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Many people have asked me why my blog ranks so well on Search Engines, and sometimes for some really good search terms. The secret sauce is using Wordpress as a platform and adding some very cool SEO plugins that I would like to share with my readers. Please backup your blog before trying them out, and use them at your own risk - none of them gave me any problems. Not all of them are strictly SEO plugins, but they all help me.
I’m guess that probably less than 5% of Wordpress users even have half of these installed, so if you take the time and effort, it should boost your search engine traffic by about 2-3x (which is what I’ve seen since installing them last year).
Permanent Redirection of Posts
This plugin helps when you need to move a post or a page to another location. Very useful in that you don’t disrupt the value that the incoming links to that page offers your site and preserve the PageRank that Google may allocate.
This plugin will really help you to migrate pages from poor page structures (i.e. http://www.vinnylingham.com/2008/01/endeavor.html to a better structure such as: http://www.vinnylingham.com/endeavor.html). Remember that having pages or blog posts that are 3 levels deep into your site is not optimal for SEO. I highly recommend that you use this plugin and move your posts to the root (i.e. the blog post should basically site on the highest level in your site directory structure).
Wordpress comes standard with NoFollow tags, that basically tell search engines not to apply weighting to links posted by readers who comment on the blog. I personally moderate every comment on this blog, and if sometime takes the time to post decent comments, I believe that they deserve a link back to their site. I obviously delete silly comments like “nice site”, etc. If used correctly, this can really incentivize your readers to interact more on your blog.
This plugin is great for getting a sitemap submitted to the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo & Ask. I used it right after changing the permalink structure and it helped them to reindex the site a lot quicker. I had a few minor problems here, but I think the new version might have fixed those bugs.
Decent enough plugin thats assist in getting meta data into your posts. Meta data is not highly regarded anymore with the major search engines, but it might be worth inserting them.
This is a brilliant plugin. When readers come to your blog via a search engine, it reads the keyword term and offers them links to similar posts based on the initial term they searched. This is one is a must, and it greatly increased my internally pageviews from search terms ratios.
This post probably helped the most with my SEO rankings. It basically inserts the heading of my post’s keywords into the Title tags for the page - simple but effective. I recommend removing things like your name in the title - it should just be the name of the post.
My archives page is very clean. Have a look. It shows a list of posts, by month with number of comments. Good, Clean & Fresh - Nuff Said!
Here is a list of some other really good wordpress SEO plugins. Most of the plugins listed above will have links to other similar ones. I really suggest that you check them out and if you’d like, post comments below to others that are worth trying! Happy SEO’ing!
Rob Stokes over at Quirk beat me to my own scoop this morning - the nerve!
When Google launched their new Co-op program last month it captured our imagination! South Africa’s best search engine is the local Google.co.za, with all the others coming a distant second (based on the fact that Google is the #1 accessed site in the country). So we decided to use Google Co-Op to create a better search engine - the power of Google Search combined with local knowledge of the Internet world should lead to substantially better results.
Google Co-Op allows you to create a custom search engine which either prioritizes or only searches a designated set of pre-determined results. You can add additional refinements and as time goes on, I am sure that they will offer additional features to the product set. We are looking to the South African community to assist us in improving the results by adding the good sites, and removing the poor ones - something that is automated for Google, but will be manual for us - human intervention is a great way to detect poor spam sites, etc.
Lee Stuttaford & Keith Feldwick-Davis from incuBeta are responsible for the design & development of Sekamo - and they’ve done a great job.
The beauty of Google Co-Op is that it allows hundreds of people to team together to improve the listings by adding their favourite sites, relevant to the topic in question (in this case, South African interest). Anyone can sign up on the site, and you just need a Gmail account to get started (email me at vlingham-at-gmail.com if you need one), and start contributing the development of our local search engine.
This is true collaboration around Search - Google understands, and I agree, that search has to verticalize over the next few years - Google.com simply will not be able to improve the quality of the information without hundreds and thousands of sites like Sekamo that will feed better information into them, based upon actual user relevance and collaborator input.
I’m pretty impressed with Google, however, they have restricted the site to 5000 refinements (i.e. we cannot load more then 5000 additional sites into the index for prioritisation) - hopefully this will change soon.
So I invite all South Africans who are interested in creating a better search engine locally, to either volunteer or submit site for prioritisation in our index.
Oh, and keep this watching this space - if Sekamo takes off, you can expect us to launch many more vertical search engines!
I stumbled upon this nice article from Pandia on WordPress Optimization for Search Engines. With a bit of help from one of our developers, Lee Stuttaford, this blog has been updated to include most of the recommendations mentioned in the article. I’m also pleased to announce that this blog broke through the 1,300 unique daily readers mark last week, and received over 25,000 unique visitors last month. Thanks for the support and comments - and I look forward to growing my blog even further! My apologies that this month has been slow, but I was in Johannesburg, speaking at a South African Online Marketing Conference and also attending my 10 year high school reunion this past weekend - what a walk down memory lane! Well, I’m back in action next week - so look forward to some good posts (in my opinion anyways 
).
I’m not sure if this post relates to a flaw in the Jagger update or perhaps just an anomaly. This post is correct at the time of writing, Google will most likely remove the listing as soon as they pick up on it. For those of you who think I’m speaking about Mick Jagger, let me explain :-).
Jagger is the name given to the latest update that Google has performed on it’s index (it’s collection of webpages that it has visited). Google tends to update the results daily with small, minor updates, but 2-3 times a year, Google performs a major update on it’s index, changing ranking algorithms and including sites previously not listed on Google. The naming convention was derived from a WebmasterWorld forum discussion, where the updates were compared to hurricanes, and the naming convention has since been similar to the way that hurricanes are named. The effects of an update are usually catastrophic to many websites, and many are still painfully trying to crawl up the rankings since the Florida update of 2003.
Anyways, let me cut to the chase. So I decided that I wanted to buy a Texas Holdem Poker table for my house, and I set out to do some research on it. What’s the first thing that presumably I (or any similar customer) would search for? You got it; “Poker Table” on Google…
The SERP results look fine, and I proceed to the first listing, PokerProducts.com (which I’m not going to link to, and you will soon see why). So the landing page of the site is pretty innocuous, but something just didn’t look right, so just before I clicked the “Enter our Site” link, I decided to do a “Control+A” and scroll down on that site, try it and you’ll see what I mean.
This is the worst example of Keyword Stuffing & Invisible Text that I have seen reach a #1 position on a very popular keyword, in recent years. According to Overture, “Poker Table” received 108955 searches last month - that’s a serious amount of traffic for an amateur SEO spammer employing the blackest of black tactics. I even counted over 75 outgoing links on the landing page. If this is not amateur black hat, then what is?
Is this an anomaly or does this happen more often than I think? I’m also not sure if something in Jagger is broken? Any comments?
Vinny Lingham is an International Award winning Entrepreneur & Search Engine Marketer. He is currently CEO of Synthasite, a Web 2.0 Startup.
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