Making a Hook with Your Sub Headline

Most copywriters understand that the headline is an essential part of their copy. It is also important to know that the sub headline is also an essential part of the copy. The sub headline is like an extension of the headline. It continues to reel in the reader and provide even more intriguing information that keeps a reader reading.

In web writing headlines are often one of the biggest ways to keep readers reading. They introduce each section of your writing, letting the reader know what they are about to find out. The sub headlines do not have to be as bold as the headline, but they should still grab the reader’s attention.

Sub headlines do not have to be stuffy or boring. In fact, they should not be boring, they should be exciting. They are the key to keeping the reader reading.

Your goal is to get a reader to read all the way to the end of your copy, so they can order. With well written sub headlines you can do this easily.

Your sub headlines can be catchy and even bold. You can use them as highlighted notes that give a hint that there is much more to come if the reader just keeps reading.

To write a good sub headline you need to think of it as a headline with a very specific point. Your headline is basically introducing the whole, general copy. Your sub headline, on the other hand, is introducing a specific part of your copy.

Where headlines can be very generic and broad in scope, a sub headline can not. A sub headline needs to be specific and pointed. It should be relevant to the following section of text.

You will likely find that as you are writing your headline you may come up with some ideas that can work as sub headlines. Just keep your work documented, so you do not lose those good ideas.

If you have a general outline for writing your copy you can probably take each section and brainstorm about the sub headline. If you do not have an outline then you may just want to brainstorm about the different things you are planning to write.

Sub headlines work for a few reasons. They help to break up the copy, they help to highlight key points and they keep the reader intrigued.

Web readers are much different then people reading off line. Most on line readers are looking to get through content quickly. They do not want to waste time reading long drawn out content. Sub headlines help to break up the copy so it does not look like a large block of text, which would turn most readers away.

Sub headlines also help to highlight key points throughout the copy. Many web readers simply skim content and really do not read through word for word. They skim by looking for highlighted text, bullet points and headlines. They just read these things and are able to get the basic idea about what the copy says.

The main point to sub headlines is to keep the reader intrigued. Sub headlines help to keep the reader interested. They read each section and when they get to the end then the next sub headline catches their attention and keeps them reading on through the rest of the copy.

Every copy that is effective and worthwhile that has been written for the web will have sub headlines. They will use them efficiently and to the fullest potential. Sub headlines can make your copy writing stand out.

Sub headlines can be something that can really change your copy from just a piece of writing to a selling masterpiece. They can transform your carefully chosen words and masterfully crafted sentences into a pure form of copywriting art. Sub headlines are just that effective and important.

As mentioned, your ultimate goal is to have readers read your copy all the way through. A headline can only do so much. It will not keep the interest of a reader for very long once they actually get into reading the copy. This is why sub headlines are so important, not to mention all the other reasons mentioned before.

As a copywriter, you have to make sure to use all the tools available to you. Sub headlines are a tool that you should not overlook or take for granted. You need them to make your copy effective and efficient. Most of all, you need them to make your copy successful.

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Use of Articles in E-Commerce Today

In the history of Internet Marketing, which is indeed still a short history, Article Marketing has always been one of the most effective ways to market a business or website at little or no cost. This still holds true today, and will most likely be true for many years to come.

Article Marketing is viral in nature. One article is written, and it travels from your computer to multiple article banks, providing back links to your website. From there other website owners copy the article, with the authors information in tact, and publish it in their newsletters or on their websites. They may even use your article as part of a compilation for an informative E-book.

The important thing is that the article becomes viral – spreading far and wide. This accomplishes many things. As already mentioned, this provides you with back links to your site that help with search engine optimization. Since your author’s information, or resource box as it is called, is at the bottom of the article, this gives your website a great deal of exposure, and increased traffic.

Article Marketing accomplishes a couple more things that are vital in E-commerce today. First, writing and distributing articles helps to establish you as an expert on the topic in question. Second, it helps to build a ‘relationship’ with people who read your articles, which in turn builds trust.

Successful Internet business owners typically write and distribute at least one article per week to the various article banks. They may use articles that they wrote for their newsletters as well for distribution, after the newsletter has gone out to subscribers. If the business owner does not write well, or doesn’t have the time to write their own articles, they typically hire a ghost writer to create the articles for them.

The articles that are distributed by successful people are informative and well written. They are not sales letters disguised as articles. They are informative vehicles that are used to get readers to visit their websites, providing helpful information, with the author’s information at the bottom, including a link to the website.

