Check List of how to make your blog crawlable by search engine spiders -

• Use of H1 Tag – Try to use H1 tag once in your blog pages and it’ll be best if you use post headings as H1 tag.
• Use of H3 Tag – Try to use H3 tag in the text of the blog posts. Try to use this in important headings.
• Use of Meta Tags – Use All-in-one-seo pack plugin for the same. Try to keep meta keywords relevant to blog post.
• Use of XML Sitemap – Use Google XML sitemap generator plugin.
• Relevant Keywords – Google Keyword tool is an excellent tool to find out which keywords you must target.
• Use keywords in posts – Include those keywords as many times (properly) in the first paragraph.
• Get link backs – Try to get link backs with those keywords as anchor text.
• Link old articles – Always try to link to your own articles.

These are some important points you may need to consider to promote and strengthen your blog for search engines. This will ensure that your blog goes crawlable and rank good in search engine result pages.

What is a permalink?

Permalink is short form of permanent link of a particular blog post. In blogs each and every post gets a specific URL, so that it can be accessed at any point of time even though it doesn’t get displayed on the blog’s home page any more.

So Don’t I get permalinks by default?

By default, wordpress creates the URL of the blog posts in this format : http://yourdomainname.com/?p=1 however, this is not search engine friendly URL as there are no keywords in the URL and doesn’t make any sense to any human reader as well. Now consider this URL: http://yourdomainname.com/youarticlename/, don’t you think that this URL is much better and true as well ?

How do I customize permalink in WordPress for my blog ?

Now, you are making sense! It’s really not difficult to change permalink structure in WordPress you need to follow these steps to ensure that you get to choose the kind of permalink structure you long for -

Go to Settings -> Permalinks and you can choose Common settings and click on save settings.

If at all you get any error then it will most likely because of read/write permissions on .htaccess file. In order to ensure that it works properly, we will change the read/write permissions of .htaccess file. You will need to set 666 settings to your .htaccess file.

Another wonderful question! WordPress is so flexible that it gives you the power to include date, time, year, categories, tags and what not in the URL structure and depending on your website’s requirement you can choose any one kind of URL structure. I prefer to use the Custom structure and in that the value I’ve put is /%category%/%postname%/.

This ensures that the category name appears in the URL structure and we can keep category names in such a way that they include important keywords and that ensures that all important keywords appear in blog posts’ URL.

WordPress doesn’t generate Site Map on it’s own. However, we would love to have this feature come default in next versions. There are plugins which can generate Site Map for you else there are simple tricks through which we can Generate a Site Map.

Although search engines prefer blogs as they get updated regularly, however there are few things on which we can work on and can ensure that we can get listed at the top of the search results. With these tricks alone you can easily gain more than 60 % of your blog traffic from various search engines (it may vary for lot of blog, some may get up to 70-80% as well).

These tricks are definitely worth and are completely white hat too.

Keywords are the key

If you can find out the best keywords for your website and if you can target them properly then you can gain lot of quality traffic from the search engines. All-in-one-seo pack is a great plugin to help you in doing the changes in the posts for better SEO.

You can find relevant Keywords from these places -

a) Google adwords keyword suggestions.
b) WordTracker

1. Keyword density : It’s important to put the keywords in your blog posts. Try to keep the keywords at around 5% – 10% of the total blog post.
2. Bold those keywords : Search engines understand that if you are highlighting some words then those words are important and they get more preference over rest of the text.
3. Include the keywords in post heading: Try to include those keywords in post heading as that brings the keywords in the H1 tag of the theme and thus gets more importance.
4. Importance of the Title tag : Title of the pages also hold lot of importance and if you include the keywords in the title then you’ll be doing lot of good to your rankings in the search results.

Let the search engines know where your content is:

It’s pretty simple that if search engines can’t reach your pages then they won’t be able to show them anywhere in the result. So the idea is that let the search engines find the content of your website in the simplest manner. So, it’s good to have a sitemap and Google sitemaps generator is one of the best plugin to achieve the task.

Once you’ve generated the sitemap of your blog, feel free to submit it to Google webmaster tools and gain access to various wonderful tools which are part of Google webmaster tools.

