Tutorial Blog » SEO

Top 5 SEO Plugins for Joomla

Spencer Spellman — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:00:54 +0000

Anyone who runs a successful website knows the value of search engine optimization. A good SEO tool kit can turn a good website into a profitable website by attracting the right kind of targeted traffic.

But, how do you SEO a CMS site such as Joomla? With Joomla Extensions! Extensions is term used to refer to any number of Joomla components, modules and plugins.

If you have a Joomla website, you’re going to want to make sure that you’ve properly optimized it for search engines and have the appropriate SEO tools in place.

Below I’ve listed the top five SEO extensions for Joomla. (...)
Read the rest of Top 5 SEO Plugins for Joomla

5 Free Ways to Market Your Blog

Spencer Spellman — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:00:46 +0000

It’s no secret that the ailing economy has hit everyone, even us bloggers who depend so heavily on Google Adsense and page impressions. It’s become increasingly harder to grow and maintain those high page views, while also competing with other bloggers in your niche.

As a blogger you don’t want to pay a high rate to advertise your blog and risk not getting a return on your investment; nor do you want to do an adwords campaign. You want quick, easy and free ideas for marketing your blog. (...)
Read the rest of 5 Free Ways to Market Your Blog

5 Plugins for Making Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly

Spencer Spellman — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:00:29 +0000

In my last SEO for Wordpress article, I started with 5 tips for making your WordPress blog SEO friendly. We discussed things you could do on an ongoing basis to give your blog value to people and search engines — optimized content, proper keyword research, optimizing photos, building links and using navigation techniques to optimize for search engines.

This time, I want to talk about five WordPress plugins that will add SEO value to your blog. Remember, plugins are packages of code that add functionality to your wordpress installation. With each version of Wordpress, plugins have gotten easier to install and maintain. So, there is no excuse for not using the proper tools to promote your site and make it more search-engine friendly.

Without further ado, here are 5 Wordpress Plugins for Search Engine Optimization. (...)
Read the rest of 5 Plugins for Making Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly

5 Tips for Making Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly

Spencer Spellman — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Everyone’s vying for that number one spot on search results. Over the last couple years, it’s been Google who has stood head and shoulders over the rest, although the release of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, has raised eyebrows. So what does this mean for WordPress users?

Well it means that if you want your WordPress blog to be found, you better take advantage of search. I’ve listed below 5 tips for making your WordPress blog SEO friendly. (...)
Read the rest of 5 Tips for Making Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly

Using SEO to Optimize Your Social Media Profiles

Spencer Spellman — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:00:53 +0000

If you’re reading this then it means you probably have at least a base understanding of what social media and social networking is. You probably at least have a Facebook profile.

If you’re more learned in social networking, some of your day’s activities may have consisted of stumbling one of your blog posts, digging a couple articles, posting a bulletin, changing your status update and retweeting a Guy Kawasaki article. However, did you know that no matter what your social media experience, that you can optimize your social networking profiles so that more people can find you? (...)
Read the rest of Using SEO to Optimize Your Social Media Profiles

New Searchable Scanned Docs and a Common Screw Up

Michael Alexander — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:06:05 +0000

I mention Google so often that many people must think I’m getting paid by the company. Just for the record, they don’t pay me. I just can’t help myself–Google is always doing cool things.

Recently, Google said it is now able to use optical character recognition to index scanned documents stored as Adobe PDFs. Previously, the company rarely scanned docs because it couldn’t be sure of the search results. According to Google’s blog:

While we’ve indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer.

To take a test drive of this new-new thing, click on this search query–Steady Success in a Volatile World–and you’ll see an excerpt of the PDF doc in the search results followed by the View as HTML link.

Convert scanned PDFs to text

Tech site Digital Inspiration has an angle on this new feature worth mentioning:

If you have scanned PDF files on your hard drive but lack OCR software, you can still convert them into recognizable text, DI says.

Create a folder on your Website (say, your site is abc.com) and upload all your PDFs to the same folder. Then, create a public Web page that links to all the PDFs. Wait for the Google searchbots to spider your stuff. After that’s done, type site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf to see your PDFs as HTML.

Lifehacker adds this twist to converting PDFs to HTML:

You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to reign in what gets scanned and indexed on your site, although you should assume anything you put online can be found by those looking for it.

Can you tell what’s wrong with Lifehacker’s sentence above? Read “21 Words That Sound Alike but Mean Different Things.” What wrong in this picture?

Improve Your SEO Part 3 – Attention To Detail

Philip Beel — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:00:55 +0000

Welcome to the final installment of “Improve Your SEO.” This topic has been spread over three posts, so if you haven’t already, check out part 1 and part 2 of the series. This final post will concentrate on the final touches of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which you can implement to improve the performance of your site. The topics have been broken down with examples to give you a better understanding of how you can implement the changes.

This tutorial will cover splash pages, backlinking and javascript implementation, as well as URL structure and folder directory layout, all of which are extremely important in optimising your websites search engine friendliness and increasing traffic to your website.(...)
Read the rest of Improve Your SEO Part 3 – Attention To Detail

Using WordPress? How to Enhance Your Site’s Search Engine Optimization with Plugins.

Michael Alexander — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:28:25 +0000

One of the nice things about WordPress is that it’s as friendly to search engine optimization as a beagle is to a bowl of ice cream–even before you start tweaking it.

Long ago, I settled on WP because I was more interested in using it as a simple content management system than an actual blog. All I really wanted to do is build a no-fuss place–comprising four or five pages–where I could showcase my work and experience to promote my Web writing business. I don’t really know how WP compares to other blogging platforms because I haven’t used any of the others.

In recent years, I’ve been paying more and more attention to SEO best practices. I quickly learned a while ago that Web writing and SEO were immutably tied and there’s really no way to separate the two skills. You need to be on your game with both skills or you’re never going to get the ball from the business players. Anyone who tells you differently probably sells replica watches from the trunk of his car on the side.

(...)
Read the rest of Using WordPress? How to Enhance Your Site’s Search Engine Optimization with Plugins.

How I Increased Traffic to My Blog with These Three Tips from Google

Michael Alexander — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:43:45 +0000

When you’re optimizing your site for Google and other search engines, images may not be everything, but you shouldn’t overlook them. According to Google, you can use Google Image Labeler and other tools “to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.”

To opt in to enhanced image search:

1. Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account.
2. Click the URL for the site you want.
3. Click Tools, and then click Enable enhanced image search.

(...)
Read the rest of How I Increased Traffic to My Blog with These Three Tips from Google

Write Your Keywords for the Front and Back of Your Web Pages

Michael Alexander — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:00:09 +0000

In my last post, Follow Through on Your Web Design Media with Search Engine Optimization, I repeatedly mentioned keyword placement in your multimedia filenames, Alt tages and why certain kinds of formatting helps boost search-engine visibility. I didn’t delve into many specifics of why you would want to use keywords beyond your design elements because it would have taken too much time. I figured that I’d circle back today and get into keywords a bit more. It’s such an important topic, I’ll be writing about keywords and keyphrases again (and maybe again).(...)
Read the rest of Write Your Keywords for the Front and Back of Your Web Pages