One of the biggest downfalls to the stock version of Wordpress is without a doubt its limited search engine optimization customization. However, there are numerous plugins and solutions available to help quell some of these problems. In this particular case I’d like to discuss a major make or break area of your blog, your post / page titles.

Your page title is of utmost importance to google and other search engines. It’s one of the very first areas the search engines look at to determine keyword relevancy. Get it right and google will reward you with a high ranking search result, get it wrong and you can have the best damn post in the world, but no one will ever see it. For the purpose of this tutorial you’re going to want to get one of the following wordpress SEO packages.

• All in One SEO Pack – my recommendation
• Headspace

Using these simple plugins we can take full control over multiple SEO aspects of our website, enabling you to take your post / page optimization to a much higher level of perfection.

By default wordpress will create a post / page title that includes nothing more than your blog’s title. This essentially tells google nothing about the contents of your page, providing you with no SEO benefit. You’ll want your title to include:

• Your posts keyword phrases
• Include the most important keywords early in the post, as these are given additional weight in search engine rankings

Check out the complete video tutorial to see how you can implement these search engine optimization techniques on your own blog.

• test multiple banners against one another to determine which has the best conversions
• incorporate multiple banners in the same location, helping to solve the “banner blindness”

<?php
$themes = array(
array( title => “image title1″,
img => “http://www.domain.com/image1.jpg“,
url => “http://www.domain.com/link1.html”,
),

array( title => “image title2″,
img => “http://www.domain.com/image2jpg”,
url => “http://www.domain.com/link2.html”,
),

array( title => “image title3″,
img => “http://www.domain.com/image3.jpg”,
url => “http://www.domain.com/link3.html”,
),

);

$rand_keys = array_rand($themes, 3);
echo ‘<a href=”‘.$themes[$rand_keys[0]]

[url].’” target=”blank”><img src=”‘.$themes[$rand_keys[0]][img].’” alt=”" /></a>’;
?>

array( title => “image title3″,
img => “http://www.domain.com/image3.jpg”,
url => “http://www.domain.com/link3.html”,
),

$rand_keys = array_rand($themes, NUMBER);
echo ‘<a href=”‘.$themes[$rand_keys[0]]

Watch the Video Tutorial

Wordpress permalink SEO isn’t all that complicated, but do it wrong and google will make you pay. By default the wordpress permalink structure features a basic SQL query link. Example: http://www.domain.com/?p=123. This type of wordpress permalink structure tells google absolutely nothing about the content of your article, rendering it 100% useless from an SEO perspective.

You want your link to tell google as much as possible about what the article or post is about. To accomplish this task we’re going to use a wordpress permalink structure that includes the post name. Now, most of you may be thinking you’ll just use the following structure: http://www.domain.com/post-name, which…in most cases is a fine selection. However, due to the way wordpress dynamically re-writes URLs this can cause you problems down the road regarding page redirection. To avoid such problems I highly recommend using a wordpress permalink structure that appends a pre-post directory.

You could use the day and post name option in your wordpress permalink menu or use a custom permalink structure that includes a static pre-post directory, http://www.domain.com/blog/post-name or http://www.domain.com/article/post-name are 2 popular variations I’ve seen used in the past.

After google categorizes the content on your website they will present relevant advertisements in the various google adsense blocks you setup. For example, let’s say you have a website with articles on making money online or working from home. Google would present ads along the lines of…

Make Money Online – free e-book report to starting your online business

Ready to Work from Home – master the most effective ways to make money on the web

Generally these ads are relevant and will generate some degree of effectiveness. However, there are cases in which a niche can be hammered by nefarious advertisers or otherwise ads that simply are not going to generate clicks. Through use of some fairly simple competitive ad filtering we can drastically reduce the number of irrelevant or nefarious ads and start improving our overall click through rate (CTR).

You can find the competitive ad filtering setup options in your google adsense account. Within the adsense tab you’ll find the filtering options, here we can include a list of websites we would like to block from showing ads on our website. We will build this list over time by simply watching what ads appear in your google adsense blocks. If you continue to see the same ad which you deem unacceptable you should add it to your competitive filter list.

