need to be notified through tools such as Google Webmaster so that the rankings remain unaffected by the fixes.

Summary

By deploying these tactics, you will soon be able to build a strong network of links that can help raise the profile of a site without having to resort to anything that is too complex or advanced. Furthermore, it gives you a solid foundation to work from and then use other SEO techniques to help land a good ranking on Google or Yahoo.