5 Tips On How To Make Your Blog Visitors Stay Longer

The length of time that you can keep your visitors on your website can be a crucial factor in determining how successful your blog will be.

Simply getting traffic in the form of thousands of unique visitors daily is meaningless if the time they spend on your site is less than a few seconds or your bounce rate is more than 95%.

There are certain things you can do in the way you present your pages and posts which will maximize the chances of your visitors sticking around for a longer period on your site.

The longer people stay the greater your opportunity to monetize their visit or convince them to take your desired call to action.

A call to action is an Internet marketing term which refers to the primary action that you want your visitors to take when they land on your page or website. One example of a call to action  is where you want someone to click your “buy now” button and purchase your product. Another might be that you want to get people to download your free ebook after signing up as members.

Below are some tips which will help you to keep the attention of your visitors or at the very least keep them interested long enough to stay and explore your site and ultimately perform the call to action you want them to.

1. Remove unnecessary external links from your landing pages and use internal linksTrying to increase the average visitor time on your site is one of the ways that you can decrease your bounce rate and increase your rankings.If you use Google Analytics you’ve probably already heard of the term “bounce rate”.Bounce rate (as defined by Google) is:“..the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page”.
   Therefore plastering your affiliate banners and links all over your pages can work against you if your visitors leave your site immediately from the page they entered from.
   Try to entice your visitors to read more by offering them some relevant links to another internal page or post where you provide a useful review and which ultimately contains your affiliate banner. This way you are not pushing people straight out of the same door they entered.
   There are some useful WP plugins you can use to add relevant internal post links to your blog such as Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
2. Use emotion to present your messagePeople most often buy from emotion whether they admit it or not. This is because the actions which emanate from emotion are quite often subconscious.
   Hence, an emotional response is much more likely to achieve a call to action than a logical one.For instance if you are trying to convince someone to buy your product by using logic, then the chances are that they will also look at your argument from a rational point of view and they will weigh up the pros and cons of buying versus not buying.If you introduce an emotional element to your message such as presenting a benefit or selling a solution to a problem or highlighting how people can get closer to achieving their dream, then you will appeal to the emotional decision making areas of the brain.
   This will maximize the chances of gaining a customer because it will create an emotional connection between your message and the reader.Therefore once you have successfully forged a positive emotional relationship with your readers, they will happily want to come back to your site to explore further or even become regular customers.
3. Include video content on your posts and pagesVideo is one of the most effective ways to communicate a message to people. Even short videos of just a few minutes can often deliver more value to your readers than multiple pages of writing can.
   Therefore in the cases where you would usually get people browsing through an article in 10 to 20 seconds before leaving, the added benefit of using a short video is that it increases the likely-hood that people will stay on your site for longer because they are watching your video.
   Video on the Internet is really just a modern extension of TV but the great thing is that you get to be the producer of the content.
4. Use captivating images in conjunction with your copy or content
   Quite often the right image coupled with the relevant content can induce an emotional response and it can help lay the foundations for the right mindset you want to create before somebody reads your sales pitch or post.
   Humans are quite easily visually stimulated and you can exploit this by using effective images and colors with your message.
5. Focus on providing value and informative content rather than blatant advertising
   Your content and the value which it provides is the sticking point which helps to build a relationship with your readers. A relationship needs some measure of trust by both parties but when you successfully gain this trust from your readers or clients then you are also creating a longer term investment where current customers also become future customers.There are many ways you can provide value for people who will in turn be very happy to return the favor by becoming a customer. For instance you could offer free online courses or a series of tutorials which people can access after they sign up as free members.
   You could also set up your own forum or support system which provides help to people but also an opportunity for people to interact with each other.

Split Testing on Your WordPress Site Using Google Website Optimizer

Since we published the Maximize Revenue 101: Should You Lower or Increase the Product Price to Increase Revenue article, a few readers have asked us to provide a step by step guide on how to setup split testing on a WordPress powered site. Google website optimizer is probably the best tool out there for setting up split testing.

In this article we have included a PDF file with step by step guide on how to setup split testing using Google Website Optimizer and a WordPress plugin.

Click on the following link to open the PDF file:

• How to Do Split Testing on Your WordPress Site Using Google Website Optimizer

I hope this helps you easily setup split testing for your products on your WordPress powered site.