For Example…

The online gaming niche is rife with blackhat or otherwise suspicious advertisements that many visitors are not comfortable clicking on. If we look at the mass-multiplayer online gaming (MMO) niche specifically, including games such as World of Warcraft, Everquest, Warhammer Online, etc., we note there is a large number of advertisers for in-game currency. Most of these games prohibit the purchase or selling of their in-game currency and will punish players caught engaging in such activities.

For this reason many gamers won’t ever touch a ad like this. So, by simply filtering out these type of advertisers we can present only relevant ads that won’t discourage a user from clicking. Above all else you want to try to put yourself in your visitors shoes.

Now there is!

Introducing SEO ToolBar

The new SEO toolbar by SEOBook.com is a jam packed firefox addon bubbling over with functionality and useful resources to assist your daily SEO tasks. Here’s just a brief list of the major features in the SEO toolbar.

• Various rankings displayed including, page rank, alexa rank, directory links, traffic value, monthly unique, among many others
• Comparison tools utilizing alexa, quantcast, compete, and other site ranking websites
• Rank checker tool to determine ranking for specified keywords
• SEO X-ray built in (allows you to view internal / external links, headings, keyword density, etc.)
• Keyword Research tools
• Built in RSS reader
• Automatic updates

I can’t even begin to go through all the functionality here, however, after only downloading the addon a few hours ago I can already tell this is one I’m going to like. Keep in mind this is a firefox addon, so if you aren’t already using mozila firefox you should go download it here. Whether you’re new to SEO or a seasoned pro this is one addon you’re going to want to download.

Thus far I’ve only had the chance to take a preliminary run through, but from what I’ve seen so far I expect this plugin may have a permanent and vital role in my future blogs across all of my wordpress websites.

• Upload, record from webcam and import all rich-media directly to your blog post;
• Edit and remix videos using Kaltura’s online full-featured video editor;
• Easily import all rich media (video, audio, pictures…) from other sites and social networks, such as YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, CCMixter, Jamendo, New York Public Library, any URL on the web etc.;
• Allow readers and subscribers to add video and audio comments, and to participate in collaborative videos;
• Manage and track interactive videos through the management console;
• Sidebar widget displaying thumbnails of recent videos and video comments
• Complete administrative capabilities. You decide who can add and edit each video;
• Supports more than 150 video, audio and image file formats and codecs
• Three different video player styles to choose from
• Custom sizing of the video player
• Advanced sharing options for videos
• Easy installation that takes just 4 steps and a few minutes.

This new Version 2.1 includes several fixes and tweaks as well as a cool new widget for the blog sidebar showing all recent videos posted and video comments.

Additional capabilities coming soon:

• The ability to create, manage and display video playlists
• Podcast recorder and player
• The ability to create video galleries
• Advanced playing features such as: subtitles, download button, credits, content discovery, etc.

Download All in One Video Pack

Your page title is one of the very first pieces of html code google and other search engines look at when they spider your page. This single piece of information immediately gives the search engines some idea of what’s on your page, what it may be about, and what keywords could be associated with it. For this reason it’s extremely important that your page title be as keyword centric as possible.

For example, say you have a website on dogs, and you wrote an aritcle about how to teach your dog to sit. We want to create a good title, which in turn means creating a title that’s loaded with keywords. Here’s a few examples of what we might come up with…

• How to make my Dog Sit
• Teach your Dog to Sit
• Get your Dog to Sit
• Dog Tricks – Teaching your Dog to Sit

All of these page titles are likely phrases or parts of phrases a user would likely input into a search engine. Knowing this information we have the potential to hit a 100% phrase match on our page title. If we take this match in combination with general keyword distrubtion throughout our article we have a great chance of getting ranked high for that specific keyword phase and / or additional iterations of those keywords.

Auto Responder

Spam – in its most simplistic form spam is simply an unsolicited email. While spam is still a huge problem and annoyance for many email users any respectable auto responder company, such as getresponse.com, will block such spam. In compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 these auto responder services now require you send an opt-in email before beginning an email correspondence with an email subscriber.

Opt-in – this is an email that will be automatically be sent out to any of your subscribers by your auto responder service. All of your subscribers will have to click this opt-in confirmation link, otherwise they will not be added to your subscriber’s list.

Qualified Subscriber – any email account that has successfully completed the opt-in form.

Tracking – Any respectable auto responder service is gong to include various forms of tracking within each email you send. Generally any links you include are automatically converted into a unique tracking link, which will allow your auto responder service to collect information on that link. Ex. How many of your subscribers click a specific link?

