Free SEO Articles

We touched briefly on the ways to increase blog traffic by using relevant images within posts in a previous post. This is a great method of generating additional traffic to your site from search engine image searches. However, how can the inclusion of images contribute to a page’s overall SEO profile? And, moreover, what are some of the recognized best practices when including images on web pages?

Images can be optimizes for various entities (for example, viewers, search-engines, social networking use etc.) which can be said of all forms of page optimization. Here, we concern ourselves with optimization for users/viewers, and for search-engines. There is much common ground, but also aspects unique to each.

Here is a broad checklist for image optimization:

• image relevance – ensure images are relevant to the page content;
• image format – usually jpg and png format; some SEO commentary has suggested a slight bias towards png format in Google image search although this appears not to have been substantiated;
• page title correspondence – matching the page title to the image title and content;
• image title – the image title (or raw file-name) can permit the use of extra keywords; do not waste the opportunity to call an image gone-with-the-wind-cover-scan.jpg instead of DC112092.jpg;
• image alt text – use keyword-rich image alt tags although avoid over-stuffing;
• image size – keep images between reasonable size limits;
• captioning - using captions in WordPress postings seems to increase relevance, though I have yet to fully substantiate this claim;
• keyword vicinity – using your target keywords for the image in the same block level HTML element as the image seems to increase relevance; again, I have yet to fully substantiate this;

The web is a very visual medium, therefore every opportunity should be taken to improve the overall user experience of your site with the appropriate use of images.

I am sure you’ve tried it! I know I have, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbour’s cat has, at some point in one of its 9 lives, even attempted it. Yes, folks, what I am talking about is starting an Internet forum. There are almost as many Internet forums as there are Internet users, but despite this apparent glut of competitors, how can you improve your site’s SE profile and try to gain an edge over your competitors in terms of SEO?

I have used vBulletin, SMF, phpbb, punbb and mybb in the past and after significant use of each, I have decided to standardize my forum building efforts on myBB. To me, it is straightforward and intuitive to manage and customize, has a reasonable range of, and support for, plug-ins and themes, and the free support community always do their best to help out (even if in a markedly high school-ish way at times.)

So I want to talk a little about ways in which we can improve onsite SEO for myBB forums.

There are several useful plug-ins that help with myBB SEO. The first, and most obvious, is the Google SEO mod which incorporates suggestions from Google’s own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. The mod requires a little effort to get working flawlessly, but all credit to the author for including several SEO features in to a single mod. This plug-in will enable keyword-rich search-engine friendly URLs, dynamic XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, dynamic META tags generation, automatic 301 redirects for broken URLS and a few smaller tweaks.

In order to avoid PR leakage (and to deter forum spammers), it is a good idea to install an additional plug-in that appends the rel=nofollow attribute to all in post links.

Similar to the above, any extraneous links included in your myBB templates should be amended to rel=nofollow links. Again, this will help prevent PR leakage. You can also use a robots.txt file to prevent search engine spiders unnecessarily visiting and subsequently indexing pages that should not appear in the index – these may include your login page, standard help files, member list and more.

Signatures are always of some concern to forum owners. I tend to tackle this by introducing a clear statement about when signatures are allowed. I use a plug-in to disable signature by default. In order to qualify for a  standard signature, a user must make 10 good posts. The standard signature has rel=nofollow appended to all outbound links. When a user has made 25 or more good posts, I remove the rel=nofollow restriction on his/her signature links. Employing this method has allowed me to gain and retain good PR and ranking on many inner pages. There are several signature related plug-ins for myBB. The one I use at the moment is available at myBB Central.

Here, I have tried to provide a broad overview of some of the ways in which to raise the SEO profile of a myBB forum. I will make additional posts on this topic, delving in to more detail on each of the broad points mentioned above.

Internal linking refers to the method of linking from one page or post on your site or blog to another page or post on your site or blog.

Since search engine spiders may follow outbound links on your popular or frequently indexed pages, then it is a good idea to give the spiders plenty of your own internal links to follow. This may increase the number of pages from your site that are read, and consequently indexed, by the search engines. It may also disseminate PageRank within your site.

