WordPress makes it very easy to publish content. In fact once you have it installed the hardest part is to actually make yourself write, find or commission the content. The actual publishing of the content is a second thought. How could this get any better do you ask? How about if we can make our posts super optimized with just a few tweaks and plug-ins?

1. Search Optimized Title

The title of your posts and pages is a large factor in how well your content ranks. All of the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing all heavily weigh the title of your page and the keywords in it when deciding how relevant it is to search terms. This means that if you include keywords and phases in your page title you will get significantly more search traffic. Now by default WordPress does a great job of including the title of your page in the document title, however we can improve upon it a little bit.

The closer the keywords and phrases are towards the start of the title the better you will rank. WordPress put's it at the end of the title tag after the name of the blog, what we want to do instead is put it at the front. Luckily this is easy with the All In One SEO Plugin. Simply download and install and you can configure how the title is automatically generated.

2. Search Optimized Internal Linking

Links are critically important to SEO, in fact they can have one of the highest influences on how your sites rank. The search engines both take a look at how many links are pointing to your sites and pages as well as the words that used as the text for the links (ie: the anchor text). While links from other sites are the most effective types of links you can also improve your sites ranking by optimizing how you treat your internal links.

An easy way to do this is to ensure that each post has the title linking to the permalink for the page, this reinforces the keywords that are in your title with the post. This is an easy item to control through your theme template or simply by selecting a theme that uses the title as a link. If you can have the title also be a heading this will be even better.

Here is an example of the mark up / templating you can use to optimize your page titles:

 <h1><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1> 

3. Care with Duplicate Content

Many of the search engines are extremely sensitive when it comes to having several pages that have the same content. This is because at one point people wrote scripts that would scour the internet and steal your content, posting it on their own sites as a way to try and gain search traffic for advertising or affiliate links.

WordPress out of the box is not great when it comes to duplicate content. Many of the tag and archive pages can end up duplicating your articles under several different URLs. To combat this we recommend two options:

Display article excerpts on archive, category and tag pages rather than entire articles

On the pages where you are displaying archives or tagged pages, instead of showing the entire article use the wp_excerpt(); tag to display a teaser of the article with a link to learn more. This will prevent search engines from picking up the same post or article on several different URLs.

Exclude archive pages with your robots.txt

If you would prefer to have your archive, category and tag pages display full articles you can always exclude all of them except one by using your robots.txt file. The robots.txt file can tell web crawlers like the ones that are powered by search engines not to index parts of a given site. This is simply done by putting a text file named robots.txt in your root directory and including code similar the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content
Disallow: /tag
Disallow: /author
Disallow: /2010
Disallow: /2009
Disallow: /2008

4. Search Optimized Sitemaps

As you publish more and more content search engines can start to have difficulty finding all of your content and ensuring that it is all indexed. There are two ways we can ensure that search engines have as much information as possible as to what content is published on our wordpress sites and where they are published.

Keep an up to date XML sitemap

Search engines now look for a sitemap.xml file that contains the structure of your website with in the root directory. Additionally many search engines will also let you register and specify where you sitemap.xml sits on your server (Google Webmaster Tools for example gives you this capability). The XML sitemap plugin will automatically generate and update your sitemap.xml every time you create a new post so you can be sure that the search engines know about every post that you have.

Keep an up to date HTML sitemap

The other way that search engines find new pages and articles on your site is simply by navigating the links on your pages. By having one page that lists all of the posts on your site, the search engine can easily access every post from one central easy to find place.

Rather than update a page every time you create a new post or page, we suggest using the sitemap generator plug-in for WordPress. Much like the XML sitemap generator, this plug-in will generate and update your HTML sitemap automatically every time you add a page or post.

5. Search Optimized Promotion

Once your have created a blog and some posts you need to actually promote them to get users and the search engines to take notice. Simply posting content and hoping that people will stumble upon them might be a little optimistic. Instead we want to be proactive about getting our content noticed and there are some great ways to do this.

Improving your Ping Pang

When you create a new post wordpress sends a notification to different services to look up and acknowledge the new content. We can improve this however by expanding the list of services that WordPress pings. Simply go to settings > Writing and paste the following list into your "Update Services" box

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/pin

Promote Socially

Almost every search engine looks at links as a vote that your site and content is worth reading (and thus should appear higher in search engines). Promoting your content to social media is an excellent way to get high quality links and traffic to your posts. Additionally many search engines are now monitoring and tracking real time discussions and linking such as Twitter updates. It is likely that if they are not using this in their algorithm now they will in the future.