Web Analytics 101 – Learn Which Analytics Data You Should be Using

If you are running a small website, chances are you’ve already heard of Web Analytics. If you haven’t, it is a tool for measuring traffic of your website. It provides data on the number of visitors, page views etc to gauge the popularity of the site. For many people, using analytics is limited to watching how many more visitors have come to the site, and repeating the figures to potential advertisers. If used smartly, analytics is also a marketing tool, an e-commerce tracker, an ad tool, and the list goes on. In this article, we’ll have a look at basic ways to use the analytics.

Choosing an Analytics Software

First of all, you need to have an analytics software set up for your website, which mostly means signing up for an account of an analytics provider, and adding a few lines of javascript code to your pages. Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics tool. It’s also free and integrating it in a WordPress site is just a matter of adding a plugin to your site! If you like to have choices, you can search the Internet looking for some other alternative solutions. This article lists a number of analytics software and their pros and cons.

Keep your eye on the Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the number of people that after arriving on your website, don’t browse any other pages and leave. It’s generally expressed as a percentage of total visitors. The top reasons for having high bounce rates are:

1. Uninteresting Content
2. Broken Links
3. Erroneous Pages
4. Badly targeted Ads

The analytics tool can help identifying the pages that have high bounce rates and open your eyes to problems that you haven’t detected before.

Check your Conversion Rate

If your site has a clear goal, then you must have at least one goal page. For an e-commerce site it’s normally a completed check out page. For social website like Twitter and Facebook, it’s the page where the visitor completes the sign up process. The conversion rate is percentage of the amount of people that are just not getting to your goal pages but also carrying out the action you want them to do. Conversion rates are usually low. For an e-commerce site, even a 3% is considered a good conversion rate! The rule of thumb is to set up a clear path(a sequence of clicks and page views) to your goal page. You can have the analytics tool set up funnels to figure out where they are falling off. Once that problem is fixed you need to look at where people are going after conversion. Are they staying on or exiting? If they are exiting, why so?

Track visitors to Target pages

Target pages may appear similar to goal pages but have differfuent values. If the checkout completion form is the goal page of your e-commerce site, the product pages are the target pages. These pages are the first major step to goal completion. After all, the visitors need to see the product page before they go on to shop for the products. Use your analytics tool to find out how many visitors are going to your target pages and what percentage of them are going to goal pages from these pages. If the rate is low you might need to present your target pages in a more engaging manner.

Site Search Analytics

Tracking site search is a highly valuable resource for finding out what your visitors are looking for. Are they able to arrive at the page they are looking for? If not, there’s clearly a problem with your site search engine. It may not be returning the results it should be returning, or worse, it isn’t displaying the results in a useful way your visitors can understand. Also, if they search for something you don’t have, you might want them to redirect to alternative pages. Obviously, if your site sell books, there’s no need to provide alternatives to a guy who is looking for golf clubs in your site! It doesn’t make sense. But if he’s searching for a particular book of his favorite author and it’s not there, you should suggest him other books of the same author or of the same theme.

Track where visitors are coming from

Probably the easiest way to find out if the link building and ads on the site are working, is to see where your visitors are coming from. It makes sense that you keep track of where you get the most returns to make a wise decision of where to focus your efforts. A properly set-up analytics account integrated with eCommerce tracking and Adwords accounts can even show you a direct return on investment for your individual Adword campaigns; a very useful tool for managing your pay per click ads.

Top 3 Common Reasons for a Slow WordPress Site (in my experience)

If you own and run a WordPress site which is currently slow then there are usually some common factors which are most probably contributing to the lack of load speed of your site.

The power and flexibility of WordPress lies under the hood, where as a blogging and CMS platform, it easily caters for customizations to be made in a programmatic way via themes and plugins.

However, this flexibility can also ironically be a cause for some of the reasons why your site might be running slow or has progressively become slower as time has gone on.

There are also numerous other factors which also play a role in your site’s speed (or lack thereof), so let’s take a look at them.

