As you know, title tags are the most important on-page factor. They are given the most weight out of anything on the page as far as the search engines are concerned. So it is a huge weakness in WordPress (and most other blog platforms for that matter) that the post title is used as the title tag, usually with some other extraneous bits added on like the name of the blog. That is far from optimal SEO! Instead, you should be able to handcraft your own title tags independently of the post title -- interject synonyms, rearrange the word order, and so forth.

My SEO Title Tag plugin, which has been out since middle of last year, allows you to do just that. But wait, there's more...!

I am happy to tell you that I, along with some of my talented programmers here at Netconcepts, have made a major update to the plugin. Indeed, we have really made some magic, as you shall soon see!

I'm pleased to announce the SEO Title Tag WordPress plugin... Version 2.0 beta!

The plugin now allows you to mass edit title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, indeed any URL, all in one go.

It also now has a title tag input box on the Edit and Write forms for pages and posts, so no more having to use the custom field box.

It allows you to set a title tag for your 404 error pages and for internal search results pages too.

Not only can you now view all your title tags across all of your posts/pages at once. You can also revise your titles right there within that report! This mass editing functionality is available under the Manage > Title Tags tab in the WordPress admin.

Here's what the mass editing admin looks like:

Maybe I am tooting my own horn a bit too much here, but I think this plugin is the best thing to have ever happened to WordPress -- as far as SEO is concerned! :-D

The plugin also plays nicely with the plethora of meta tag plugins out there, such as Add Meta Tags and Another WordPress Meta Plugin. You can choose to use category descriptions as title tags on category pages, or you can choose not to. The latter is the preferred option if you are using a meta tag plugin, because most of those use the category's description field for the meta description tag on the category page. Don't worry though! You can still set custom titles for your category pages -- even if you are using the description field for your meta descriptions.

The plugin is WordPress 2.1 compatible. If upgrading from the previous version of SEO Title Tag, be sure to deactivate the old version before installing the new version. When you activate the new version, it will create some new database tables.

I welcome any and all feedback to that plugin and I hope it is of value to all you bloggers using WordPress.

I'd love to hear of any success stories using this plugin and the rankings and traffic benefits that ensue. Please report back and regale me with your stories of hockey stick graphs! :-)

Now go get the plugin! Enjoy!

It is amazing what you can achieve in regards to SEO just by reaching into your Web 2.0 toolkit. A corporate brochure is about as Web 1.0 as you can get, yet even brochureware can be transformed in ways you may never have thought possible and boosting search visibility in the process.

To prove that point, we redesigned our Netconcepts.com site and launched it this month. It's a typical corporate website, with a portfolio, testimonials, case studies, an article library, bios of our executives, information on our services, etc. The redesigned site is now powered by WordPress, a popular blogging platform.

Because it is now qualifies as a blog, our corporate site can start to enjoy some visibility in the blog search engines and directories and, because WordPress comes with RSS feed capability built in, we can now start to enjoy some visibility in the feed search engines and directories too. We don't just have one RSS feed, by the way. We have many, grouped by topic (e.g. SEO, email marketing) and by type of resource (e.g. articles, testimonials), done through the use of tagging.

Speaking of tags, that is where the real SEO magic happens in this corporate site because every testimonial, every portfolio entry, every press mention, as well as each bio, article and case study, is broken out into a separate post. That post is tagged with appropriate keywords, for example all the testimonials are tagged with the word "Testimonials". So instead of having a single testimonials page as we used to, we have a testimonials tag page that spans three web pages (at 10 posts per page) and each of the 30 testimonials is a separate web page now too. In other words, we want from 1 page to 33 pages; that's a lot more search engine fodder, all with different keyword foci!

Spiders can find and index these tag pages through the text links contained within the tag cloud on the home page, and through text links underneath each post, and through links to "Related Tags" on each tag page. Related Tags are determined from posts that have the tag (from the tag page in question) in common. So, for example, because we have posts that are tagged with both "SEO" and "Testimonials", therefore "SEO" appears as a related tag on the Testimonials tag page and "Testimonials" appears as a related tag on the SEO tag page. We display links not just to the related tag pages, but to intersections between related tags. So, for example, you will find on our Testimonials tag page a number of Related Tags in the right hand column, all with "AND" and "OR" links adjacent to each one.

Let me restate that a little bit differently just to clairfy... All our SEO-related items (testimonials, case studies etc.) are tagged with "SEO". Consequently, there is a tag page that relates to "SEO" and a tag page that relates to "testimonials". There's even a tag page that relates to "SEO testimonials" -- the intersection of those two tags. That makes for boatloads of tag pages, considering how many different permutations there are for various combinations of tags being "ANDed" or "ORed" together.

