There are many bloggers that use WordPress. If you have a self hosted WordPress theme than you need to download and install the plug-ins below. They’re specific to SEO, Pagerank, Performance, Backup, and Statistics.

The Plug-ins:

SEO Title Tag: The most import plug-in for SEO (Search Engine Optimzation). This little plug-in re-writes your title tags so that spiders can index your site based on keywords within the tag. SEO Title Tag makes it easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website.

http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

WP-Cache: Speed up your WordPress theme! WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster. It works by caching WordPress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests rather than loading and executing calls to PHP.

http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/

Google XML Sitemaps Generator: This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

WP Backup: Backup your WordPress easily and efficiently. You can have your backup executed automatically and sent via email or to a writable folder on your web server daily. I prefer to have it generate an email daily.

http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

NoFollow: NoFollow Free removes the “nofollow” attribute from your WordPress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links and it inserts (if you want) an image band at the top of your pages with the phrase: “NOFOLLOW FREE” is a useful attribute to conserve pagerank.

http://www.michelem.org/wordpress-plugin-nofollow-free/

WassUp: If you like statistics you will love Wassup. WassUp is a WordPress plugin to track your visitors in real time. It has a very readable and fancy admin console to keep tracks of your blog’s users visits, current visitors online, visitors details and so much more. It comes with a “Spy” view in Ajax like the Digg Spy.

http://www.wpwp.org/

All in One SEO Pack: It’s all about SEO! This plugin does it all. Streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings recommended.

http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

It’s important that you stay current with all your plug-ins. You can check your Plug-ins link in your admin console to see if there’s any new updates for any plug-ins you’re using.

There’s many blogs that write about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and assume they’re the subject expert. Well, unless your results speak for themselves you can’t really label yourself as a true expert of SEO. I have read many publications and blog sites on SEO to further my knowledge. I am going to share a technique that can really get you positive results.

Questions:

1. Which of the following is a positive technique to improve rankings & traffic from search engines?

a. Submit your site to 2000 search engines and directories

b. Use meta tag keywords

c. Re-writing title tags on your pages to reflect high search volume, relevant keywords

If you answered (c) you’re correct. This is an effective SEO technique.

2. Which of the following character limits is the best choice to use when limiting the length of title tags?

a. 22

b. 65

c. There’s no limit

If you answered (b) you’re correct. Google & Yahoo! both display between 62-68 characters and MSN/Live hovers between 65-69.

3. Which of the following would be the best choice of URL structure for search engines?

a. www.mysite.com/music/led-zeppelin

b. www.mysite.com/music/index.htm

c. www.mysite.com/music/123.php

If you answered (a) you’re correct. This method provides the most semantic information, the best description of the content on the page.

Summary:

There’s so much information about SEO, but getting a basic understanding on how to get better results will help your site in ranking and page rank. Our results are incredible by just applying a few techniques to our blog site. In just 4 weeks our rank went from 12 million to 400K.

To learn more from a true leader in SEO knowledge, visit seomoz. You can also see how well educated you’re on SEO by taking the 75 question test. This test generally takes 30 to 45 minutes. You can even show off your level of knowledge and score.

SEO Master - 84%

Are you an SEO Expert?

I hope you find this guide helpful. I will explain the basics on how you can improve your web site ranking with Alexa, and the two big search engines Google and Yahoo. I have tested this myself and I was amazed. In only 3 weeks here’s my results based on the date and actual Alexa ranking.

1/23 - 12,345,537
1/31 - 3,799,956
2/04 - 1,978,769
2/12 - 1,098,281
2/13 - 714,467

The results are tremendous for 3 weeks. Look at the 1 wk. Avg. This means during that 1 week our site was ranked 140,167.

Now on to the guide.

Make sure you have a blog site that has good original content, and that you add new content at least 3 to 4 times per week. Do not copy other sites or publications! You want to be original and capture your readers interest.

WordPress Plug-ins that you need;
* SEO Title Tag
* All in One SEO Pack
* Google Sitemaps
* Simple Tags

You can download these plug-ins for “Free” using the latest version of WordPress. You can also read more about each plug-in on the authors web site.

Once you have everything configured, you’re now ready to promote your web site!

First, register an account with Entrecard. This advert is unique and it’s a great way to get your ad’s displayed on other web sites within the Entrecard network. All you have to do is drop your card on other Entrecard members to gain credits. You can use your credits to buy ad space with no out of pocket cost! Not a bad deal. It’s important to always drop on members who drop cards on you. You can drop up to 300 cards per day which is 300 credits. This doesn’t include how many credits you can receive from other members dropping on you.

And there’s more!

The best way to get others to comment about your blog, is commenting on theirs. You will see a lot of blog sites that will have a logo that says “You Comment, I Follow”. In most cases they will reciprocate. You can also recommend a site on the Entrecard network. This is a great way to build relationships and have others recommend your blog site.

You can download Search Status by going to http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/. SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see Website Traffic Trend information, Reach and Rank. There’s no interruption while you surf.

I hope that you find this information helpful and I would like to hear your feedback.

If you own and run a web site you want to know how your web site is ranked. Alexa provides this data to you for free. You can download the latest Search Status from here. This is only for Firefox and Mozilla. Search Status allows you to see the performance of any website in the world, including yours when you have your web site opened in Firefox or Mozilla. It is located at the bottom right of your browsers status bar.

It’s important that you know your ranking to see how well your site is doing. Alexa provides you exactly what you need. It’s also a good tool to use when you’re visiting other sites that talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If that site isn’t ranked in the top 100K than they’re selling you a pipe dream. I have just started and my site has moved from 12 million to 8 million in matter of weeks. It takes a lot of work to get ranked in the top 100K. There are some great SEO plugins for WordPress that work really well.

How does Alexa Ranking work?

Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.

Alexa’s traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on Geocities and Tripod. If a site is identified as a personal home page or blog, its traffic ranking will have an asterisk (*) next to it: Personal Page Avg. Traffic Rank: 3,456*. Personal pages are ranked on the same scale as a regular domain, so a personal page ranked 3,456* is the 3,456th most popular page among Alexa users.