After doing troubleshooting work on hundreds of customer sites over the years, I have found that the following 3 common factors contribute to a WordPress site being too slow:

1. Using lots of poorly coded plugins
2. Using poorly coded and bloated theme
3. Using a not so good hosting provider/solution

1. Using Lots of Poorly Coded Plugins

Due to the open-source nature of WordPress (which is a big positive in my opinion), the variety of plugin functionality available is immense but so is the variety of plugin coding quality.

The fact that you can quite often obtain a free plugin which will perform a crucial task for your website is immensely exciting, but this also requires the need to beware of which plugins you choose to use on your site.

How a plugin is coded can mean the difference in whether your pages load in a fraction of a second versus 5 seconds or more. WordPress generally has a best coding practices criteria for plugin developers but quite often these are ignored by a lot of programmers; in some cases because these programmers are new to the technology or simply not skilled enough to know better.

Therefore you will often find plugins which have been coded in such a way where the programmer has either not been cognizant of performance impacts or not taken into account possible conflicts which their code might have on other core functionality of WordPress in general or the functionality of other plugins or themes. For example, how and when a plugin developer chooses to load their javascript/jquery scripts and libraries can greatly impact the chance of conflicts.

There are many factors which determine the quality of a plugin’s coding and this topic can fill another series of articles, but for our intensive purposes as website owners we should be discerning with which plugins we choose to use.

There are a couple of easy checks you can make when choosing either a free or paid plugin.

For instance if you are searching in wordpress.org for plugins, you can check things such as the number of downloads for the plugin and also how well it is supported.

You will find with the more quality plugins that the developer quite often stands behind their work and they demonstrate this by providing some support and regular updates.

The same thing also applies for paid plugins.

Side Note and Example

You may find various articles recommending that you limit the number of plugins you use on your WordPress site because they claim that having a large number of active plugins is one of the reasons for a site’s slowness. This advice can be misleading if not explained correctly. The whole principle of WordPress is based on its modularized nature and it is designed to accept various specialized functionality via things such as plugins. So in general rather than being too focused on the number of plugins, focus on limiting the use of poorly coded and bloated plugins.

I will give you a very simple example to demonstrate my point. Lets say you have one one site (Site A) that has one plugin which loads 20 JavaScript files. Another site (Site B) has 10 plugins which altogether loads 10 JavaScript files. Now, if you purely go by the number of active plugins then you would think that Site A has better page load time than Site B which would be totally wrong.

You should in theory be able to have as many active plugins on your site as you wish provided that they are all working harmoniously with each other, your theme and the WordPress core in general.

What really matters is which plugins you are choosing to use, because the greater the number of lower quality and bloated plugins you’ve installed, the greater the chance this will affect your site speed.

2. Using Poorly Coded Themes

A similar argument to the one we made above applies for themes too. Always be mindful of which theme you choose to install on your site. The fact that you may have paid a premium price for your theme in themeforest doesn’t necessarily mean that the theme has been properly constructed by the developer. Try not to buy themes that uses a lot of JavaScript files.

The benchmark which you should often use about how well a theme performs is to try out your site using the native WordPress themes such as TwentyTen or TwentyEleven and compare how well or badly your current premium theme fares against these.

Further Reading

• When themes go wild
• WordPress system integration 101

3. Your Hosting Solution is Not Very Good

Your hosting provider is another crucial factor which can affect the performance of your site.

A lot of the “cheap” and “free” providers are cheap and free for a reason. These hosting providers are usually under-resourced in terms of hardware and the features they provide. Also the type of hosting plan is important and which plan you choose is based on how much traffic you are getting to your site.

Shared hosting is the most common plan and will usually suffice for most WordPress sites provided that the hosting provider is reliable. In this type of solution your site shares the server’s resources with a number of other sites. If your hosting provider puts you on an overcrowded shared server then it will significantly affect your site speed. For higher traffic scenarios, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a dedicated server solution is usually required because this provides you with more dedicated CPU and RAM Memroy resources which will keep the page load time optimum under high traffic scenerio.

WordPress Plugins to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

Speeding up your WordPress blog goes a long way to improve its popularity. As the website loads faster, your visitor enjoys browsing, driving high traffic and generating revenue. While there are many proven ways to boost a site’s performance (a lot of these are explained in the WordPress Optimization Tips and Tricks post), in this article we will take a look at some WordPress plugins that allows you to perform critical front-end and back-end optimizations, within the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

In the first section of this article I have listed the well known WordPress caching plugins and my recommendation. The next section has a list of few nice utility type plugins which you might find useful (depending on your situation). Please note that you don’t need to install all of the plugins listed here on your site (Just pick whatever fits your needs).

