Many people like to track there SEO performance. Whether you are trying to use Wordpress SEO or just trying to see where you are performing good at in search engines, there is a simple way of going about this. Yeah, there are many programs and scripts that can help you track your performance. However, I believe my way is pretty simple.

SEO Performance

First off, if you are trying to rank for searching keywords then you can honestly just go to Google and search for those keywords. Of course you have to go through and search for your websites homepage or your article. The only problem is, you won’t be able to track your SEO performance on keywords you don’t know you are ranking for.

I use the WassUp plugin to easily track my performance in search engines. Here are the reasons why this plugin is so helpful:

1. It is basically showing you visitors coming to your blog live. It is not like Google analytics where you have to wait till the next day to see how many visitors you’ve had and where they came from.

2. You can just track visitors coming to your blog from search engines.

3. It shows you what’s search engine they came from.

4. It tells you what they searched for.

5. And best of all, it tells you what page they were on when they found you for that keyword or phrase.

6. It will also give you a link so that you can go and see your article on that page in whatever search engine they used.

Those are all my reasons for loving that plugin to track my search engine optimization performance. You can also use Google analytics to track your SEO performance. However, I do not like it is much because it doesn’t give you the details like this plugin.

Google pagerank sucks, I know I know. I was surprised to get a few emails talking about how much pagerank sucks. I guess my last article explained what Google pagerank is reminded people how much they don’t like the current system.

Basically, it’s really not that bad. I know it could be a lot better, but basically all pagerank is telling you is how much Google trusts a blog. It gives you some link power, but that shouldn’t really be a big deal. Your pagerank doesn’t help you get more search engine hits and it’s not going to get you more subscribers.

It is just a trust factor. If you are looking to be trusted more and maybe you should then try to increase your pagerank. For the people that think that Google pagerank sucks, just remember it is not going to get you better search engine results. Wordpress SEO will definitely get you more traffic from Google.

Explaining Google pagerank isn’t an easy thing to do. However, I think I have a great idea of how it works considering I took this blog all the way to a PR 5 in less than a year. That should give me some credibility when it comes to explaining Google pagerank.

Google Pagerank Explained

Here is how I currently see it in my mind. Right now Google could care less about do-follow and no-follow links. Matt Cutts from Google recently confirmed this on his blog. So any kind of link to your blog is counted in some way. That means every link I have received to my blog by commenting makes it look good to Google. Google does one at how many links are pointing towards your blog. Even if you have 30 of them coming from one blog (because of commenting) it still helps you. Pagerank Tip: Comment on many blogs over and over.

Google pagerank is also decided on how you use your linking power. What I mean by this is that you already currently have a pagerank. Your pagerank is diminished if you link out to a whole bunch of websites. However, if you just link out to a few web sites then your link power is greater. So linking out to 200 web sites is worse than linking out to 50 web sites. Pagerank Tip: Link out to less web sites. Link more to your own articles.

Your pagerank will also be decided by the kinds of web sites you link out to. My pagerank increased because I chose to link to web sites that have a pagerank of four or higher. This makes my blog look less spammy and more trustworthy to Google. They will notice that you’re not linking out to a whole bunch of no-name blogs. Pagerank Tip: Try to only link to web sites that have a higher pagerank. Anything lower than a PR 3 begins to look suspicious.

That is basically all pagerank it is. It really isn’t science like many people make it out to be. Try to link out to less web sites, link out to your own articles more, link out to web sites with a PR 3 or higher, and get more links to your blog by commenting and submitting your articles to do-follow social bookmarking sites.

All pagerank says is that Google likes you and when you link out to people it gives those blogs or web sites more power. It does nothing for your search engine results. Trust me, I would know.

Your Wordpress SEO is one of the most important things for your blog unless you are not worried about getting traffic from search engines. There are many simple things you can do for your blog’s SEO with the Wordpress platform.

It is so simple that all it takes is downloading a few plugins to your blog and you can dramatically have better Wordpress SEO. Below you’ll see that I have gone through and talked about what each plugin will optimize. They are definitely a must if you are looking to get traffic from any search engines.

1.

