5 SEO Mistakes You Need To Avoid On Your WordPress Blog

Posted on 17. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

Most people would want you to believe that you should become a SPAMMER when it comes to SEO. Add all kinds of keywords, comment on numerous blogs, fill your blog with numerous articles with repetitive keywords and basically create a saturated blog with no human value. If you care about your blog, please don’t make those mistakes. It is a wrong advice that will hurt you in the long run and needs to be avoided at any cost.

As a WordPress blogger, I would like to tell you about 5 mistakes you are likely to make on your WordPress blog. I am assuming here that you have installed All-in-One-SEO plugin which is the best plugin of its kind. (what’s up with all the new upgrades every other day?)

5 SEO Mistakes You Need To Avoid On Your WordPress Blog

1. Keyword Spam

You see this column in All-in-One-SEO plugin’s configuration and it is very important that you fill out the keywords in this box separated by a comma and without repeating. I don’t recommend more than 20 keywords. Keep in mind that “Search Engine Optimization” is same as “Search, Engine, Optimization” and “Engine, Optimization, Search.” Doesn’t matter if your keywords are in all CAPS or the first and last character is capitalized.

The keywords you put in this box should be relevant to your blog posts because these keywords are default for your blog. The beauty of using All-in-One-SEO plugin is that you get to add keywords to your individual posts also because most of the time it is your post that is being ranked and not your blog as a whole (this happens when you are heavily dugg)

2. Keyword Indigestion

The idea on any blog is to optimize the posts and that can be achieved once you’ve got your keywords in your content a few times, in your title and URL, and maybe in the alt tag of an image. If you are writing a post just to rank higher in search engines, you are making a grave mistake. Human beings use these search engines, the content has to be valuable and digestible for humans, thus the phrase “Keyword Indigestion.”

3. XML Sitemaps

WordPress has an excellent sitmaps plugin called XML-Sitemap Generator. Most bloggers would rather not deal with sitemaps because of the initial time investment. Sitemaps can boost your search engine traffic in a very short time and I recommend you take out some time to understand how they work and make good use of it.

4. Ignoring Bing and Yahoo!

Yes I know that Google is king to search engine traffic but if you are avoiding Bing and Yahoo!, you are just limiting yourself from more traffic. 15-20% of your search traffic can come from Yahoo! and Bing and it doesn’t make sense to ignore it completely. Don’t do anything extra, just submit your sitemaps using XML-Sitemap Generator to submit sitemaps to these two websites.

5. Comment Spamming on Popular do-follow Blogs

It is a popular belief that if you comment on a popular blog with do-follow links, you will benefit from the high popularity of the blog. I always thought this practice was well worth the effort but there is nothing out there that justifies spamming. You should avoid comment spamming on popular do-follow blogs because it plain doesn’t work. Once again, stop thinking about search engines for a minute and think about humans. Your blog post can be optimized to death but if it doesn’t have what it takes for a human to consider worthy, you are completely missing the mark.

Please feel to contribute mistake you have discovered when optimizing your blog for search traffic. Let me know if you have questions.

Did You Know 2.0 and 4.0

Posted on 15. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

Did you know 2.0 and 4.0 are two excellent videos that summarize the social media and other technological advancements in the past few years and give us hints as to what we can expect in future. I suggest you watch 2.0 first and then 4.0.

Did you know 2.0 was created in June 2007 by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod.

Did You Know 4.0 was created recently

WordPress.com to Self Hosted WordPress Blog in 5 Easy Steps

Posted on 14. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

Few days ago I helped Shari transfer her WordPress.com blog to a self hosted WordPress blog. This task might sound daunting but its really not and Shari is my witness. What is the difference? To avoid confusion I would like to mention here that there are two types of WordPress blogs, one is when you go to WordPress.com and sign up to get a blog address something like yourblog.wordpress.com and self hosted is when you go to WordPress.org, download the software and upload it on to your own server.

Main Difference
WordPress.com is hosted blog service. You do not have to download software, pay for hosting or manage a web server.