Top WordPress Caching Plugins

W3 Total Cache

A lot of people still use the WP Super Cache plugin. WP Super Cache is a nice plugin but have you tried the W3 Total Cache plugin yet? If you are using a WordPress caching plugin and you have never tried the W3 Total Cache then you seriously need to give this plugin a go. W3 Total Cache is a relatively newer caching plugin with better performance and the configuration is much easier and cleaner. It works nicely with the WP eStore, WP eMember and the WP Affiliate Platform Plugins too (more details here).

W3 Total Cache is the fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. Trusted by many popular sites like: mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com, yoast.com…. tipsandtricks-hq.com  and others.

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

Hyper Cache

Hyper Cache is a new caching system for WordPress, specifically written for people who have their blogs on low resources hosting provider (CPU and MySQL). It works even with hosting based on Microsoft IIS.

WP-Cache

WP-Cache is an efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching WorPress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a HTML file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

DB Cache

The DB Cache plugin caches every database query with given lifetime. It is much faster than other HTML caching plugins and uses less disk space for caching.

1 Blog Cacher

1 Blog Cacher is a WordPress plugin that caches your pages in order to increase the response speed and minimize the server load. Cached files are stored in HTML files, and organized in directories emulating the URLs (if “safe_mode” is not enabled), so it’s easy to display the content of the files and organize them (for instance deleting the cache for a given entry, for all categories, for all searches, for all posts from a given date, etc.)

Other Useful Site Speed Related Plugins

Clean Options

As you go on installing, using and uninstalling plugins on WordPress, the ‘wp_options’ table becomes bloated. Even some themes use this table to store settings related data. Some of those records don’t get deleted as the plugin/theme is uninstalled. The table continues to grow and contribute to progressively slower load times. The Clean Options plugin gives users an easy and safe way to get a bloated wp_options table down to a manageable size. It’s equipped with many built-in safety features so you don’t accidently delete any data that’s needed for your blog to operate.

IFrameWidgets

Bloggers often add various widgets to their site for social networking, advertising, weather update etc. Widgets remain hidden until they are completely loaded. Some of these widgets could be written using slow JavaScript, causing your page to slow down. If they somehow give up, the page gets broken as items after the slow widgets fail to load. TheIframeWidgets plugin eliminates this problem by loading the widgets within an Iframe. Iframes load parallel to the rest of the page, so if one or more of those sluggish widgets hang, the page on its own remain unaffected.

Optimize DB

Optimize DB lets you speed up your MySQL database, without you needing to learn complicated optimization techniques. This plugin runs the ‘optimize table’ command on your WordPress tables and defragments them. This significantly reduces the query execution time and physical space on disk. Use it to optimize the tables which are updated the most.

CSS Compress

CSS Compress is a nice plugin to reduce the size of bloated CSS files. It removes comments as well as white space characters from the CSS (new lines and tabs). It also performs GZIP compression. Using this plugin reduces the CSS for the default “Kubrick” theme from 8 KB to 1.7 KB! It’s also very easy to install and use. If you are using the W3 Total Cache plugin then you shouldn’t need to use a CSS compressor plugin.

Digg Protector

Many bloggers have complained about ‘invasion of Diggers’. If one your posts get Digged, it’ll drive a lot of traffic, stretching out your server-load to maximum. Most of this load is caused by high amount of images that are loaded. The Digg Protector plugin will determine if a visitor is from Digg, and if he is then the plugin will serve him a remotely-hosted version of the image, taking the load off your site’s server. Otherwise, the plugin will serve the locally-hosted (on that server) image.

PHP Speedy

Another handy tool for boosting site performance. PHP Speedy can speed up the download time of your web pages by joining together all the appropriate files and compressing them. The recently released version(0.4.7) requires WordPress 2.6 or higher.