To promote users sharing your content make it easy. The ShareThis plugin makes it easy for users to add your content to any number of their social networks or simply e-mail it to a friend. The added links using the plugin will give you will make your entire blog an SEO beast.

If you have a huge advertising budget getting targeted traffic is not that difficult. There are countless tools available for identifying the right markets and you can simply write checks to your hearts desire. However most of us are placed in situations where we (or our clients) simply can not afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on internet advertising.

Luckily, if you know the right strategies you can get plenty of targeted traffic with out spending any hard cash.

1. Build an E-mail List

Building an e-mail list is something that many of us have seemed to have forgotten about. It may be due to the association with spam, or that it has been around so long, or maybe social media and RSS seem like a better option. E-mail offers a very unique difference and advantage however. First you have the ability to send specific e-mails and messages to specific groups and segments of your audience (where RSS is an all or nothing approach), but additionally you tend to have a more captive audience which results in higher response and conversion rates.

RESOURCES

• Lyrus E-mail Marketing
• How do you build your e-mail list?
• Entrepreneur.com on building your e-mail list

2. Focus on Organic Search

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has the capability to pull in large amounts of traffic with out having to spend a dime (in theory). Organic search is simply the unpaid listing of websites that show up when someone performs an internet search on a site such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. With 80% of all transactions starting with an internet search, not only do you have an audience that is ready to buy... it has the potential to bring in more traffic that almost any other approach available.

While we would all like to get more organic traffic it often is easier said than done. It is important to keep in mind that there is no way to trick your way to good rankings. The best practice is always to create high quality valuable content and ensure your website is built in a way that is search engine friendly. Keep in mind that when you are focusing on organic traffic getting high quality links with targeted anchor text tends to be most effective (for example, DIY Solar Energy)

RESOURCES

• SEO Basics
• The SEO Book
• SEO For WordPress Guide

3. Social Media

Social Media is the use of employing sites and media that allow you to connect with other people on a social level. The common examples would be Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Linkedin. These sites let you connect and converse with other users who have similar interests as you. Because all websites have some overarching theme or topic, you can connect with people who are also interested in the topic. This gives you the opportunity to build awareness of your site/product/service with your audience on a personal level which is much more effective than on a push media level.

An important note about social media. Make sure anything you do, publish or say on these networks is done in a way that actually adds value to someones day. If you are simply signing up to spam links to your site you are likely to have sub-par results.

RESOURCES

• Mashable Social Media 101
• Example Social Media Policies
• The Social Media Bible

4. Develop Some Public Relations

With so much focus on digital media public relations has lost a lot of the attention that it used to hold. Public relations is a valuable part of any marketing mix and it is an approach to building awareness and traffic that shouldn't be ignored. Especially considering it can be a low cost (or no cost) solution. There really are two areas in which we can benefit from public relations, through traditional forms of media and new forms of media.

While there are many different facets of PR, where you stand to gain a lot of new traffic is by having stories and articles written about your website.

Offline

Back before the internet became what it is today, companies would send a small one page write up with "news worthy" content regarding their company to any relevant media sources. These went out to newspapers, magazines, journals, etc... This write up was called a "press release" and simply covered the "who, what, when, why and how" of the story. Despite the fact that the internet is changing the way people consume news, it is still an effective way of building awareness about your website and/or company.

There have been plenty of studies and reports that show a direct correlation between traditional media mentions and website traffic. Even if your website isn't listed in the article you will find more branded searches for your website (and thus more traffic). If you know that you are going to be covered you can also try and capitalize on the increase in traffic and offer special discounts or personalized messages.

The process is fairly simple. Round up any related publications and look for the news contacts, almost every publication will have an e-mail where you can submit news. Write up a short press release and distribute it to the list you created previously. Don't be afraid to call up the media and pitch the story to them a few days after you have sent the release.

Online

This process doesn't have to be limited to offline publications. There are lots of industry blogs and websites that regularly post content and news to an audience consisting of your target market. While the concept is similar (get an online publication or blog to talk about you, your product, your company, etc..) it tends to be slightly different in approach. In most cases getting articles and news published can be a bit trickier as you are not always working with professional journalists who always need that next story.