By moving to a more modular structure (based around Posts rather than Pages) along with the large inventory of new pages, allows us to capitalize on the "Long Tail" of natural search in ways we couldn't dream of with our previous incarnation of brochureware.

Above the "Related Tags" you will see a RSS button which leads to a RSS feed specific to that tag page. We use that RSS feed to pull the latest articles, testimonials, seminars etc. and feature them as related content on the right column of our Services pages. For example, our Email Marketing page lists Related Articles on email marketing, because we've specified that the topic of the page is "email marketing" (in other words, the tag that it relates to). We use that information to grab RSS feeds of tag pages for email marketing + articles, email marketing + testimonials, etc.

Besides tagging, we have also employed many other blog SEO tactics, a number of which I detailed in my article for MarketingProfs, 10 Tips to Help Your Blog Soar in the Search Engines. This includes use of sticky posts, adding buttons to add a post to del.icio.us and various other social bookmarking services, and linking to a "Top 10" list of sorts -- namely, under "Free Stuff" on the home page, some of our best content from the past year or so.

To my knowledge this approach for search engine optimizing a corporate site has not been done before, particularly the aspect of breaking up all the discrete bits of content (each testimonial, each portfolio item, each FAQ, etc.) into individual posts and tagging all them, and then relating that tagged content with the appropriate Services pages and highlighting those as related content. If you have heard of a corporate site doing this, please let me know. I would love to check it out.

I also welcome any feedback on what we have done here on the Netconcepts site. We still have a few issues to tidy up with the site (so don't expect perfection), yet overall I am quite pleased with how it all came together.

And, last but not least, the new redesigned site, although it doesn't look markedly different from our old site, is better designed with XHTML and web standards in mind. No more tables for layout. Yay! That was long overdue. Now maybe we will see a rankings benefit in Google Accessible Search. ;-)

Since at least a few people seem to want me to expand on my presentation from the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, I have put a one-hour screencast together. In addition to covering all the slides in the Powerpoint deck, I also ran through an example of a corporate website that is powered by WordPress and that uses, in novel ways, a lot of the blog optimization techniques discussed in my presentation. The corporate site I am referring to is that of my company, Netconcepts.

Enjoy! And do let me know what you think of it.

Download or watch the video via streaming: Flash (10 M or WMV (22 M or Quicktime MPEG4 / iPod Video (59 M

Wouldn't it make sense to take your very best posts, regardless of posting date, and endow them with a maximum amount of link gain so they have the most opportunity to rank well in the search engines? 

Putting together a Top 10 Posts list for your home page will do exactly that, by strategically passing link gain from your blog's home page directly to these posts. 

The great thing about a Top 10 list is that you can be as arbitrary as you want in determining which posts get onto this list. It could be the ones that lead with your most important keywords. Or the ones that most effectively soft sell your products or services. Or simply the posts you personally like the most. Just be careful to choose "evergreen" posts that won't lose their appeal or value after a few days or weeks. 

I really like the way Darren Rowse has done his featured posts list on ProBlogger, where he's listed them in a box labeled "introduction: key articles". He's also sprinkled a couple more into his "tips and hints: toolbox" and "problogger news" boxes, along with links to category pages. The links are very enticing to users, and of course they are text links with great anchor text in them, so they are appealing to search engines too. Nice job, Darren!

If you're happy to leave it up to your readers to decide, then simply install a 'most popular posts' plugin such as the Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress. The plugin automatically compiles the list based on which posts get viewed the most. You can publish the list on the home page and whereever else you see fit.

If you read Marketing Profs, you may have seen my two-part article over the last couple of weeks Ten Tips to Help Your Blog Soar in the Search Engines. 

The tips involved...

1. Specific customizing of your title tags 
2. Ways to clean up your URL structure and aggregate link gain to a single definitive (canonical) URL (i.e. reduce duplicate page issues) 
3. Adding a tag cloud and tag pages to your blog and then optimizing those tag pages 
4. Offering text links to related posts
5. Adding a Top 10 Posts list to your home page with text links to those posts that you most want to pass link gain to 
6. Improving your anchor text on permalinks and on external links to other content of yours
7. Adding intro copy rich with keywords to the top of the page through the use of sticky posts 
8. Use of heading tags 
9. Use of bold or emphasis tags in the body copy of your blog posts 
10. (For blogs with multiple authors) Creating an author page for each contributor and linking to their site directly from your home page to pass them link gain using keyword rich anchor text. 

The complete article is around 3000 words and goes into much more detail. It includes suggested WordPress plugins to use and even sometimes specific PHP code to insert into your blog. 