WordPress Optimization Tips and Tricks for Better Performance and Speed

Is your WordPress blog performing at it’s best? How quickly does the page load? Is it sluggish? Your website’s performance is one of the key factors in ensuring that the visitors are having a good experience with your site. So I personally think it is worthwhile to spend some time tuning/optimizing the site for performance. In this article I have listed various tips and tricks on how to speed up a WordPress Site.

Before diving into the optimization tips and tricks I recommend measuring the current performance of the site so you have some benchmarking figures to compare against after you make the changes and see how it has affected the performance.

How to Measure the Performance of a Site

1. I use the Page Speed tool from Google to measure performance and try to achieve a score of 85+ out of 100. Page speed has a browser addon to measure the performance of a site. Page Speed analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.

2. You can also use YSlow Firefox addon to measure the page load time of a site. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. So to use YSlow you will have to get the Firebug addon and then install the YSlow addon.

The site in question takes about 23 secons to load which is not a very good page loading time. Some optimization could help!

3. The number of database queries a webpage makes to load the page have an effect on the page load time. You can use the following piece of code in the footer of your theme to find out how many database queries a page is making:

<?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries in <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds.

Make sure the webpage is not making any unnecessary database queries.

4. You can use the website speed tester to find out how fast your site loads.

Website Speed Tester

5. You can also use the stopwatch on numion.com to test how long it takes to load a webpage.

Basic WordPress Site Optimization Tips and Tricks

• Upgrade to the latest wordpress release (you should be doing this for security reasons anyway)
• Use W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin (Forget WP Super Cache). W3 Total Cache is just awesome… even I use it 
• Minimize simple unnecessary PHP queries. For example, instead of using <?php get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’); ?> just replace it with your wordpress installation URL so the browser can simply read it instead of making a query.
• Load javascripts in the footer (The golden rule – CSS on top, javascript on bottom)
• Kill some plugins that are unnecesary or doesn’t add much value to your site (Disable or delete these plugins)
• Optimize and Repair your Database from myPhpAdmin. You can use the Optimize DB plugin that does this for you.
• Check your theme Code (Use valid HTML code)
• Get a Good hosting

Intermediate to Advanced Optimization Tips

• Use a good hosting provider (preferably not shared hosting)
• Keep your page sizes less than 100kb. Do not use too many unnecessary images and video on a page. Always compress the images appropriately.
• Combine css files into one big css file (One 50kb file loads a lot faster than five 10kb files)
• Combine javascripts into one big file.
• Reduce the number of dynamic PHP and http calls (Use subdomains to share the load)
• Use external scripts. Instead of placing tons of code in your header.php file, use external scripts. This allows the browser to cache the script so it won’t have to read it for every other page.
• Add far future expires header to images, CSS and javascript files (How to Add far future expires header).
• Don’t use ETags unless you are taking advantage of it (How to configure ETags).

6 SEO Strategies That Can Generate Highly Targeted Traffic

Developing SEO strategies that can drive an immense amount of traffic to your site within a month is not an easy task, especially if you want your site’s visitors to convert into profits. Generating highly targeted traffic or visitors that have the intent of availing the services or products that you are offering is the best way to really earn from your website.

The good news is that there are many ways that you can do to hasten the process of having your site noticed by people who are in need of the information, services or products that you provide. Here are some of the ways that you can do to generate specifically targeted online visitors in under a month.

1. Target easy to rank long-tail keywords through blog posts

If your site has no blog section yet, then you better start including one. Blogs can benefit your business in so many ways, and consistently driving traffic to your site is one of them. Using long-tail keywords in your blog posts’ titles (eg. How to learn SEO), can extremely help your site’s performance in terms of traffic generation, seeing as this strategy can very much take your blog posts on top of SERPs without further improving them through off-page optimization or link building.

Blog posts can naturally rank on their own basing on its topical relevance as seen by search engines, and taking advantage of low competition keywords will make your pages rank on the top page of SERPs in no time, which means more organic traffic to your site.

2. Targeting 3 -5 keywords for each page on your site

Creating your pages or blog posts with the intent of ranking for more than 2 keywords is always a smart move, since it will allow your site to draw more relevant traffic along the process. Say, if your site has 15 blog posts or pages on its first month, and each page are targeting 3 different keywords. Doing the math will give you a result of 45 keywords giving you constant traffic within a month.