Webhosting Optimization

I have noticed that ever since I changed webhosts it has resulted in better SEO for my Wordpress blog. The speed of your server can decide how long Google stays on your page to scan your content. I changed to Bluehost a year ago and it has been heaven ever since. As soon as my content was scanned again by Google after changing webhosts, I got around 60 extra search engine hits a day.

Many people do not put emphasis on how well there Web hosting is. However, that could result in you hardly getting any search engine traffic to your blog. Next time you are thinking about a webhost, pick one with a server that has speed.

2.

Wordpress SEO Post Plugins

It is important that you use plugins to help your Wordpress SEO. There are many plugins that can do this for you but if you want the best SEO for Wordpress there are a few that are better than others.

The one I use is either All in One SEO Pack or HeadSpace 2. They both let you optimize your titles, descriptions, and keywords of your posts. Both of them will do the same for your overall blog.

Download: All in One SEO Pack | HeadSpace 2

3.

Permalinks

Your permalink is very important for SEO. One of my favorite plugins is SEO Slugs because it gets rid of the words that are not important in your blog post title so they don’t end up in your permalink. Search engines don’t really care about unimportant words so this plugin is a must if you’re looking to improve your Wordpress SEO.

I also make sure that in my Wordpress settings I have it set up so that when I post an article my blog name doesn’t show up next to the article name in search engines. I found that this helps with getting my articles ranked higher because it gets rid of unimportant words that do not go with the article.

Download: SEO Slugs

4.

Title Optimization for Wordpress SEO

Title optimization is important for Wordpress SEO. You definitely need to download the plugins that I mentioned in number two. These plugins will allow you to insert any title that you want to have show up in Google for your article. It is important to write good titles that Google loves.

Make sure that any keywords that you are targeting are at the front of your title. It seems that Google and other search engines give you a better ranking for the keywords at the beginning. Try not to use one of those automatic title makers.

5.

Description Optimization

Your description is important even though some experts are saying that it isn’t so important anymore. The reason I do disagree with some of these experts is the fact that when I use descriptions all my posts are ranked higher in Google and other search engines. Make sure you download one of the plugins in number two so that you can insert descriptions for your post and blog.

Make sure when you write a description user keywords at the beginning of the description and some at the end. Remember though, you only get so many characters to write so make it short and sweet.

6.

Image Optimization

Google loves your images to be optimized for their search engine. Lately, it has been showing that it hurts to not have your images optimize. Their spiders have a difficult time searching through your content when they come upon an image that is improperly formatted for Google.

The easiest way to go about optimizing your images is by using the SEO Friendly Images plugin. Your Wordpress SEO can become a lot better if you use this plugin. It might begin to bring in traffic to your Blog through Google image search.

Download: SEO Friendly Images

7.

Template Optimization

Template optimization is a must if you’re looking to improve your Wordpress SEO. It is definitely hard to find a template that is only optimize for search engines. You definitely want your page to load as fast as possible and you want search engines to be able to search through all your content simultaneously.

What I did too optimize my template is move to the best Wordpress theme on the planet, Thesis. This Wordpress theme is one of the fastest on the Internet and would dramatically help your Wordpress SEO. I create all my Blogs on this theme and I have never seen better results.

8.

Page Optimization

Page optimization is also important if your looking to improve your SEO on Wordpress. The simple things you can do is use the breadcrumbs plugin so that you can show search engines around your Blog. It will be easier for search engines to find all your content and at a faster speed. Page numbers will also help your SEO so use the WordPress SEO Pager Plugin.

Download: WordPress SEO Pager | Yoast Breadcrumbs

9.

Speed

Speed is an important part for every blog if you are looking to get search engine traffic. Google has loved fast loading blogs for some time now. Although some do not agree with this, I have only got more hits from search engines since optimizing my blog for speed.

Wordpress has many plugins that can speed up your blog for SEO. I use the ones below because each one has proven to help the speed of my blog. The way I checked how each plugin helped the load time of my blog is by using each plugin by itself and then comparing before and after

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

WP Super Cache – This 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.

WP CSS - This plugin GZIP and strip whitespace from your CSS files. It allows you to confidently use @import inside a CSS file and not worry about what happens on the user’s end. It will look through your style.css file and put any @import files into it. A cache expiry time can also be set.

PHP Speedy WP – PHP Speedy is a script that you can install on your web server to automatically speed up the download time of your web pages.

