You have a website and analytic software installed. I use Google Analytics but it’s up to you what solution to use. It really doesn’t matter because every analytic software should provide some basic reports. What I’m going to talk about in this article is how to use your top landing pages to improve your website functionality.

First thing that I consider important is this: any analytic software is meant to suggest some actions. Don’t just read your website reports: you have the answer to some of your problems right in front of you. Take action and then go back and measure it.

Top Landing Pages is a feature that shows you what pages, from your website, are used as entry gates. The tip that I have for you is to use these top landing pages to direct users deeper in your website.

There are two major cases of top landing pages:

1. The main page of your website
2. Particular pages/articles from your website

In the first case you have a lot more choices to direct people to other pages but when it comes to a particular page you have to be careful and direct readers to relevant content. When you want to improve the functionality of a particular page don’t place links to general pages (I mean don’t try to divert readers to your main page, for example).

The reason is that those people arrived on that page because they’re interested in that subject. A logical thing to do would be to direct them to more related subjects and from those subjects to other pages and so on.

So, your top landing pages could be the engine of your website if you know how to proper link it to the rest of your website.

What do you think of all this? Share your ideas and experience and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

Search engines are not the only thing out there, on the web. I see so many articles concentrating only to search engines and they miss the most important thing: all their content is actually for people. We tend to forget that all those statistics and all that we call traffic are people.

For a search engine a nofollow link is equal to zero but from a user perspective it could mean a lot, especially when you’re new on the market and your website doesn’t have too much authority. That is why is a good thing to go on the web, search for the authority websites and people on your market and comment on those websites.

If your comment is interesting enough then it’s a good chance other readers of that blog to click your link. It may not happen right from your first comment but this social-web is about persistency. So keep posting interesting comment and even thou your links will be nofollow you may receive some benefits out of it.

The most important thing is that those websites already managed to gather people interested in your market, so any click will have high value and may also lead to a conversion.

Now, I don’t want you to read this article and just run and place comments all over the web. Find a balance in everything you do and find its value. Just like in a brick and mortar business when you’re evaluating everything you do in terms of costs, you should try and do the same with a web based business.

What do you think of all this? Share your opinion with us and if you find this article interesting please consider subscribing to my blog!

These are my thoughts on the relation between the winter holydays and business. I’m not talking about the thing that this is a period of time when you should sell a lot: this is not about that relation. It’s about using Christmas as a moment when you take a deep breath and you think about what you did and what you’ll do.

Without thinking about what you did and what you have to do in order to further develop your business I think you’ll not go to far in terms of business. So, use Christmas as a moment to think:

1. Are you happy with your financial results?
2. What do you think was the most important thing you’ve done this year for your business?
3. What methods you used to market your business on the web?
4. Are you using any social network to help spread your message?
5. How many of your goals did you achieved, this year?
6. How many people did you helped?

Evaluate you and your business and also think about the future:

1. Establish goals for the next year and think about the ways of achieving it
2. Plan your SEO
3. Think about your social media activity
4. Think about the kind of content you’re going to produce
5. Think about how you’re going to help people
6. Don’t set goals that are directly connected to money; things like: increase sells. Consider additional things that in time might get more indirect value/money back; things like increasing the number of subscribers

My 10 ideas for 2010:

1. By the end of January I want to launch my Compete Guide to Keywords (for only $10)
2. Increase the number of my subscribers
3. Increase the number of Fans on my Facebook page
4. Continue helping people with problems related to SEO and Blogging, on my Facebook page
5. Produce new content every day
6. Increase the number of requests for my services and also the number of closed deals
7. Increase the conversion of my Work With Me page from my blog
8. Create a small free guide on general SEO issues that will be offered for free to anyone that subscribes to my newsletter
9. Maintain and develop my current relations on Twitter
10. Stay focused and work hard

What is your take on all this? How do you plan your next moves for the next year? Share your ideas, opinions, experience and don’t forget to subscribe to my blog and you’ll receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

Some of you may recall my other article about “10 SEO Tips for Wordpress – the Basics” which I highly recommend you to read if you’re interested in the basic operations that will improve the SEO performance of your Wordpress website/blog. This article deals with another important aspect of your web activity and that is building content.

Everyone knows that content is what will get you traffic, rankings, conversions, clients, awareness, brand and so on. Without content you are nothing on the web. And the sooner you realize this you’ll be able to benefit from understanding how to plan your content and how to implement a good SEO strategy for content development.

The Plan

Every Wordpress blog starts with an idea that will lead to a plan and in the end to a blog. Doing SEO for your Wordpress blog is pretty much the same thing you do for any website but there are some particular aspects that make the task a little more interesting.

A blog means new content on a regular basis. New content means new ideas about how to describe your products, how to answer to people’s problems, how to present your business as a problem solver and so on. Building new content it’s not easy, if you try to always offer some kind of benefit to your reader.

Without a plan your SEO efforts to have a well optimized Wordpress blog will be governed by chance. If you don’t have a plan on what to write about and how to do it then it’s like building a house without knowing if you want a first floor or not.