Build incoming links:

Incoming links are one of the most important factors, when it comes to ranking well in Google and here are some of the tricks to help you build the incoming links -

1. Original ideas, tips work really well: If you can write unique content regularly then you are bound to get some great back links from people. Nice and original tips get circulated well and bloggers talk about it and share the link love.
2. Write resourceful articles: List posts do really well and get lot of link backs from bloggers around.
3. Submit your articles to social networking sites: There are many social networking websites where you can publish your articles and that will give you incoming links and thus will help you in gaining the link love.

We don’t need to explain anything about Spam over here. Blog spam is nothing new and there have been already many articles written about it.

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guest books, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

How to fight comment spam

There are various plugins for WordPress to fight against spamming. However, with our experience as professionals, we have come across some great ones.

Akismet – This wonderful service from Automattic has been consistently helping thousands of bloggers in fighting blog spam. Not only it is available for WordPress, it has been extended for various other platforms like Drupal etc. We recommend using this plug-in for your WordPress setup.

WP-Spam Free –It’s so powerful that it literally makes your blog secure from all the comment spam. Although, this plug-in is infamous for using extra resources from server. If you have a high traffic blog and get lots of spam comments, then we recommend using this plugin.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – Another wonderful plug-in for fighting spam on blogs. It not only helps to fight blog comment spam. It also can be extended to fight automated registrations and automated contact form submissions. This plugin uses a familiar trick of fighting comment spam i.e. CAPTCHA verification. It has lots of configuration options and if you don’t want to rely on automatic anti-spam plugins like Akismet & WP-Spam Free then this plugin will easily serve the purpose for you.

Bad Behavior – This wonderful script has been developed to fight against spam bots. It’s not specific to WordPress and is available for other content management systems. It’s pretty light on servers and has been made available for many of CMS. It has done a wonderful job in keeping this blog spam free from long time and will continue to do so!

ReCAPTCHA – reCAPTCHA is a service that is used by thousands of popular websites to fight spam bots. The service can be easily integrated in a WordPress blog with the help of this plugin. We like this plugin because it definitely has proven its effectiveness to fight the spam bots.

Your blog’s design is very important to you. It reflects on you and how you’re perceived by other people. Believe it or not, first impressions do count. A good blog design will absolutely give you a better first impression. It encourages the people to click and read a bit further and get to the all-important content. In the wide world of blogging, the content might be the king, but the design is the queen. So use your first impression and give the content of your blog a better chance to be seen by the world. Contact Digital Intersect to consult about a professional design for your blog.

The design of your blog is just as important as any other aspect of your business and it will be wise to plan it in your budget. In blogging you can always change things, experiment, see what works and then use it.

Uninteresting Posts

Before you start your blog, think about your goals you want to accomplish. Define your target readership and don’t forget that your future readers are common, real people and that you need to write posts that people enjoy reading and they will reward you by returning to your blog regularly. Getting the visitors is easy, making them your regular visitors is hard. Write in a conversational style and on one particular topic. Don’t worry about blog traffic but focus on quality contents.

Ignoring Search Engines Optimization Activities

You should follow a basic but important search engines optimization tips that will make your page perfectly optimized like:
-Your blog URL should contain the primary keyword you want to optimize for.
-You should use your primary keywords in the title of your post and your secondary keywords in the body of your post.
-You should use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts.

Not writing often

Write often and write regularly so readers and search engines will visit your blog more often. Post on weekdays because there are more readers during weekdays than on the weekends. Even if you keep a low pace of posts, say 5 posts per week still are available for your readers most of the time.

Uninteresting Design

Your blog design should not be complicated and visually unappealing. If your blog design is complicated it will make readers distracted from reading your content. It also can slow down loading and will drive impatient visitors away. But if your blog design is simple and visually appealing it will be more attractive to your regular readers and also you can submit it to some CSS gallery site that feature great designs and get some extra traffic from there too.

Not Spreading the Word about Your Blog

Don’t just post on your blog and leave it like that. You must work a little bit harder and be active to generate traffic, read lots of other blogs, leave track backs, simply you should become part of the community. You can automate your blog with the social media platform to auto-publish your article and generate traffic from there.

• 15%  of the top 1 million websites in the world are now powered by WordPress
• 1 in every 5 new domains created in US are running on WordPress (for new sites it is easy to get started with WordPress – design, functionality and cost wise)
• Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power their websites.
• Millions of plugins downloads every day passing proves that how actively and beautifully the community is contributing which is proven by the use of the plugins.
• 92% of WordPress users now use it as a CMS
• WordPress Maintains such highly advanced process of core development which allows it to be adaptive, flexible and open to extension. This is the reason why we all love WordPress. It is the only platform which is flexible and well documented for us to mould and develop further upon to make it even more stronger and beautiful as per the requirement of individual projects)

Its open source and thus the platform itself is free to use and develop on – starting on WordPress is like less than half the cost of custom developing from scratch or using any other robust CMS.