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How Does Article Marketing Work

The fact that Article Marketing works has been established – time and again – by a large number of Internet Marketers in wide varity of niches. However, those who have not ever attempted article marketing tend to think that it is harder or more time consuming than it actually is.

It starts with writing the article. This can be done by the business owner, or by a ghost writer. The typical cost of a ghost written articles, between 300 and 500 words in length is usually less than $10.00. It is important that the article is informative and related to your niche. The article should not be a sales letter at all.

At the end of the article, you include your ‘resource box.’ A resource box is simply information about the author, and it usually includes a link to the authors related website, a link to subscribe to a newsletter, and possibly even an email address to contact the author. If your article is ghost written, you are still the author.

Below the resource box, you type a statement giving others the right to reprint the aritcle for free, as long as the article is not changed, and your resource box remains intact. This gives others permission to make your article viral for you.

Once the article is ready, you should distribute it to as many article directories as you can find, and also send the article for consideration to E-zine publishers within your niche. You can find lists of E-zines in the various E-zine directories that are available on the Internet.

There is a software that can be used to submit your article in a shorter amount of time. One example of software is Instant Article Submitter at www.instantarticlesubmitter.com . There are also services who will submit your article manually for you, which is highly recommended since many article directories do not allow and will not accept articles submitted with software.

Overall, you will find that submitting the articles yourself is a time consuming task. If you can hire someone else to do that work, you will have more time to concentrate your efforts on producing more viral articles, or on other marketing tasks.

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Prospect via Copywriting

Any copywriter who has been in the business long enough knows that bullet points are a big seller. Bullet points have many benefits to them. People respond to bullet points and they are often under utilized in copywriting.

Bullet points are important to a copywriter. It can be very easy to overlook the significance of bullet points, but you shouldn’t. You should learn why they are so useful and put them to good use in your copy.

When writing for the web you will run into all types of readers. The majority of them will look for headlines, sub headlines and other highlighted areas of text that stand out from the paragraphed text. These readers need bullet points.

Bullet points draw attention to your main points. If you really want to highlight something about your product then use bullet points to do so.

Some people think bullet points are too simple for their readers. This is not true. Any reader can benefit from having things simplified and spelled out in the way bullet points do.

Bullet points are most useful to call attention to the benefits of your product. You want to really highlight your products benefits. The benefits are a main selling point and they will be a big thing that will contribute to making sales.

Bullet points rank right up there with the headline as the most important aspects of your copy. Almost every reader will read them, so it is important when writing them to make sure they are well written.

Your bullet points should be precise, pointed and each bullet point should cover one specific topic. The bullet points should be easy to read and should tell the reader something important.

Bullet points are basically highlights of important information. They are things the reader needs to know and wants to know. Bullet points do not contain filler or useless information.

When writing your bullet points you should write a large amount and then choose the best ones. This will help to ensure that you use the best ones. It will also help you get them very specific and precise.

Here are some tips for writing great bullet points:

1. Each bullet point should highlight one thing about the product. That is the point of bullet points, after all, to highlight a benefit or feature. Just make sure you are only including one point each.
2. Keep the bullet points short. You do not want to go into a long drawn out explanation. That is the job of the rest of your text. Just keep it simple.
3. You do not have to write the perfect sentences. You can use fragments or other grammatically incorrect ways of saying what you need to. Just make sure the general grammar is correct, like using the same tenses and pronouns.

You are aiming to write bullet points that will accomplish something more then informing the skimming reader. Your bullet points should, ultimately, get the reader to either read the rest of the copy or head to the buy now button. This is what you have to keep in mind when writing bullet points.

You do not want your bullet points to just end up being filler material. When you use bullet points the content must be something interesting and something of value. Do not just use bullet points for the sake of using bullet points.

When a reader sees a bullet point it is a clue to them that the information is important and that it is worth reading. They catch their eye and the reader will read them as long as they are not too wordy or boring.

The way you write your bullet points is almost as important as using them in the in the first place. You have to make a good effort to write bullet points that worthy of being bullet points.

Keep in mind that bullet points are an extra addition to your copy. They should not become the focal point or take over the copy. They are simply an aid to get people reading your copy. Bullet points will draw in the people who simply skim when reading online. They will also breakup the copy and make it look more interesting to read.

Use bullet points in your copy, but use them wisely. You should follow the basic guidelines for writing bullet points and you should make sure they are adding to the copy rather than just taking up space. When used correctly, bullet points can be a big copy helper.