The Beginning

There is a strong connection between content and keywords. Identify the problems your product solves, identify the keywords people search to find solutions to these problems, group the keywords in pyramid structures and plan your content for each pyramid.

A pyramid structure means that you have a main keyword at the top and more levels with long tail keywords that are related to each other and to the top keyword. The foundation of each pyramid will be formed by synonyms and related single words that you’ll use in your articles and in some in anchor texts.

Another important element of the pyramid structure is the fact that there is a link between each level and between elements. This will have to be reflected in your articles: plan a linking structure that will help all the articles in the pyramid. A good thing to remember is not to link all your articles to the main one.

Building articles in groups that are connected will have a great effect on your Wordpress blog. It will help your SEO and user functionality because of the fact that this way you can cover multiple aspects of the same problem and you can also deal with more particular issues.

The Opinion

Now, it’s your turn to tell me what you think of this pyramid method. How do you create your content? How do you plan it? How do you try to stay on top? Share your experience in comments bellow.

I decided to create my own Facebook page because I consider it to be a much more productive way to share my knowledge and interact with people that need help when it comes to SEO and Blogging. I would like to use this article in order to share my ideas about what I want to discuss on this page.

SEO Tips

The discussions about SEO will include tips, ideas and suggestions on how to solve different SEO problems. Here are some of topics that I’ll try to cover.

1. Website analysis
2. Content analysis
3. Keyword planning
4. Competition analysis
5. How to read and interpret Google Analytics results
6. How to improve different metrics: traffic, rankings, bounce rates

Another goal of the page will be to also promote my services and informational products related to SEO. I also have a discussion opened where you can pose your questions related to .

Blogging Tips

These discussions and posts will be about blogs in general. Here are some of the topics I’ll try to cover:

1. Setup and Configuration
2. Content Planning
3. How to write quality copy
4. What to write about
5. How to use keywords in Content

I have a discussion opened where you can pose your questions about blogging related issues.

The address of my Facebook page is: http://www.facebook.com/pages/OptimizingTheWeb-SEO-Tips-and-Blogging/234377996616 I really hope to see you there, to interact and share our ideas.

This is a common mistake especially for bloggers: many blogs don’t have a unified RSS Subscription. Here is what I mean by that: all blog themes have an RSS icon, usually on top of the blog and another one at the bottom of the blog.

Additionally bloggers subscribe to feedburner in order to create an easy newsletter that contains their content. Everyone that likes the content on the blog but doesn’t want to visit it every day can simply enter his/hers e-mail address and receive the blog in their inbox.

The problem is that after people burned their feedburner feed and place the subscription form on their blog they leave the other RSS feeds set up to the blog’s feed. The result is that some of your subscribers will subscribe via e-mail, others will choose to read your feed. The issue is that you don’t know how many subscribers you really have.

My advice is to redirect all your feeds to feedburner so that you have a unified feed. Here is how you can simply do it:

Usually the RSS link is placed in the header or footer. So you need to do a small tweak. The feedburner feeds have a link structure like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Your-Feed-Name. So whatever your feed name is place it at the end of the link and that is your feed link. Use this link to replace the old ones that are just pointing to your blog’s feed.

Wordpress additional feed placement suggestions

You can also implement an additional feature: every article can have such a subscription link at the beginning or the end. To do this, place the link along with some text in the singlepost.php file in your Wordpress theme:

1. Here is a simple example of code that will show the link surrounded by a dotted line:
   <div align=”center” style=”border: 1px dashed #3333FF;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 15px; padding-top: 3px;padding-bottom: 3px;font-style: italic;text-decoration: none;”>Hi and thanks for the visit. If you’re new here you may want to <a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR_FEED_NAME” title=”Subscribe to my feed” rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”>subscribe to my feed</a></div>
2. The code can be placed at the beginning of the article or the end:
   1. The Beginning of each article: open your theme editor in Wordpress, select the file singlepost.php to edit and place the link before <div class=”postContent”>. Usually all themes have this class
   2. The End of the article: you can have multiple choices here, right when the article ends, or when the comments begin. So you can post the link right before <div class=”postTags”> or right before <p class=”comments”>

Let me know what you think about this article and if you like it don’t forget to subscribe

More and more people run their own blog and many of them use Wordpress. That is the reason I decided to put together a small articles with some basic tweaks that you can make to any Wordpress theme in order to have an SEO friendly Wordpress blog.

You can also use plugins to enhance the functionality of your blog and make it SEO friendly but I prefer to do it myself. This way I keep the modifications to a minimum number – just what I need – and I also maintain control over what I’m doing. You don’t need programming knowledge: I’ll give the code and tell you where to place it. It’s easy and you only need 5 minutes (top) to make it work.

The basics of SEO apply also here

Just like any other website a Wordpress website has to have proper titles for its pages, proper metatags, proper anchors and so on. So the basics of SEO also apply to a Wordpress theme.