When pitching stories to bloggers or online publications you may need to spend more time developing a relationship with the authors first. Additionally finding a list of relevant blogs can be a bit more tricky and require more searching. The more open and honest you are about the situation the better your results will be. It is unnecessary to write a formal press release (and ineffective), focus on starting a conversation with the author instead.

RESOURCES

• How to write a press release
• How to pitch to bloggers
• Blogger Relations 101
• How to pitch

5. Add Value to Other Sites

Ok "Web 2.0" might be a cliche term, but there are a countless websites that thrive on user participation and contribution. I assure you that there are some related to your industry or that consist of your target market, as people naturally want to connect and discuss things that are important to them. Some industries and topics may be harder to find than others, but if you are listening there are people talking.

Once you have found these types of sites, take a little bit of time every week to add value to them through participation. Over time the users will begin to become familiar with you and trust you. By offering your knowledge you will build awareness, good will and trust for your company/website/profession. Additionally most of these sites will even let you have a profile or signature that can contain a link (or several) to your website so you don't have to be so direct about your motives.

The more you participate and the more you contribute the more you will get out of this technique.

6. Get Others Involved

Sometimes the best way to build awareness and traffic is through word of mouth. Word of mouth is actually one of the most effective forms of marketing online and off. Not far behind word of mouth in terms of effectiveness is celebrity endorsement. This method can drive traffic to your website by using both of these proven techniques. When you get other people involved in your website (either as guest bloggers, giving them an interview, etc...) you are doing two very powerful things. First you are actually giving people a small portion of ownership in what you are doing. When they invest the time to contribute and assist the site they buying into the idea that it is worth their time and effort. Because of this they are going to be much more likely to want your website to succeed and thus tell other people. If nothing else they will likely link to their contribution and tell people about it.

Additionally by having a well known figure contributing to your website you are getting their endorsement and it can boost your credibility significantly (even to the point of matching their own). This subconsciously will resonate with users and put the site at a higher status than they would previously, making them much more likely to share your site, contribute to the site and return for future visits.

7. Syndicate Your Content

Chances are if you are looking for more traffic there are at least a handful of other sites on the web that cover the same (or similar) subjects that you are. By creating high quality content you can offer a win/win situation. Approach popular websites and offer to publish (or syndicate) your articles on their site. They win by providing relevant content to their readers with out having to perform the work of creating it and you can build awareness / traffic to your site through an article byline.

If you can't find any websites that will bite you could always submit your articles to article directory sites. They often have huge mailing lists on various topics and tend to rank fairly well themselves.

• Technorati
• Top Article Directories
• Syndicate your blog through social media

8. Contests For Your Services

Contests have always been a great way to build awareness and interest. After all who doesn't like wining something for free? Since we are talking about free ways to generate traffic purchasing an item to give away is out of the picture. Sure you might be able to find something you already have to give away but how likely is that? Instead offer up your expertise. Chances are you have skills or knowledge that is valuable to other people or companies. By offering a contest for the services you don't have to spend any additional capital and build awareness for all of those people who previously didn't know about your expertise but could use your help.

This is a perfect time to build your e-mail list. Ask those who are signing up for your contest if they would like to be entered into your newsletter for future opportunities and giveaways.

If you don't want to do a contest you could also do a free seminar or webinar, both of which can drive a lot of traffic and attention to your site as well.

9. Be Remarkable

Supreme marketing guru Seth Godin often talks about the importance of being remarkable. The idea is that if you are "the best in the world" at something it will naturally market for you. An important part of achieving this status is picking a very specific and narrow niche or specialty. If you have a content focused website, what very specific topic can you cover that you can do better than anyone else in the marketplace? If you run a service company, what very narrow and specific niche can you server better than any of the other companies in the market?

By focusing your attention on becoming the best at this narrow specialty you will become remarkable and an expert. Your demand will increase dramatically and people will start finding your site naturally. This actually is more effective and will generate more traffic than if you were to try and be "good" in a market that is already saturated with those who can do a better job than you.

RESOURCES

• Seth Godin: The Dip

10. Start a Group or Organization

Through out human history we have always desired a sense of belonging and community.It doesn't take much looking to find a group of people who are interested in the same things that you are. Start a weekly meet up, tweet up, chat up (if it is virtual), forum, digest, etc... that gets the group of people together to talk and discuss the issues. You would be surprised at how quickly a group like that can grow. As the founder and head of the group or organization you will receive a lot of notoriety and interest. It will also give you great opportunities to have links and advertisements for your company or website through out areas in which members interact.