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The Pros of Article Marketing

There are many advantages of article marketing. The most obvious advantages, of course, are that article marketing is highly effective, and it is free, unless you must pay someone to write your articles for you, in which case it is very low cost. That is when come freelancing. Sometimes I use GetaFreelancer which you can find some writters for low cost and quality. Of course when comes to “create articles” for submitting articles to articles directory I will pay much less.

Writing and submitting articles allows you to build a large number of backlinks to your site in a relatively short amount of time, without having to provide outbound links in exchange for those inbound links. This helps boost your search engine rankings by increasing your search engine optimization. But note that if you submit the same article in many article directory it can be penalized because duplicate content.

If you have a flair for writing, you can easily express yourself in 300 to 500 words and produce quality articles in a very short time, all at no cost. This also helps to establish you as an expert within your niche. When you establish yourself as an expert, you are also building trust with those that read your articles, and this in turn, of course, creates more sales.

Articles are viral. Viral marketing means that you do something once and it spreads, providing you with the benefits for a long time to come. That’s how article marketing works. You write and distribute the article one time, and it serves you with back links, increased traffic, credibility, and trust for a very long time.

If you distribute articles on a regular basis, you will find that it serves to increase your backlinks, your traffic, your credibility, your trust, and ultimately your sales for an even longer time.

As long as you are producing quality, informative articles within your niche, you can’t go wrong. While your articles should not be sales letters disguised as articles, you can use articles to pitch products, as long as the information is informative and useful to the reader, even if they do not purchase the product.

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How Hacked Servers Can Hurt Your Traffic

You can check the whole discussion on webmasterworld, it’s recommended.

Unfortunately there are all kinds of devious server hacks making the rounds these days. They usually depend on two factors: sites that use a common CMS (such as WordPress) and site owners who do not update their software to keep security solid.

But the average site owner may not have the resources or understanding to investigate thoroughly. All they know is that their Google traffic went away.

But if you can discover that you’ve been hacked, the fix is straightforward:

• fix the security problem
• restore a clean version of the site
• request reconsideration

Malware

One thing that hackers do is find sites to help distribute malware. This one should be easy to detect, because Google will post a warning notice in the SERPs “This site may harm your computer.” This discussion covers the details of how to handle a malware hack. Googlelady.com and many other sites of our company have been hacked long time ago and believe me we lost a lot of money during this time.

One common footprint for a malware hack is an iframe that doesn’t belong in your code – especially one with a lot of hex coding.

Defacement Hacks
These are really “old school” – they’re more like online graffiti than anything else. The hacker usually just wants to brag that they got you, and they put up a message on your pages for all to see. Well, that’s easily detected because you just go to your pages and there it is!

But as I said, this is old school and many hackers are looking for something with some financial value these days.

Robots.txt Hacks
This one is either done for sheer malicious delight, or perhaps for competitive disruption. How often do you check your robots.txt file? If someone replaced the first line and disallowed all indexing, how fast could you catch that?

In addition to visually inspecting your robots.txt file on a regular basis (and especially if your urls start disappearing from the Google index) you can also set up a Webmaster Tools account and check it regularly. Google will report to you when urls get blocked by robots.txt.

Parasite Hosting
This one is sneakier and depends on the value of backlinks, either for PageRank or for the traffic itself. The hacker places links on your pages (they may be hidden through various means) and you may not be inspecting your content close enough to see those links.

The tool you need is a link checker, such as Xenu LinkSleuth, that can give you a report on all your external links. You are careful about who you link out ot, right? So anything really bogus is going to jump out at you from that list. Running a link checker on a regular basis has many other benefits as well, such as keeping those accidental 404s out of your site. So I consider it to be something like getting a regular physical (but I recommend doing it more often.)

Cloaked Hacks
Now we’re really getting devious. Over the past year or more, hacks have been showing up that cloak their parasite content so that only googlebot sees it. If you visit with a regular browser (user agent) you only see what you expected to see.

Your main tool here is a user-agent spoofer of your own, such as the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox. Just fire it up with a googlebot user agent string and see if your page content changes.

Complex Cloaking – using IP and cookies
This is getting deep – and it’s also not so common, but it is out there “in the wild.” The hacker in this case paces complex scripting on your site so that not only do they cloak for googlebot by user agent, they also cloak by IP address. In some cases the script also places a cookie so you get only one chance to see what they’re doing.

And your tools here are 1) learning how to browse your site with coolies turned off and 2) studying your server logs for what your server replies to googlebot.