1. Watch the titles of your articles. Most Wordpress themes will display the title of your article after the title of the blog. This is not good for SEO. So, what you need to do is make a small adjustment. Open your Wordpress admin page and go to Theme Editor. Access the file header.php and where you have the tags
   <title> … </title>
   replace it with
   <title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(�name�); }
   elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ‘ – ‘ ; bloginfo(�name�); }
   elseif (is_single() )
   { if(get_post_meta($post->ID, “title”, true)) {echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “title”, true));}
   else {single_post_title();}}
   elseif (is_page() ) { if(get_post_meta($post->ID, “title”, true)) {echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “title”, true));}
   else {single_post_title();}}
   else { wp_title(��,true); } ?></title>
   This piece of code will help your SEO on your blog with two things:
   1. When someone access an article, the browser displays only the title of the article
   2. You also have the possibility to set another title for a page then the name of that page. Why is this useful: let’s say you have a page “Work With Me”, you don’t want a title like that because in terms of SEO will not get you any benefit. So, you can create a custom field called title and create an interesting title that also targets some real keywords
2. Description Metatag and Keywords Metatag. Every article should have unique description metatag and keywords. It doesn’t matter for your rankings but it will matter for readers who will see the description metatag in a search result right under the title. This tweak is done via custom fields that you can add to each of your posts. To take advantage of this, go to the admin page, theme editor and open the file header.php. Use this piece of code so that the information you pass in the custom fields “description” and “keywords” to be taken into account:
   <meta content=”<?php echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “description”, true)); ?>”>
   <meta content=”<?php echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “keywords”, true)); ?>”>
   Remember to use this code as a replacement of the existing one. You don’t want to end up with to definitions for a description metatag, for example.
3. You need SEO friendly URLs. The standard URL structure from Wordpress is not that good for SEO or readers. So, you need a small adjustment. Go to the admin page, Settings > Permalinks and check Month and Name. This way your link structure will look in a descriptive way not only for search engines but for readers too
4. Build a tag list based on your keyword list. It is important to use any opportunity you have to target keywords. By building a list of tags based on a keyword list you’ll make sure that:
   1. 1. All your tagging stays consistent
      2. Articles are grouped under a descriptive tag
      3. The anchor text for a tag is a keyword that people are really searching for on the web
5. Build a category list based on your keyword list. Just like in the case of tags, categories are another place where you can use your keywords for better SEO results
6. Build a Sitemap. Use a plugin like Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress (http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/) to generate an xml sitemap. It will help your indexing process.
7. Add similar posts to the end of each article. Use the similar posts plugin. This way you’ll not only generate a better functionality, but you also determine the search engine bot to crawl other pages of your Wordpress blog. It will add relevancy to the source page.
8. Use your top landing pages as “engines” for the rest of the blog. An SEO tip for top landing pages is to use them to pass link juice to other pages: link to other related pages from your top landing ones
9. DO NOT LINK to another website, from your blog, with the keywords you are trying to rank well for
10. Use keywords when setting your Wordpress title and tagline. This title will be the title of your main page so, as an SEO tip, you may include your most competitive keywords in it.

Your turn

Here are my SEO tips for Wordpress. What would you add to this information? What is your opinion? Share it with us in comments bellow.

In this article I have to answer to three questions: Why to use Twitter for business purposes? then How do you know how crowded is your  market on Twitter? and finally How to attack this market?

Let’s get started with the first question, and that is why to use Twitter for business purposes. I think that everyone that is using Twitter and have his/hers updates publically has an objective. Twitter is a different social network than others. The stream is live and real-time. The level of connection is deep. The feel of an actual meeting is present. Twitter it’s easy to use and configure. If you know what you’re doing you can attract very quickly many eyes on you. The pitfall of Twitter is to have many spammers as followers and thus you may have the impression of an audience which in reality doesn’t exist – or to have as followers people that have few tweets but follow thousands of people. Tweets are shown in Google searches and also the Twitter username so you can use it for SEO purposes.
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I see many people launching online stores without thinking. I get requests to develop websites for online stores and in 99.99% of the cases I say NO. You may think that I’m refusing good money but in my opinion I’m protecting my business. I got burned with websites that weren’t meant to sell products/services directly. In what sense I mean that: the owner of the website didn’t understood that a website is not a brochure. He didn’t understood that a website it’s like an office that you have to keep open every day to succeed. I had some clients that came back to me asking why they don’t make money with their websites: so I don’t even want to think about online stores.
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This question is often asked to late: and by late I mean after the blog is launched and the few people that read your articles already see you in a certain way. It’s wrong? Why? Because you may find that you’re sending the wrong message and thus, you’re attracting the wrong kind of people. A tool becomes gold in the hands of the one its using it.

I think that a blog can be used in one of these ways:

-          To be popular in a certain community or to express yourself: to be able to speak your mind, to talk all kind of things with no obvious connection – things that are on your mind

-          To make money

-          To build a brand

-          To build a business which is the hardest of all because it involves building a brand and also making money at the same time
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