Follow Up Message – an email sent following a user’s opt-in. These emails are added sequentially and every user that subscribes to your list will receive the same follow up message series.

Broadcast Message – an email sent one time to your list. Subscribers who sign up to your list in the future will not receive this message unless you manually resend it out.

All in One SEO Pack

All in one SEO pack is without a doubt the most crucial wordpress plugin you’ll ever download. Major features include:

• Page Title
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Description
• SEO Configuration for home page, posts, page, categories, tags, etc.
• No index options

Having control over these aspects allow you to super charge each individual post on your blog, thus optimizing them for search engines. Without this plugin wordpress is simply inadequate from an SEO perspective. All pages / posts will be assigned a default title, tags, etc. leaving much to be desired by the search engines.

Download all in One SEO Pack

Simple Tags

Simple tags is another “simple”, yet highly crucial plugin for wordpress. This plugin allows you to take greater control of the default wordpress tagging structures to further optimize them for search engines. A properly tagged article will allow you to further increase your keyword distribution for each article, exposing new search results you may have been overlooking. Major features include:

• Quick insertion of tags
• Tag finder
• Auto linking features
• Meta Keywords (disabled if you’re using All in one SEO pack)
• Related Posts
• Related Tags
• Tag Cloud

Download Simple Tags

XML Sitemaps

This plugin will automatically create an XML sitemap for your entire wordpress website. This plugin updates the sitemap on a daily basis and will notify google, yahoo, msn, and ask of your updates. Every good website needs a properly formatted sitemap and XML sitemaps is a simple and elegant solution.

Download XML Sitemaps

Redirection

Redirection is a plugin with a whole ton of functionality, but from an SEO perspective we’re going to be using this primarily for 301 redirect links (a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect). Redirection can create this code for you with just a few key strokes, allowing you to notify search engines in the event an article has moved permalink locations.

This is incredibly important if you find it necessary to change the permalinnk structure of your blog or if you are moving an entire site. I was in a similar situation a few months ago with one of my other websites, which at the time was running drupal (another blogging platform similar to wordpress). I used a similar redirection plugin to transition my pages in drupal to a completely new structured website with wordpress.

If I had failed to complete all the 301 redirects I would have essentially blind sided the search engines. For example, one of my articles was at domain.com/node/500 (this is drupal’s permalink structure) and it was moved to domain.com/8/18/08/name-of-article (wordpress peramlink strucutre). Google had indexed the article under the drupal permalink structure, and if a visitor clicks this and gets a 404 page not found error google is going to put you at the very bottom the search results during their next algorithm update.

However, with redirection I was able to intervene, so when a visitor hit domain.com/node/500 they automatically were forwarded to my new page for the article, which was subsequently re-indexed a few weeks later. Once the new article location was indexed I was able to remove the 301 redirect and completely take the old site offline.

Download Redirection

A note from Jeff & Derek…

We’re just getting started with the the construction… actually the complete overhaul of our website… so what you are seeing now is not even a shadow of what is to come.

We’re busy working on a complete A Powerful Income University and classes will be beginning in the near future so stay tuned and check back. API University is going to be geared for those who need detailed step by step coaching on how to get started, stay started, and run a successful online business. Many sites that provide great information, often times make the assumption that those visiting the site and read the articles and the tutorial assume the reader already has a working knowledge of what it takes to not only understand the concept but also have the knowledge level to implement the process.

At APIU we’re going to take you step by step right from the basics of getting your business started even before you begin clicking on the mouse and venturing out. We believe that a good foundation and understanding is the absolute best way to give yourself the best chance of success in this competitive business. So, you’ll have the opportunity to get on the right track right from the ground floor. If you are indeed at or above the entry level or the beginning stage of your online business journey you can get right into the advanced techniques of SEO, PPC, CPA, 2.0, and a vast number of other tips, techniques, strategies, competition crushing methods that we’ll teach you.

We’re excited about what we’ve got in the works behind the scenes… and soon you’ll have the opportunity to look right over our shoulder as we show you proven techniques that make money, some we’re testing, and even those that we’re just on the cutting edge with….Make it point to check back because we’re working away behind the scenes… working away on plan for your success! Jeff & Derek