Conclusion

There are lots of different ways to drive traffic to your website with out spending much (or any) money. Sometimes they are more effective than paid methods. The general rule of thumb though is that traffic tends to be high involvement and low cost, or low involvement and high cost. Search Marketing is a good example of this - where pay per click can get you traffic very quickly and with out much in terms of time investment, organic rankings can take significantly more work and take much longer but at a much lower cost.

It is important to understand what techniques, tactics and strategies are going to be most effective for any given situation. Blindly trying them all is not going to work very well, take the time to think through and plan your approach in building traffic.

This week we will learn how to increase your inbound links number without paying for any campaigns. For the ones who don't know Inbound links are links form high rated web sites/domains that link to yours. And in case someone doesn't know what does SEO stand for, it's Search Engine Optimization

So, what you need to do is very simple thing, if you are a blogger - have a blog like me, you probably have bunch of friends with their own blogs sharing similar subjects, find their top rated articles (most often they are most commented ones) by searching on Google for Sitelinks (view image above) and ask them to put one paragraph for example at the end of those articles.

That paragraph should be descriptive and shouldn't have more than 3 links. Here are two good examples, guest post info at the beginning on "Stylize your digg count" and blockquote paragraph on it's demo page about Stylized Web. Ok, what do you get now with these links?

• Increase your traffic significantly.
• Improve your visibility in the search engines.
• Provide an added resource to your website.
• Save you a lot of advertising money.
• Save you time.

Sounds good, does it? The name for this is "link building", and with few more like this and some sense for business you could start a SEO company For further reading be sure you check out:

• http://www.linkbuilding.org/
• http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/V1/inlinkData.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_link

For this I will use one of sites I’ve made, it is AdSense site and it follows SEO rules and it is good example what to do and what not to do. This site is http://www.aboutdoghealth.org/ so let’s start from the top.

Things to do

• Keywords in URL
  For example http://www.aboutdoghealth.org/ use whole words – keywords to best describe your site. Don’t rely on this if you don’t have keywords in other parts of your site.
• Keywords in <title> tag
  This shows search results as your page title, so this is one of the most important things and it shouldn’t be long 5-6 words max, and use keyword at the beginning.
• Keywords in anchor texts
  Also very important, especially for the anchor text, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.
• Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)
  One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.
• Keywords in the beginning of a document
  While coding your page put your main content before side bar. Because this also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings
• Keywords in <alt> tags
  Spiders don't read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them.
• Anchor text of inbound links
  This is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don't, it is still OK.
• Origin of inbound links
  It is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable and the .edu and .gov sites are the most reputable
• Links from similar sites
  Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.
• Metatags
  Metatags are becoming less and less important but if there are metatags that still matter, these are the <description> and <keywords> ones.
• Unique content
  Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site's rankings.
• Frequency of content change
  Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.
• Site Accessibility
  Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.
• Sitemap
  It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.

Things not to do

• Keyword stuffing
  Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.
• Keyword dilution
  When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.
• Single pixel links
  when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.
• Cross-linking
  Crosslinking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A
• Duplicate content
  When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned
• Doorway pages
  Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.
• Cloaking
  Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.
• Invisible text
  This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don't be surprised by the penalty.
• Illegal Content
  Using other people's copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.
• Flash
  Spiders don't index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don't forget to give it an alternative textual description. And also don’t have just flash home page without HTML one.
• Frames
  Frames are very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.
• Redirects (301 and 302)
  When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique, when the visitor is immediately taken to a different page.
• Bans in robots.txt
  If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site.
• Session IDs
  This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don't use session IDs for information that you'd like to be indexed by spiders.

Submit your site

• To Google
  http://www.google.com/addurl/
• To Yahoo!
  http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• To MSN
  http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
• To FastSubmit
  http://www.evrsoft.com/fastsubmit/
• To SubmitExpress
  http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html
• To dmoz
  http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Message_Boards/

And also a good and easy way to promote your site is to submit it to inspiration galleries, you can see most of them here

Once you have mastered the basics and are ready to learn more, take a stop by the SEOBook site and download their free tools.