Optimize DB - For some People running WordPress, the use of phpMyAdmin appears to be a risky thing. There’s just too many options. This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimize the tables of your database, to reduce their overhead.

Download: DB Cache |WP Super Cache |WP CSS | PHP Speedy WP | Optimize DB

10.

Wordpress SEO Results

It is important to look at your SEO results so you know what is working and what is not working. However, make sure you give your article sometime to be indexed in the search engines and get a good ranking. I use WassUp so that I can look at live traffic coming to my blog. Many people use Google Analytics but I just use that past days. It doesn’t give you any live feedback on the traffic coming your Blog.

I have seen good results when I noticed that an article is not performing well in search engines and changing it. Keeping up on what’s working and what’s not working will definitely help your Wordpress SEO also.

Download: Google Analyticator | WassUp

I am starting to test search engine optimization on this blog a little more. With just adding my articles to all that dofollow bookmarking sites, I have been able to get 150 to 200 search engine hits a day.

Now I’m going to test how much better I can do by linking to my articles in dofollow forums. If you are going to do this also, then I suggest that you stay on topic so it does not look like you are just spamming.

For this search engine optimization test, I’ve decided just to use my three most recent articles. I believe I can get some search engine traffic from them but we’ll see. I will use the article on Google’s feedproxy, me being a website grader (which I have tons of submissions already), and the article about if you could retire at 21.

I will submit each one to all the dofollow social bookmarking sites and link to each one on many dofollow forums. I will report back to you after one month of this search engine optimization test. I have a feeling that it will work, but there are tons of ways to get better Google rankings.

Any discussion about SEO Fundamentals needs to start with Google. With over 75% of the world’s web searches now being conducted via Google, it’s safe to say that your potential customers will be starting their journey there as well.

Google is the gold standard of Search Engines in both overall search volume and search quality. I’ll save the rationale behind Google’s dominance for another day, but undoubtedly a large portion of their rise to the top of Search Engine excellence can be attributed to their proprietary algorithm, which is the set of calculations performed against the web’s content that decides which web sites they think their viewers will find most relevant for the entered keywords.

Google is the most difficult search engine to optimize against because it does the best job of filtering out all of the short-cuts marketers try to use to cheat the system. Google makes a company work to return high organically. At the most basic of Google’s (and hence, SEO’s) driving factors to page rank are:

• How much relevant content does your site have, and
• How highly the web community values your content (measured in number of links from other sites to your content).

This means that the early days of tweaking a few meta tag descriptions to fix your web site’s SEO are long, long gone. In today’s game, SEO cannot be thought of as a one-time expense. It requires a commitment. Based on your competition, your industry and your objectives, it may also require a good deal of time and money before you see results. There is no short-cut around satisfying these two criteria. If an SEO Consultant tells you there is, it’s likely either a scam or an activity that could get your site blacklisted.

So, how exactly does a company show Google great, relevant content that’s as popular and externally-validated as a southern Homecoming Queen? There’s no magic answer, and the rules are always changing, but….

Without further ado, and in no particular order,

Google’s 20 most important factors to better Google rankings

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag – Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.

2. Keyword Use in Body Text – Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.

3. Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords – Topical relevance of text on the page compared to targeted keywords.

4. Keyword Use in a web page’s Headline (H1 Tag) – Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase.

5. Keyword Use in Domain Name & Page URL

6. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure – Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page.

7. Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages – Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages?

8. Age of Document – Older pages may be perceived as more authoritative while newer pages may be more temporarily relevant.

9. Amount of Indexable Text Content – Refers to the literal quantity of visible HTML text on a page.

10. Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically) – Assuming search engines can use text, visual or other analysis methods to determine the validity and value of content, this metric would provide some level of rating.

11. Global Link Popularity of Site – The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity).

12. Age of Site – Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership).

13. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site – The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword.

14. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.

15. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site – The frequency and timing of external sites linking in to the given domain.

16. Anchor Text of Inbound Link.

17. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site.

18. Topical Relationship of Linking Page.

19. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.

20. Age of Link.

Most people want to know what their blogs statistics are. There are many Wordpress plugins that can show you your stats. Below I have listed six of the best ones I have used. If you know of any other Wordpress stat plugins let me know in the comment form below.