Doing this strategy is very simple, wherein you just have to use or combine your targeted keywords on your page or post’s title, URL and on the body copy (eg. Top 10 advanced on-page SEO strategies). With the given example of a post title you are able to target 7 keywords that you can use within the body of the content, including:

• Advanced on-page SEO strategies
• On-page SEO strategies
• On-page SEO
• Advanced SEO
• Advanced SEO strategies
• Advanced on-page SEO
• On-page optimization strategies
• On-page SEO techniques

3. Dofollow blog commenting

Commenting on blogs with the same theme as your site – particularly blogs that allow dofollow attributed links on their comment section – is one of the most effective ways to promoting your site as well as in improving your keywords’ search rankings. This technique has a lot of advantages and can certainly take your campaign a long way, given that this method allows you to acquire relevant backlinks and can possibly build relationships with other bloggers related to your niche.

Networking with other bloggers is extremely beneficial, especially with higher value link placements such as special mentions, in-content links (used as a resource), guest blogging opportunities and sponsored reviews. Anyway, leaving comments on blogs with the use of your keywords as anchor texts can help improve its search rankings in just weeks, particularly if the links that you’ve built are from topically relevant pages and are dofollow attributed.

4. Guest blog posting

Guest blogging has been known to be a link building method that’s really advantageous in terms of driving relevant traffic, acquiring high quality links, passing through Pagerank and in improving SERP rankings. It’s best to choose blogs that are relevant to your site, have high page ranks and receives a lot of traffic on their site (can be based through Alexa traffic rank).

In choosing the topic to write for guest postings, writing topics that are strictly about the keywords you are aiming at is the most effective way to get most out of this technique, since the link that you’ll be able to build through your author bio will have higher scores basing on its relevance as well as in targeting the audience that will be able to read it.

5. Forum participation

Forum posting is a good start for any campaign, especially if you choose to participate on high PR and high traffic forum sites. The best way to benefit from this method is to establish an expert or knowledgeable image through this channel, and not just focusing on building links through your signature.

Establishing yourself through forum sites and being genuinely active in participating with the community can bring you targeted visitors and interested clients within a month, so spending 30 minutes a day on 1 or 2 authority forums around your site’s industry is certainly worth it.

6. Article submission and converting your articles

This link building method has proven its worth over the past decade and is still known to be one of the most effective ways in generating consistent traffic as well as highly relevant links that can boost your search rankings.  The best thing about article marketing is that it’s capable of building solid links as it gets syndicated naturally, particularly if you have written a solid and informative article. Submitting an exceptionally written article to several highly trusted article directories (such as Ezinearticles, Articlesbase, Goarticles, Amazines, and many more) can enhance its chances of getting scraped or used by other sites that are seeking for quality content to be posted, which gives you more extra links and of course, more traffic.

But there’s more to this method than just the traditional article marketing, you can as well convert your articles to other formats for more exposure and external links pointing to your site. Converting your articles to PDF, podcasts, slide/powerpoint presentation and videos, and then submitting them to their respective directories can extremely amplify your site’s traffic in a short period of time, given that these formats have higher chances of ranking high on search engine result pages.

Top 15 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques I Forget to do

Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic in the World Wide Web. After all, everybody wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search and get more traffic. I have identified and made a list of top 15 SEO practices that I tend to forget quite often. These simple SEO techniques if practiced properly can make a significant difference as to how my pages are ranked in the Search Engine Queries.

1. Use rel=”nofollow” tag on low value links to not pass the page rank juice. For example ‘Read the rest of the entry’, ‘About’, ‘Contact’ etc.
2. Use proper anchor text for interlinks. Don’t use ‘here’ or ‘there’.
3. Optimize the images, always create alt tags and write description in the alt tag.
4. Use search engine friendly permalinks. Make sure the URLs do not have ‘&’, ‘?’, ‘!’ etc characters.
5. Use hyphens (-) between words to improve readability.
6. Do not use underscores (_), use hyphens (-) instead.
7. Do not use session id in URLs.
8. Use sticky posts.
9. Use tag clouds.
10. Have a category description paragraph.
11. Let the visitors subscribe to category specific RSS feed. (Use category specific RSS plugin for WordPress)
12. Use internal linking when possible and appropriate.
13. Use sub-directories rather than sub-domains when possible. Sub-domains do not share link love from the main domain as it is treated as a different domain.
14. Research the target audience and aim the site content appropriately.
15. Keep the content up to date. Visitors don’t like outdated content. Updating the content frequently also attracts the Search engines spiders to index the web pages frequently.