Cloaked Redirects – .htaccess hacks
Google’s John Mueller (JohnMu) has just made an excellent blog post about this. I’ll refer you to him:

The first symptom that you would see is hard to interpret: URLs from the website are just not indexed anymore…
When you submit a Sitemap file, Google will show warnings for URLs that redirect. By design, you should be listing the final URL in your Sitemap file, so if the URL is redirecting for our crawlers (as in this case), we’ll show a warning in your account.

I urge you to read JohnMu’s entire article. He’s offering a lot of help here.

DNS Troubles
Some of the sneakiest hackers have used various kinds of DNS tricks. Over two years ago we discussed this rare but still possible problem in this thread.

If your traffic totally dries up, you would hit the panic button pretty quickly – so these hackers have been more clever than that. With DNS tricks they might syphon off only 20% of your traffic. One thing you would see was a traffic drop with no corresponding drop in rankings.

There’s been some good effort here on the part of the DNS servers to get more secure from this type of thing, but it’s still worth mentioning as a potential. The moral is to check your DNS settings and fix any warnings you get. It might seem like a foregin language to you if you never waded into these waters before, but it’s worth climbing the learning curve – especially if your traffic is evaporating. However, it’s something that I wouldn’t suspect until I ruled out all the rest of the hacks I listed above.

It might be an employee, too
Sorry to say, it’s not always an external hacker. Sometimes a person your trusted with server access gets greedy and places parasite links to earn some csh on the side. We’ve had such reports here, and it even happened at Google a few years back.

Don’t get crazy about this possibility, but if you do find junk on your server and there’s no real sign of an external hack – then consider who you might have given server access to. This is one solid reason always to changes passwords (strong ones) when anyone leaves the company, or when your contract is over with anyone who had access. Even great companies sometimes hire a bad apple.

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Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

I started writing my beginner's guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It's time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final WordPress SEO tutorial.

Note: this article hasn't been updated yet since the beta release of my WordPress SEO plugin, but that plugin does cover a lot of the stuff needed below, so do check it out! When that plugin goes into a more stable development mode, this article will of course be updated.

If you're more of a visual type, try this WordPress SEO video. It's an hour long presentation I gave at A4UExpo London, that covers most of what's in here too.

Want to hire a consultant?
If you'd rather have me figure out what you should be doing, feel free to order a website review by the Yoast team or hire me as your WordPress SEO Consultant.

As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices. If you don't have the time to do this kind of optimization yourself, consider hiring us to do it, check out our WordPress consulting services.

As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot, check out the table of contents for some quick jumping around.

1. Basic technical optimization

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there's a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.

1.1. Permalinks

The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.5, you'll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is

?p=<postid>, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the "custom" setting into /%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to /%category%/%postname%/.

Once you've done that, you'll want to install the Redirection plugin, and make sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, making sure both URL Monitoring select boxes are set to "Modified posts". Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO'd permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.

WWW vs non-WWW

Another good thing to configure now you're on that screen anyway is the Root domain: Add WWW / Strip WWW one. Make a choice, and set it here, don't enable both, some search engines still can't handle that. And enable the redirect index.php/index.html one too, it won't hurt you, and might even do your WordPress SEO some good.

URL stopwords

The last thing you'll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is install the SEO Slugs plugin, this will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won't get those ugly long URL's when you do a sentence style post title.

Optimize your Titles for SEO

By default, the title for your blog posts is "Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title". For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:

• Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
• People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

For more info on how to craft good titles for your posts, see this excellent article and video by Aaron Wall: Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles. I prefer to do this with HeadSpace, as that makes it very very easy. You should check your header.php though, and make sure that the code for wp_title(); contains two quotes, so it looks like this: wp_title('');. This makes sure you have absolute control over the title and don't have any annoying separator in there.

After that, go into the HeadSpace settings, and make them look something like this for your posts and pages:

For the other pages, I have the following settings:

• Posts / Pages: %%title%% - Blog Title
• Categories: %%category%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Tags: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Archives: Blog Archives %%page%% - Blog Title

With HeadSpace, you can also write optimized titles for each post specifically, overriding the settings here. This way you have absolute control over your titles, and can make sure your WordPress titles are actually helping your SEO.

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

Give each category a decent description, and use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that you actually want to rank with. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what's in the page they're clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.

Automated descriptions

In my opinion, auto generating descriptions is a load of bull, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you're thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet... If you don't use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.