You should always look your statistics so you know what you need to work on. You can see where all of your traffic is coming from and this can benefit you. You’ll know what is working and what is not working.

Wordpress Stat Plugins

WassUp
This is the statistic plugin that I am currently using. It gives you real-time statistics which is the part that I really like.

WP-Stats
This is another great Wordpress plugin for finding out your statistics. This may be the most popular one among Wordpress users. But don’t think that means it is the best.

WordPress Blog Stats
This helps you integrate the W3Counter service into your self hosted blog.

Official StatCounter Plugin
If you use the great service StatCounter for getting your blogs statistics, then you will likely love this plugin. This allows you to use their service in your admin area. This means that you will not have to go to their web site to get statistics.

CyStats
This is another great statistic plugin that I also use. It shows you a little more information about your statistics. A lot of times I like as much information as I possibly can get.

StatPress Reloaded
This was made to keep the Statpress plugin alive. The original creator does not keep the original updated anymore so this was created. Also one of the most popular plugins to get your statistics.

Those are the six best Wordpress plugins I have used for stats. There are many more that I have tried that are not as beneficial as these six. But if you have reasons you like others better than let me hear them. I can be persuaded.

I have never claimed to know a lot about search engine optimization, but as of lately I have been getting a lot of traffic from search engines. I started to increase search engine hits since I went through and retitled my blog posts, changed keywords, reformatted content, internal linking, and make the URLs search engine friendly. Most of all, I used the Google keyword tool to decide what keywords I would try to be hitting. I have now increased my search engine hits by 300%. Considering that I only ones getting 100 unique visitors a day, this isn’t that huge. However, increasing my search engine hits is good for me as that is one of my worst weaknesses.

I’m going to show you exactly what I did to increase search engine hits. I’m sure there will be many people that disagree with me, but I know that these things have actually worked for me. Whether you want to believe it or not, these do increase your search engine hits. (I have really hit the keyword “increase search engine hits” in the first two paragraphs. Google will just love me now.)

Increase Search Engine Hits

Google Keyword Tool – I am in love with the Google keyword tool and so should you. When you are thinking about a post your writing make sure to hit a couple main keywords. When you’re a new blog is better to try to hit keywords that are less competitive. So what you want to do when you come to the Google keyword web page is enter in keyword ideas you have for your post. Then when you submit those keywords it will show you the following information about those keywords and other relevant ones: how competitive each keyword is, how much traffic it is predicted to receive this month, and how much traffic it received last month. You can get other information about the keywords but I tend to not look at that when I’m thinking about increasing search engine hits. Usually if it has no competition, a thousand or more searches, and it can be used as one of your main keywords, I will build my blog post content around that word or phrase. (I will try refer back to the Google keyword tool as much as possible throughout this post)

Retitle Post Titles – your blog headlines are one of the most important things when it comes to getting search engine hits. When you used the Google keyword tool to find a word or phrase you will build your blog post content around then you should realize you’ll have to use it in your post title. For example, when I decided to use the phrase “All Twitter”, it also became a post title. You don’t have to use your phrase or word you are targeting by itself. You can surround the phrase or word you are targeting with other words. Just try to use your keyword in your post title somewhere.

Keywords – I have received a lot of e-mails about keywords for some reason. I talked about the Google keyword tool above so this part shouldn’t be too difficult unless you didn’t use the keyword tool. Make sure that your keywords are relevant to the words that are part of your content. If you put keywords down that are not relevant then you will be punished by Google. I went back through and wrote two to four keywords that were relevant to my blog post content. The crazy thing is that your most relevant keywords should be written first. That means the word or phrase used as your keyword in your post title comes first!

Reformat Content – If you want to increase search engine hits than you will need to make sure that your content is targeted towards your keywords. The main point is that you use your keyword in the first few sentences of your blog post. This is the first part of your post that the Google spider or any other search engine spider will crawl. The spiders are already biting you if your keywords are not talked about right away in your content. That means somehow you have to catch up throughout the rest of your post and it is difficult. Try to use your keywords a little throughout the middle part of your posts but this isn’t as important as using them at the beginning of the post. Then make sure that you use your keywords in the last two sentences of your post. Spiders seemed to love this.