As blog owners, what options do we have to increase our internal linking?

Post Plug-in Library

One method is to use the series of plug-ins developed by Rob Marsh, namely the Post-Plugin Library and its related plug-ins: Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, Popular Posts, and Recent Comments. These can all be found at the main WordPress site, or at Rob’s site. The main WordPress site also lists a series of similar plug-ins which do the same job. For the most part, I have standardized my blogs on Rob’s plug-ins because they offer everything I need and provide a consistent means of managing the several plug-ins (using 5 plug-ins from one author, instead of one plug-in each from 5 different authors.)

Once you have a reasonable head of content on your blog, these plug-ins can be used either as widgets, or by inserting them in to pages or posts, to provide on page links to other posts on your blog. This gives the aforementioned search engine spiders plenty of local content to chomp on, but also – perhaps more importantly – brings before the eyes of readers additional content they may be interested in seeing.

These plug-ins can be used in numerous configurations, either individually, or in combination. Experimentation will allow you to build the best profile for your particular circumstances.

Manual Internal Linking

Another method to increase the internal linking from individual posts is to manually link to previous posts. For example, if you have a past article on blue widgets and you make mention of blue widgets in a newer article then be sure to link back to your previous article when first mentioning blue widgets in the newer article.

A popular method that embraces this technique and takes it one step further by using older articles as the basis for present material. This way, you can start out your new article with an opener such as: “Regular readers may recall my previous article in which I discussed blue widgets. In today’s post I will be looking at blue widgets in a little more detail…”

Automated Internal Linking

A natural extension of manual internal linking, is automated internal linking. Fortunately for blog owners, Vladimir Prelovac has created a plug-in to allow the association of links (both external and internal) to a word or phrase, and more. The plug-in is called SEO Smart Links and is available from the main WordPress plug-in directory of from Mr. Prevolac’s excellent site.

Once installed, the settings allow you to configure a series of words or phrases each with a corresponding link. Each time the word or phrase is parsed by WordPress, a link to your specified target is automatically inserted.

This plug-in is extremely useful, particularly if you already have a large body of content on your site.

One aspect you should bear in mind when using this plugin is that, depending on the number of links you configure, it can impose a non-trivial overhead on your site.

The internet is chock full of blogs.  It’s a harsh reality that as the internet becomes more densely populated, rising to the top of the search engine rankings (SERPs) will naturally become more difficult.  However, there are numerous SEO methods available to all bloggers that will help increase search engine exposure.

First, we will consider blog posts.  Each blog post should be tuned to maximise its contribution to the overall SEO effort of your blog.  Usually, each post will appear on the front page of your blog for a period and subsequently be linked to from the front page of your blog.  So it is important that it be fine tuned in accordance with accepted SEO best practices.

For each post, ensure the post title includes its target keyword or keyphrase in the left most position and ensure that you have your permalink structure set up appropriately.

Contribute to the overall crawlability of your blog by linking within context to other articles or post on your blog.  For example, you could start out “In my last post on this topic found here” etc.

If using images and/or links within blog posts, be sure to  include concise and accurate HTML ALT and TITLE tags.

Within the main body of your blog post, attempt to repeat your main target keyword or keyphrase several times.  Some ‘experts’ seem to brand figures of anywhere between 1% to 5% of the overall body text should be keywords.  I have never noticed any empirical conclusions that back up these figures.  But I do recommend repeating your main keyword several times.

Additionally, repeat similar keywords or keyphrases or popular search variants and synonyms of your main keyword or keyphrase.  This will increase your exposure for searches that couple a variant of your keywords.

Where possible and when appropriate, use HTML <strong> tags to emphasize your main keywords or keyphrases.  Some say that this has no overall effect on your SERPs, however, I have noticed some improvement when using this technique in particular situations.  For example, I once had a sports blog and used HTML <strong> tags to highlight inline the names of players.  I used such highlighting consistently for this purpose across the entire blog and mid-term results seemed to indicate that I did start to see more traffic from search engines when these names were used in the search phrases.  Although I do not believe the evidence behind these claims to be entirely anecdotal, the gains might be very small.