Going forward I will try to use this list to optimize my web pages for search engines.

How the Latest Google Algorithm Penguin Update will Affect You

On April 24th 2012 Matt Cutts, the head of the webspam team at Google announced that there will be another algorithm change to the Google search engine.

This latest update has been named “Penguin” and the main objective of the change is to specifically target webspam.

To quote Matt’s words:

“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.”

If your site’s search engine traffic went down significantly since that date then your site is most likely being penalized by Google for not following the quality guideline.

A lot of you may remember that the last time a high profile and significant algorithm change occurred was around February 2011 and that was given the moniker of “Panda”. Back then the Panda algorithm tweaks were aimed at penalizing sites with poor quality content – especially content associated with content farms like article directories.

Although the Penguin update is believed to chiefly be aimed at webspam, a lot of the general rules of thumb regarding what makes a quality website in the eyes of Google still apply.

The main thing which all website owners and creators should keep in mind is that Google is always tweaking their search algorithms because, as a global multi-billion dollar a year business, it’s in their interests to provide accurate and quality search results to their users.

Matt Cutt’s even says that Google wants to provide search results which will enhance the experience of the user.

How will the Penguin update affect your sites?

For starters if you have created and maintained a solid site with original and quality content which has been organically rising up the rankings, then you won’t have much to worry about.

By “organically” we mean that you have been steadily creating quality content which has been indexed by Google and over time it has naturally risen in the search rankings.

However, if you have tried to take shortcuts and employed what are known as “black hat” techniques to try and fool Google into ranking your site above the higher quality competitors, then you will probably see some significant drops in your rankings and traffic in the coming months.

Examples of “black hat” techniques which may have worked in the past but will, over time, cause more harm than good to your site are things like:

• Unnatural and excessive back-linking
  You might have noticed by simply checking your spam folder in your WordPress administration panel to see how much garbage your Akismet plugin filters out of your comment area.
  All of these spam comments are from people (or automated robots) which leave comments with links going back to their site in the hope that they will be able to build a significant number of back-links. A lot of the time the comments are totally irrelevant and out of context to the topic at hand which makes them very unnatural.Another technique spammers employ is to try and leave comments with links going back to their sites in forums. There is also a variation of this method whereby the spammers create forum profiles and place links in their profile without ever leaving a comment.Whereas previously the technique of building huge numbers of back-links may have been effective in increasing search rankings, this type of tactic is now being targeted more readily by Google and it may be something they are addressing in the Penguin update too.
• Poorly written articles which don’t make sense because of bad grammar
  In the effort to write as many articles as possible in the shortest amount of time, some people use what are known as articlespinners. That is, they will often try to recycle existing articles which they’ve found on the net, by using a spinner to reword the article so that Google doesn’t detect any duplicate content.
  The end result of sites which are primarily built using such a technique is that they are grammatically illegible and quite useless as far as being informative goes.Google is constantly introducing intelligence into their search engines and crawlers to spot things like this and penalise sites with such qualities by demoting them in the search rankings.
• Keyword stuffing
  “Keyword stuffing” refers to the unnaturally high frequency of keywords which are placed on a page. The reason why people do this is that they hope to get a better ranking for their chosen keywords by exhibiting a large number of those keywords on their pages.
  Quite often, when you read a page of a typical spammy website you will find that the content actually doesn’t make any sense because the post was written specifically to contain as many instances of a keyword as possible without any regard to the quality of the content itself.

The above are just some of the “black hat” techniques which spammers and wanna-be Internet millionaires employ in order to short circuit the work needed to succeed online.

However, with algorithm tweaks such as Panda and Penguin and future updates, these techniques will soon be as toxic as kryptonite was for superman in terms of the success of your website.

What to Do if Your Site Got Penalized?

If your site got penalized by the penguin update then you should try the following:

1. Carefully read Google’s quality guidelines
2. Make the necessary changes to your site
3. Log into your Google Webmaster tools account and submit a request for reconsideration