WordPress.org is a website where you download the WordPress Blogging Software. You need a domain and a web server to make it functional.

There are number of other blogs that have talked about Advantages and Disadvantages of both the platforms and I am not going to talk about it again*

I will tell you step by step how to convert your WordPress.com blog into self hosted WordPress blog:

Step 1 – Go to your wordpress.com blog’s admin panel.

Step 2 – On the left sidebar, look for Tools and under Tools you will find Export. Click on it!

Step 3 – Download the export file and save it on to your computer.

Step 4 – Go to your new blog’s admin panel, look for Tools in the sidebar and this time click Import.

Step 5 – Look for wordpress at the bottom, browse for the file you just downloaded from your old blog and import.

Step 6 – You are done !

Let me point out one more thing, it’s better to leave the images on your old blog because it might give you an error if you try to import everything. Don’t worry, images on your new blog will still work.

* 15 Benefits and Limitations of WordPress.com Blogs, Blogger.com, WordPress.com or WordPress.org – Which One Should I Choose?,

Is Twitter Really Following the Money?

Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

Social media powerhouse, Twitter, an immensely popular microblogging website has decided that it’s about time they make money. It has been widely criticized throughout its recent growth for not monetizing even though it has 44.5 million monthly visitors.

Yesterday, September 10, there was a change in Twitter’s Terms and following was added:

“services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the content or information on the services, queries made through the services, or other information….. In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the services, you agree that Twitter and its third-party providers and partners may place such advertising on the services.”

This change in Terms is a sigh of relief for Twitter investors but for most Twitter addicts like myself, I still have doubts whether showing advertisements on Twitter pages is a viable option. Most people use TweetDeck (dekstop) and HootSuite (web) to access their Twitter accounts because of added functionality and ease of use. I personally go to Twitter only to see who is following me and if I would be interested in following that person.

The way I see it, the only viable option for Twitter is to charge the most popular users. Let’s take a look how this can work out.

Twitter user A signs up. Twitter user A is very interesting and within few months has few hundred followers. As soon as Twitter user A tweets, there is a buzz, there are clicks to to the links posted etc. Seems to me like Twitter user A is benefiting and likes the response.

How about charging this Twitter user with a monthly fee? Keep it low, have a threshold and provide better tools to monitor and analyze Twitter traffic and anyone will pay a small fee. Oprah will gladly pay monthly subscription of $9.99 or even $19.99 for her 2 Million plus followers. As a matter of fact, Oprah should pay that amount of money every month just to have a verified account.

There are number of very influential people on Twitter who are only famous today because of Twitter, Oprah is not in that bunch. They would gladly pay a small amount of money to keep up with the increase in their popularity and to gain access to special Twitter features, wouldn’t they?

iPhone OS 3.1 Software Update Released

Posted on 10. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

Along with iTunes 9.0, Apple came out with iPhone OS 3.1 software update. Below are the new features:

• Genius recommendations for Applications
• iTunes 9 support
– Genius Mixes
– Organize your apps directly in iTunes
– Improved syncing options for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts and photos
– iTunes U content organization
• Redeem iTunes Gift cards, codes and certificates in the App Store
• Display available iTunes account credits in the App Store and iTunes Store
• Browse and download ringtones wirelessly from the iTunes Store
• Save video from Mail and MMS into Camera Roll
• Option to “Save as new clip” when trimming a video on iPhone 3GS
• Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on
• Remotely lock iPhone with a passcode via MobileMe
• Use Voice Control on iPhone 3GS with Bluetooth headsets
• Paste phone numbers into the Keypad
• Option to use Home button to turn on Accessibility features on iPhone 3GS
• Warn when visiting fraudulent websites in Safari (anti-phishing)
• Improved Exchange calendar syncing and invitation handling
• Fixes issue that caused some app icons to display incorrectly

OS 3.1 update is available for the following iPhones:
• iPhone
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guide for your iPhone.

This update is very unnecessary and doesn’t do much. Of course I upgraded, how would I talk about it otherwise but now I think if I didn’t blog, would I upgrade?