Auto generating a snippet is a "shortcut", and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).

1.4. Optimize the More text

Another neat featuer of HeadSpace is that you can use it to optimize the more text, so if you use a more tag on the frontpage, you can replace the default "Read more" link with something meaningful for every post. It's small things like that that make your WordPress SEO the best.

1.5. Image Optimization

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you're helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what's otherwise hidden to them.

You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don't have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image's alt and title tag:

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

You'll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like "Home > Articles > WordPress SEO". They are good for two things:

• They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
• They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt single.php and page.php in your theme, and use my breadcrumb plugin.

2.2. Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an <h1>, and nothing else. Your blog's name should only be an <h1> on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an <h3>.

These are easy to edit in the post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they're not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don't have to download them most of the time.

2.4. Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

1. Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I've highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
2. Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend W3 Total Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.
3. W3 Total Cache works even more magic when combined with a CDN like MaxCDN. Read more about WordPress CDN stuff here.

Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I use VPS.net myself, and they've proven to be better than most everything I've seen in hosting, but I've got great experience with Page.ly too. If you want to know more be sure to read my article about WordPress hosting.

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you're not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you're allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.

The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren't necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren't helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you'd only want on sub pages.

Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

Once you've done all the basic stuff, you'll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:

1. date based
2. category based
3. tag based

Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author/<author-name>/, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs.

In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages outside of the single page where it should be available. We're going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things.

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

Install my robots meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all archive pages, like this:

Now the search engine will follow all the links on these archive pages, but it won't show those pages in the index. Not everybody will agree on this policy, and others will tell you to just show a snippet of each post on the archive page. That'll also work, but in my opinion completely throwing them out is better.

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don't think you need author archives, use the robots-meta plugin to disable the author archives. Also, if you don't think you need a date based archive: disable it. Even if you're not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO...

3.3. Pagination

Thirdly, you'll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts...

There's an easy fix, in fact, there are several plugins that deal with this. My favorite one at the moment is WP-PageNavi, but most others will work too. If you have the Genesis Theme, you can just enable numeric navigation under Theme Settings -> Content Archives.

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You'll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand. If you're using the meta widget, you might want to enable the option in robots meta to replace that with one that has nofollowed links.

4. A site structure for high rankings

Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They're diluted by one simple thing: comments.

4.1. Pages instead of posts

You've probably noticed by now, or you're seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually... not a post. It's a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a "daughter"-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that's where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.

That's why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you've changed.

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

• create a new page with updated and improved content
• change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
• publish the new page under the old post's URL, or redirect the old post's URL to the new URL
• send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you've updated and improved on your old post
• wait for the links to come in, again;
• rank even higher for your desired term as you've now got:
  • more control over the keyword density
  • even more links pointing at the article
  • the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it's content and ranking

Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you'd lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone's benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that's exactly what you got!

4.3. Linking to related posts

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.

There's a load of these available, but I just use the one that comes with the Simple Tags plugin, as I've found that the easiest and best one so far.

5. Conversion optimization

Get those readers to subscribe!

A lot of bloggers still think that because their blog is a blog, they don't have to optimize anything. Wrong. To get people to link to you, they have to read your blog. And what do you think is easier: getting someone who is already visiting your blog to visit regularly and then link to your blog, or getting someone who visits your blog for the first time to link to your blog immediately? Right.

That's why conversion optimization is so vitally important to bloggers as well: they need to learn how to test their call to actions on their blog so that more people will subscribe, either by e-mail or by RSS. (Ow btw, if you haven't subscribed to this blog yet, do it now!)

One of the things I've found to be very important, and more bloggers seem to have found this, is that a BIG RSS subscribe button is very important, as is offering a way to subscribe by e-mail. I even offer daily and weekly e-mail subscribe options, using aweber (aff), and have found that people tend to really like those options too.

Another thing to be very aware of is when people might want to subscribe to your blog. If they've just finished reading an article of yours, and really liked it, that would be the ideal time to reach them, right? That's why more and more people are adding lines like this to the end of their posts: "Liked this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!"

Another great time to get people to subscribe is when people have just commented on your blog for the first time, for which purpose I use my own comment redirect plugin. Which leads me to the next major aspect of WordPress SEO:

6. Comment optimization

Get those readers involved

Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogs. As Wikipedia states:

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Comments are not only nice because people tell you how special you are, or that you made a mistake, or whatever else they have to tell you. Most of all they're nice, because they show engagement. And engagement is one of the most important factors of getting people to link to you: they show you they care, and they open the conversation, now all you have to do is respond, and you're building a relationship!