The above are pointers that should help you increase organic traffic through search engines.  However, the most important rule to consider for every post is to write clear compelling content for human readers.  Above all, do not get overly pre-occupied with writing for search engines.

Working towards optimizing a site for search engines is an ongoing task simply because search engine algorithms are continually evolving.  However, there are several basic aspects of on site SEO that all should adhere to.  In this series of blog entires, I outline some basic SEO best practices that will help establish a foothold in your selected niche.  Each entry contains five onsite SEO recommendations.

Optimize HTML <title> tags on a per page basis
Be sure to compose unique <title> tags for every page of your site.  Ensure that these <title> tags include one or two of your target keywords or keyphrases and that the keywords or keyphrases appear in their leftmost position.  For example, “Cheap Gymnastics Leotards” is better than “A Broad and Varied Range of Cheap Gymnastics Leotards“ if you are targeting cheap gymnastics leotards.  Although a matter of some debate, some suggest keeping <title> tag content between 48 and 72 characters.  The text in the <title> tag can appear directly in SE search results, so making it relevant and compelling can increase SE traffic.

Optimize HTML <H1> tags on a per page basis
Utilize unique <H1> tags on all pages and ensure they include the page’s target keyword or keyphrase in the left most position.

Unique HTML META Keywords per page
Ensure you use unique META keywords relevant to the page content.  Avoid too much repetition of individual words and certainly avoind keyword-stuffing.

Unique HTML META descriptions per page
Use unique META descriptions per page.  Use target keywords and phrases in the leftmost position and avoid overrunning about 72 characters with target content.

Unique descriptive HTML ALT tags on all images
Since SE spiders do not read text contained within images, HTML ALT tags provide you a opportunity to tell SE spiders what your images are about.  Be sure to use unique, descriptive and keyword-rich ALT tags on all images.  Avoid repetition and keyword-stuffing.  Make your ALT tags easily readable, single sentences.

SEO activity can be divided in to two broad categories, namely, offsite SEO and onsite SEO. 

Onsite SEO refers to all the methods used in the design and presentation of your site in order to enhance its appeal to search engines and spiderability.  Onsite SEO includes tweaking hundreds of factors that can increase the quality of information search engines retrieve when visiting your site.  There are no magic formulae for these elements, but using them all appropriately can lead to significant gains in search engine rankings.  Onsite SEO factors include (but are not limited to):

• choice of text within HTML h# tags (for example, <h1> or <h3> tags).  Do not overuse h1 tags, one per page;
• choice of text within HTML title tags.  This should be unique for each page on your site;
• keyword density within HTML body tags.  Historically (and, perhaps, anecdotally), a density of 3% to 5% evenly distributed on pages of over 200 words was thought to be near optimal, although this is near impossible to assess objectively;
• strong relevant internal linking.  Breadcrumb style sub-navigation on pages can strengthen internal linking;
• choice of text within HTML META description tag.  This should be unique for each page on your site;
• watch out for broken links within your site;
• keywords in HTML <strong> tags;
• use an up-to-date XML sitemap;
• use an up-to-date HTML sitemap;
• place target keywords high up on the page;
• customize 404 pages to include links back to principal areas of your site’s navigation structure;
• use unique and relevant HTML ALT tags on all images;

These are several of the more important factors that influcence onsite SEO, many of which we shall return to in more depth in ensuing articles on this blog.

Offsite SEO refers to the methods employed to improve search engine rankings by maximizing the influence of factors outside your site’s home domain.  For example, building strong, relevant inbound links from other domains/sites.  The principal object of offsite SEO is quality link building.  Link building has evolved to become a full and separate discipline within SEO and we will return on more than one occasion to tackle the many aspects of link building in future articles on this blog.

Ordinarily, onsite SEO should be undertaken before proceeding to offsite SEO efforts and are usually quicker and easier to perform.  Offsite SEO efforts are usually divided in to mid- to long-term projects.