If you are not a MarketingProfs premium subsciber you won't be able to read the article, so either sign up, or most of the information from the article is available on my blog optimization tag page.

I've posted onto BusinessBlogConsulting.com a list of my favorite WordPress plugins and what they do and why I like them. If you're blogging under the WordPress platform, you might want to trick out your blog with some of these great plugins.

The list includes: PodPress, Popularity Contest, Google Sitemaps Generator, Akismet, Adhesive, Ultimate Tag Warrior, EmailShroud, Transpose Email, WP-EMail, WP-Print, Subscribe2, In-Series, Permalink Redirect, Gravatars, Subscribe to Comments. WP-Notable, A Different Monthly Archive, Related Posts, Related Posts for your 404.

That's not quite 20, so I'll add one more to that list — a suggestion from commenter Neville Hobson (thanks, Neville!) — FeedBurner Feed Replacement, which makes it easy to "migrate" your pre-existing RSS subscribers over to Feedburner once you sign up for the service (which is excellent, btw).

If you've got a multi-author blog and those bloggers have their own independent websites, they'll probably want and appreciate getting links from you.

Include links to all your author's websites in your sidebar rather than at the bottom of your page, because footer links don't get as much weight by the search engines. Or better yet, only include your list of author links from the home page rather than making it a site-wide link, which will also get partially discounted by the search engines.

Within every post that they author, include a link to their site. That will motivate them to post more often.

Also include with each post a link to their profile page (hosted on your blog). Each author profile page should contain a link to that author's site, a biographical statement (taken from the "About Yourself" field in their profile), and the posts that they've authored. Here is my profile page on BusinessBlogConsulting.com, for example.

Let them define the anchor text of the link to their site, since anchor text is such an important element for SEO (see my Blog SEO Tip on Anchor Text). The way I did it for BusinessBlogConsulting.com, which runs on WordPress, I had them specify the anchor text they wanted in the Nickname field on their edit profile page and I used that instead of their name.

Using bold, strong, or emphasis tags within the body copy of your blog posts will help identify to search engines like Yahoo! which words/phrases should be given more weight. This is a useful technique for blog optimization. Notice that I made the phrase "blog optimization" bold in the previous sentence. That's an example of this tactic in practice. ;-)

Feel free to emphasize multiple phrases in your copy. Even make use of Heading tags if your post is particularly long. Just don't overdue it. If it seems overoptimized when you read it, then it is!

Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So they should be used wisely to reinforce the page's overall keyword theme. The posting date should never be within an H1 tag, because you're NOT trying to rank well in the engines for a date. Instead, wrap an H1 tag around your category name or tag name on your category page or tag page, respectively. Then make the titles of your blog posts H2 tags, so that on a category or tag page, the category/tag words can be the only H1 on the page and thus can convey greater emphasis than the post titles.

You could even take this idea a step further and make the post title display within an H1 tag if it's a Sticky post, and within an H2 if a normal post. (See my last post for more on the benefits of Sticky posts for SEO.) Check out this example category page on BusinessBlogConsulting.com where I did just that.

A "sticky" post is one that always appears at the top regardless of the date/time posted. The "sticky" feature is available in some blog systems by default (e.g. Blogger.com) and in others through the use of a plugin (e.g. the Adhesive plugin for WordPress).

Why would you ever want to make a post sticky? Because it's an easy way to improve the keyword prominence on a category page or tag page. If you're not familiar with the concept of keyword prominence, it's simply this: the higher up on the page your targeted keyword is, the better you'll rank. So, having keyword-rich intro copy that consistently appears at the top of a category page or a tag page will give you good keyword prominence and help you maintain a stable keyword theme for the page even when old posts fall off the page and new posts appear.

You can achieve this with a blog post containing your desired keyword-rich intro copy, categorizing/tagging it so that it appears on the desired page and making the post "Sticky" so that it stays on the top of the tag page. Back-date the post so it doesn't appear on the top of your home page, just on the appropriate category or tag page. With the Adhesive plugin, you should select the "Show Sticky Posts Only on Category Pages" option in the configuration settings to ensure that they never appear on the home page. If you're also using UltimateTagWarrior to create tag pages, you'll need to edit the following line (which appears twice) in the Adhesive plugin from:

if(!adhesive_get_options('category_only') || is_category())

to:

if(!adhesive_get_options('category_only') || is_category() || is_tag())

If you aren't able to make posts sticky for whatever reason, then a kludge to still get the desired effect would be to put your intro copy directly into your template/theme and use a series of if/then statements to determine which copy to display based on which category/tag is active.

UPDATE: Here is an example category page where I've added some intro copy in the form of a Sticky post.