6.1. How you get people to comment

The easiest way of getting people to do anything is: ask them to do it. Write in an engaging style, and then ask your blog's readers for an opinion, their take on the story etc.

Another important things is your comment links. Is your comment link "No comments »"? Or is it "No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome »"? Feel the difference? You can change this by opening your index.php template, search for comments_popup_link() and changing the texts within that function.

6.2. Bond with your commenters

Another thing to do is thank people when they've commented on your weblog. Not every time, because that get's annoying, but doing it the first time is a very good idea.

Justin Shattuck thought the same, and created the Comment Relish plugin which sends an email after someone has made his first comment. This email is a message you can enter yourself, with for instance your feed URL, and in my case, a newsletter subscribe URL, etc. Note that some people think this is spam, and that laws in several countries might prohibit the use of this. I can't tell you, because I'm not a lawyer.

Another option, which is a bit less obtrusive / spammy, is to install my comment redirect plugin. This plugin allows you to redirect people who have made their first comment to a specific "thank you" page.

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

Now that people have joined the conversation on your blog, you should make sure they stay in the conversation. That's why you should install the subscribe to comments plugin, that allows people to subscribe to a comment thread just like they would in a forum, and sends them an e-mail on each new comment. This way, you can keep the conversation going, and maybe your readers will be giving you new angles for new posts.

7. Off site blog SEO

If you've followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you've got a big chance of becoming successfull, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn't. Go out there, and talk to people online.

7.1 Follow your commenters

There's been a movement on the web for a while now that's called the "You comment - I follow". They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to "reward" your visitors. Now I do agree, but... That get's you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog... What I do advocate though, is that you actually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.

If you think that's a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That's a group of people you have to take care of!

7.2. Use Twitter

Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the "cool" people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.

To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.

7.3. Find related blogs, and work them

If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you'll need to rank is to be a part of the community.

8. Conclusions on WordPress SEO

This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your blog. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There's a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you'll have to actually do most of it.

If you want to keep updated on the latest news about WordPress, and hear more tips as I come up with them, then subscribe to my WordPress mailing-list right now. If you need help implementing all the tips in this article, or want me to review whether you've done a good job implementing it all, order a website review!

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Why? - Page Rank

What is Page Rank ?

In short Page Rank is a "vote", by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there's no link there's no support (but it's an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page).

How is Page Rank Used?

Page Rank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page's relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and Page Rank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own.

Page Rank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you've installed the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/). But the Toolbar Page Rank only goes from 0 - 10 and seems to be something like a logarithmic scale:

Toolbar Page Rank:

(log base 10)Real Page Rank
0 0 - 10
1 100 - 1,000
2 1,000 - 10,000
3 10,000 - 100,000
4 and so on...

We can't know the exact details of the scale because, as we'll see later, the maximum PR of all pages on the web changes every month when Google does its re-indexing! If we presume the scale is logarithmic (although there is only anecdotal evidence for this at the time of writing) then Google could simply give the highest actual PR page a toolbar PR of 10 and scale the rest appropriately.

Also the toolbar sometimes guesses! The toolbar often shows me a Toolbar PR for pages I've only just uploaded and cannot possibly be in the index yet!

What seems to be happening is that the toolbar looks at the URL of the page the browser is displaying and strips off everything down the last "/" (i.e. it goes to the "parent" page in URL terms). If Google has a Toolbar PR for that parent then it subtracts 1 and shows that as the Toolbar PR for this page. If there's no PR for the parent it goes to the parent's page, but subtracting 2, and so on all the way up to the root of your site. If it can't find a Toolbar PR to display in this way, that is if it doesn't find a page with a real calculated PR, then the bar is greyed out.

Note that if the Toolbar is guessing in this way, the Actual PR of the page is 0 - though its PR will be calculated shortly after the Google spider first sees it.

PageRank says nothing about the content or size of a page, the language it's written in, or the text used in the anchor of a link!

Definitions

I've started to use some technical terms and shorthand in this paper. Now's as good a time as any to define all the terms I'll use:

PR: Shorthand for PageRank: the actual, real, page rank for each page as calculated by Google. As we'll see later this can range from 0.15 to billions.

Toolbar PR: The PageRank displayed in the Google toolbar in your browser. This ranges from 0 to 10.

Backlink: If page A links out to page B, then page B is said to have a "backlink" from page A.

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