We all know how important SEO is if you want to be noticed by the major search engines. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you will also know that I am the perpetual lazy blogger, one who enjoys blogging but unfortunately I find SEO to be a real drag and so I look for ways to optimize my SEO without doing all the hard work.

Enter the Platinum SEO plugin which really does a brilliant SEO job on almost any blog. I reckon a lot of you probably already use this plugin but I wonder how many of you use it to it’s full extent. Did you know that you could optimize your category pages? I didn’t, and I’m not going to tell you how it’s done either because the author has done a brilliant job of how you can add meta description and meta keywords tag to the head section of your category pages.

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The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

I know there are a lot of blogs out there and I also know it would be a false assumption to think that all those blogs exist purely so they can earn money. This is something that many A Listers assume and the main reason behind this false assumption is because they see so many blogs with ads on them.

Kristi, who amongst other things is famous for her Fetching Friday series, left a couple of comments in my last post, a post that put forward scientific proof as to why some A Listers are Assholes, saying she thought it funny how many people equated success by the amount of money they earn. She then goes on to say, in regards to her blog;

It couldn’t be because I simply enjoy blogging, or I find my success in getting more tweets / comments. :)

Exactly, and as long as those people are visiting our blogs why not have adsense and other revenue earning adds on our blogs, even if they’re only there to cover the hosting and domain name costs.

Now this post isn’t about having a go at the A Listers, it’s about showing others how they can get more people to their blog so that, like Kristi and others, myself included, they can have the satisfaction of getting those extra tweets and comments.

When commenting on other blogs I don’t bother at all checking to see if they are do-follow or not, what I do look for are those using the commentluv plugin. This plugin, used by many bloggers to reward their commentators, is special in that it parses your last post, and if you’re a member you can choose from your last ten posts, so if you’re not a member now would be a good time to join, just click the Register/Edit your blog URL.

What this means is the plugin fetches the title of your last post and if you have an interesting blog title the chances of someone clicking on that is vastly improved, much more than from the link left in your name/url part of the comment form. As it’s explained in my post Getting The Most Out Of Commentluv, you can also use commentluv to double your exposure with each comment you leave. This is really useful if you want to link to another of your blogs or to a particular post of your choice.

Another plugin that is used to reward commentators is the keywordluv plugin by Stephen Cronin. This plugin is especially useful if installed on a do-follow blog. These blogs allow you to use keywords in the name field so instead of just using your name you can now leave a name and keywords of your choice. Don’t abuse the system by using a keyword instead of your name because most bloggers will just delete your comment, I know I do.

I usually don’t use the keyword function when commenting on these blogs mainly because I don’t bother with keywords, but I reckon I will start having some fun with it

Rather than using this section for the search engine benefit you could add something that will pique the readers interest so that combined with your ‘killer’ title how could they not visit your blog? Naturally once they’re on your blog you want to make sure that your content is good enough for them to leave a comment.

So, in summary, while installing commentluv and keyword luv on your blog will increase your comments, utilizing other blogs that also use these plugins will increase your traffic thereby increasing your potential for comments, not to mention the occasional click on your ads.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010

The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

First let me say that this technique will only work if you are using Andy Bailey’s commentluv plugin. If you are not using this plugin, you really should as I believe it will increase the amounts of comments you receive on a blog and it’s one of the best ways to reward your commentators. I’ll let Andy himself explain exactly how it works;

The CommentLuv WordPress Plugin will visit the feed of the comment author and attempt to scrape the last post they made and display it under their comment, this way you can encourage people to join in the discussion of your posts and give something back straight away.

The plugin looks for a feed at the site given in the URL field of the comment-form, if you have an auto find feed then it should find it.

The plugin retrieves your last post at the time of the comment being entered and appends the extra text just before the comment gets saved to the database, this way it doesn’t put any extra load on the database or server other than the effort required add another 60 or so characters to the comment content.

When commenting, the only time you get any real SEO benefit is when you comment on a dofollow blog as these comments can be ‘seen’ by the search engines. Blogs that have the commnetluv plugin also display your last post thereby rewarding your commenter. To pick up your last post it needs you to fill out the url to your blog in the comment box. This is gives you two links, one to your blog, and one to your post.

The thing is that I really wanted to promote my new Top Software Online store but using this link in the url meant that I would lose the link to a post, until I happened upon the following method.

• First you type in the url of your blog as you would normally do
• Then you write your best comment, not only because you don’t want to spam the blog you are commenting on, but because a good comment is more likely to lead to people visiting your link.
• Lastly, before you press the submit button you paste in the new link to the second url you want to promote substituting the original url that you had typed in. This could be a link to another post or another blog / site entirely.

That’s it, you now have a comment that is doubling your presence on the Net.

When people first start up a WordPress blog they usually go for the default settings as this is by far the easier option. Unfortunately in certain cases it is the worst thing that you can do. This is especially so when configuring your permalink settings. I had completely forgotten about this until I read some of the comments on Understanding The New Rules Of SEO.

The problem arises in the fact that the default setting is http://wassupblog.com/?p=123 which shows the search engines that you have posted post # whatever but not much else. It makes more SEO sense to present to the search engines a lot more information such as the title of the post. While you can change the value midstream this can have disastrous results because all your pages that were previously indexed by the search engines become invalid. Not only that, if you are in the habit of linking to pages within your own blog, a good habit I might add, these also become invalid which would mean you going through all your posts and fixing up the links manually. A very boring and time consuming task, as can be attested by some of the commentators on the above post that I mentioned.

There is an easier solution, a plugin by Dean Lee called Permalinks Migration Plugin.  As the author states;

There is a way to tell the search engines (and browsers) that the page has permanently moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one . It’s called a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect.When you do this, Search engines will update their indexes quickly and you won’t lose your pagerank.you will continue to receive traffic as though nothing had changed. This works for search engines, bookmarks, and links from other sites.

So, if you are having permalink problems or changing your permalink structure I  think you will find this plugin very useful.

There are many reasons for linking to posts within your own blog, the very least being that it may have some SEO advantages. Three that come to mind include;

1. It can tie in other posts that may be relevant to the one you are writing at the moment.
2. Resurrecting old posts so that it brings peoples attention back to those posts.
3. Keeps readers on your blog longer if they choose to follow your links

One blogger that does this well is Mitch and his post Top Three Do’s and Don’ts is a good example of how this is done. Take note that he also links to other blogs which some bloggers of note say is critical to blog growth.

The thing is that all this takes time and many bloggers will not take the time necessary to link between their own posts. Yep, I reckon I am one of them, which is why I was pretty happy to come across YARRP, Yet Another Relatated Posts Plugin. Once installed and configured this plugin will find other posts within your blog and place ‘Related Posts’ links at the end of your posts, a great way of introducing related articles to the readers of a blog.

EDIT: According to s couple of my blogging mates, Stratos, author of Blogger Buddy, and Donace, Of Nexus, YARRP is a little CPU hungry and I’ve learned in a previous post how using too much CPU can be detrimental to your WordPress Blog. Now I’ve learned before that on occasion, this being one of them, it pays to listen to your friends and so I’ve installed Microkid’s Related Posts plugin istead. I reckon even Mitch will like this plugin as it gives you complete control of which related posts you want to include. Like the author says;

This plugin makes it super easy to manually select related posts. You can search and select posts that fit your criteria, all from within the write/edit post screen.

So, thanks for the tip guys, I like this plugin a whole lot better, and sometime this century I will go over my old posts to find Related Posts but at least I will use it for all my new posts.