The next part of reformatting your content to increase search engine hits is to use your headline tags. You know what your keywords are from using the Google keyword tool. One way to emphasize that words are important in your blog post is by using headline tags. Google spiders will give you a higher search engine ranking if your keywords are used in headline tags. Just make sure you surround your keywords with other words so it doesn’t throw up a red flag that you are just trying to get a better ranking. One thing that will penalize you is if you use headline tags too often. So using them once or twice in a post is just about right.

Internal linking is also important when you are trying to increase search engine hits. This will give you free links to your own posts. What you want to do is link to one of your blog posts if you have used a word or phrase you are trying to target. For example, I used the phrase search engine ranking which is a phrase I use as a keyword for one of my post. I would then make a link to that post the phrase “search engine ranking”. The post then gets a higher ranking for that keyword. Most keywords that I target seem to be longtail keywords.

Search Engine Friendly URLs – Your URL needs to have your targeted keyword in it. There are many plugins for WordPress that will take out words that are not relevant, such as and, to, but, and others. However, you may use some of these words as part of your phrases you are trying to target. If you’re trying to target the phrase how to blog, then you would want your URL to have the word to. So I recommend not using these plugins and just rewriting your URLs manually.

What else should you try? Use images in your blog posts and use the alt tag. Try to put one of your weaker keywords as your alt tag. Image searches are huge so you might as well get easy traffic.

Those are all the steps I took to increase my search engine hits. If you have not been getting the traffic you like from search engines, then follow all the steps I have taken to increase my search engine hits 300%.

Many people take the time to manually find where their blog’s keywords are ranked on Google and other search engines. This can become very time-consuming especially if you look up every single keyword for your blog. However, there is a simple way to figure this out that will save you a great amount of time.

The other day I came across a couple of web sites that help you monitor where your blog is ranked for your keywords. On the Position Finder Tool you just use the web site and type in the information it asks for. It will reload the page and show you where your blog is ranked for each keyword.

I do like the Free Monitor for Google software the best. The reason why is because it saves all the information you input. I try to be as productive as possible when I am doing things related to blogging. So not having to type my keywords and blog URL saves me time. I just open up the program and I’m able to search right away.

Saving time by using tools like these makes us more productive bloggers. Tools like these can also let you know what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. If you are ranking higher on a keyword one week and then take a plunge the next week, then you know to go and correct any changes you have made.

It can be difficult to know how to get traffic from search engines and a good blog headline is one way. If you thought you were the only one having a difficult time getting traffic from search engines then you are mistaken. There are not many blogs and web sites that will give you this information for free. However, over the years I have been a private consultant to many companies creating web sites and blogs.

Search engines never usually tell you how you can get a higher ranking for your blog itself or your blog posts, but during my time as private consultant I learned more than I already knew. The reason for that is because search engine optimization seems to be changing monthly so I had to change with it. I have talked a little about search engine optimization on this blog, but I’m going to talk more in the coming weeks because people are looking to get easy traffic to their blogs and over time search engines can do that for you.

One way to begin is by writing a good blog headline. I try to teach bloggers that it is important to create a striking blog headlines so you can get people’s attention. A striking blog headline gets people to read your posts, get social media users to come to your blog, and will help you get linked to by other bloggers. The main problem is that a striking blog headline may not get your post ranked very high in search engines.

Here’s some tips on how to get your blog posts ranked high in search engines even with a striking blog headline:

• The most important keywords of your blog post should be at the beginning of your post headline. It seems as if Google and other search engines search through the first few words of the post title and then moves down the rest of the blog headline second.
• Make sure the main keywords used at the beginning of your post title are in the first two sentences of your blog post. Again, Google and other search engine’s start from the top and go down.
• When using adjectives to describe what you will be talking about, make sure that it is not part of your permalink. Unless you find that people will type that adjective in with the other keywords of your blog post, don’t use it in your permalink. In your permalink. just use keywords that you are trying to match with your blog headline.
• Use Google keywords to help you find certain keywords that you can use in your blog headline that people search for. Look for ones that do not have a lot of competition. These will be the easiest ones to get your blog post ranked high in search engines.

Those are the simple techniques of writing a good blog post headline that can both be creative, but will also get your blog post ranked higher in search engines. There isn’t really any secret when it comes to writing a blog headline.