Additional Functionality via plugins

WordPress community is vast and growing every passing day. Community contribute in the form of plugins which gives you additional functionality at ease and most of them are free or really low cost. Try to only use plugins which are regularly updated as it means the developer is active and it was not just a onetime thing.

Easy Development

In comparison to any other robust Content Management Systems available, WordPress programming is really simple and very documented which makes it easy and simple to start developing on WordPress for even beginners.

Flexible Structure & Template

Because of the flexibility of its structure and code, the framework has no limitations in terms of design customization as other CMS available. You can do anything to it in terms of design.

Easy to Release

All the above factors make the site development really fast and save you a lot of valuable time. You can setup your WordPress on the root folder of your server and run your existing site on live domain and once you are ready with your WordPress website, you can make your site live in seconds by just changing few options in the admin panel.

Themes – multiple prebuilt websites/blogs:

There is a huge bunch of themes available for use – free or low cost. If you are starting with a new website, you can search for themes available on internet and match with your requirements. It is more cost effective in compare to doing a custom theme as you save development cost and as you grow and know your business better then you can start customizing – all depends on your business model. Just make sure that the theme you are selecting is not only just good to look at but has the simple management of the functionality in the backend so you can manage it.

SEO compatible framework:

WordPress system has been built to be search engine friendly. WordPress has the most SEO compatible pretty urls which are most liked by search engines and very easy to manage. Apart from that there are multiple free plugins available for you to extend the SEO functionality and manage it easily all by yourself.

Upgradable

WordPress release latest updates every now and then and you can simply implement that with click of a button. You will need to make sure that any customizations you do are only done in your theme folder. WordPress upgrades update the WordPress core files.

Easy Content Management:

Writing content in the backend is as simple as writing in MS Word. Also, you can play around with the placement of the features and add new features yourself mostly all by yourself – just make sure that the developer utilizes the power of WordPress when working on your site (making the sections widgetized to the extent possible).

WordPress as a Company itself is run by smart innovative people and though it is open source it has a huge funding behind it for them to push developments on the platform itself.

• WordPress is a good value. WordPress is free in its basic and usual form.
• WordPress is Useful/Useable. Right out of the box, it gives good basic functionality.
• WordPress is Customizable. A great many modified versions for special purposes are available. More can be had by employing a custom designer.
• WordPress is Stable. WordPress works, is secure, not quirky, and is highly reliable.

Why WordPress offers good economic value:

WordPress is down-loadable for free. If you wish to have a custom modification done by a qualified professional, you will want to pay them, of course. But the fact that the professional designer does not have to pay for WordPress saves you money, as you will only pay for their work in creating the variations you want. Free access is a good reason why WordPress may be your choice for CMS.

Why WordPress is Useable:

Word press is easy to get and easy to use. WordPress can be acquired simply by going to WordPress.org and downloading it. It is easy to install and configure on private or shared servers. This is why WordPress is available in so many hosting packages. The WordPress Repository contains loads of themes and plugins to customize your installation to meet your needs. Great community support is a main reason why WordPress is a popular choice for CMS.

Why WordPress is Customizable:

WordPress is designed to be redesigned. Human beings in general and web designers in particular, being as we are, would modify and redesign it to suit our needs anyway. But WordPress lends itself well to the work of a talented designer. Flexibility may be the reason why WordPress works best for you, and why WordPress should be your choice for your content management system.

Why WordPress Works:

WordPress is stable. A lot of attention has been given to security as well. The fact that so many top websites are WordPress sites speaks strongly for its dependability. The design was good to begin with, and the years of improvement as its popularity has grown have given us a remarkably strong and dependable package.

Why is WordPress the choice of so many top designers and high-value customers?

Because it combines terrific usefulness as a content management system with a very customizable appearance. Because it is strong and safe, as well as stable and reliable, that is another reason why WordPress is so often chosen for CMS installations. WordPress looks as good as it is, and really is as good as it looks. That is why WordPress is the best choice for your CMS project.