It’s been a hot debate for a really, really long time now, does image alt text count for SEO in web pages? I’ve probably seen this argued as many times as whether or not the meta keywords tag really matters for search indexing and SEO. After some research and trial and error over the years, I have to say that it does, but only for long tail keywords. If you’re targeting some broad search terms like “ipod nano” – sorry, the image alt text isn’t really going to help you against the stiff competition. However, if you’re targeting long tail keywords like “fix broken ipod nano” then alt text in images can really help you!

You see, broad terms are usually one or two words that get tens of thousands (or more) searches per day. Long tail keywords are 3+ works that are very targeted and usually get 5,000 or less searches per day. If you add your keywords into the alt text of an image on a page you’re trying to get ranked, I’m pretty certain that in most case it will boost you up there in the SERPs. Read my other post about it Image Alt Text: SEO or No SEO?, and I think you’ll agree.

Are you using keyword laden alt text on your sites now?

I just saw that the SEO Ultimate Wordpress Plugin was released as a submission entry in the 2009 Wordpress Plugin Competition. Personally, I’ve used wpSEO for years now, which I wrote about on this blog, but many use kind of the de-facto standard for SEO in Wordpress, All in One SEO Pack. Many have switched to Platinum SEO Pack because of it’s auto-handling of 301 Permanent Redirects and permalinks breaks.

The exciting thing about SEO Ultimate isn’t really what the plugin contains today, but what it plans to do in the very near future. It has some of the basic features that All in One SEO has, and it even (currently) does 404 Notification. But in the future you’ll have to ability to do robots.txt editing, 301 logging, and XHTML validation checks.

Check out SEO Ultimate, it may be the new Wordpress plugin to watch!

I think that too many people forget how good internal inks are for SEO. If you want to increase your rankings in the search engines start linking your own posts on your blog! It will increase your listings in the Serps, but it will also be better for your blog because you will be highlighting and bringing up your old posts all the time.

When you write on a topic – link your previous posts about similar topics. In fact, think about installing a plugin like Aizatto’s Related Posts. You can create specific pages rounding up posts into a “series”. You can feature certain posts on your home page. All these are great ways to build internal links. There’s even a plugin called RB Internal Links that helps you browse for and find previous posts to link to using Wordpress short codes.

Build internal links and watch your search rankings increase!

Hopefully my “SEO Tips for Blog Titles” will help you to bring more organic traffic to your blog from search engines. Over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at writing blog titles, meaning titles for blog posts, blog pages, blog categories and tags, and so on. I’ll give you some tips that are easy to use and remember – and you should be getting more traffic to your blog or web site in no time! The thing to remember is that this is kinda like a recipe, and you have to use all the ingredients in order for it to be effective.

Write good linkbait

It’s probably more important that you write effective titles than the actual page or blog post itself because the title is what gets people there in the first place. This is more marketing than it is SEO, but you need to write a title that makes people curious so they actually “want” to click it. On the Internet, and in Internet marketing we call this “linkbait”, because it’s like you’re setting a trap to get as many people to click as possible. Basically it’s just hype and learning to write a good catch phrase, but you have to combine that with the other tips I’m going to write about next.

Don’t go Nuts on Title Length

Keep your titles to less than 75 characters and try to use as few words as possible while keeping it to the point.

Bad Title Examples:
I think my new ipod touch really sucks and I hate it like the plague!
There are many ways to eat healthy without cutting out the things you love to eat.

Good Title Examples
iPod Touch Review or iPod Touch
Healthy Eating Alternatives or Eating Healthy Without Sacrifice

Theh point here is to use your title to synopsize what the post is about in few words, don’t write your titles like real everyday language. Don’t ramble on, don’t use words that people aren’t going to use in search anway – which brings us to our next seo tip…

Use just a few really effective keywords

Do a little keyword research and find out what people are searching most for in relation to your post. Use this Keyword Research Cheatsheet to get started. You might find that “iPod Touch Review” gets 1,500 searches per month for “iPod Touch sucks” gets only 500. A little research goes a long way and might get you more traffic in the long run (making you more money). Don’t go hog wild combining keywords either because you will reduce their effeciveness. For example, use the iPod Touch Review phrase by itself, don’t say something like “iPod Touch Review – It Sucks”, it won’t work as well.

Repeat Keywords Sparingly

Use keywords that you will repeat just a few times at the beginning of and in your post or page content. Don’t go hog wild thinking that if you repeat them a thousand times it will help – it won’t. It will just piss off google and your page won’t rank well. When you repeat the keywords in your title in the first paragraph of your content, and possibly one (at most two) more times it’s the most effective.

Link internally AND externally with keywords from titles

In the last tip I showed you how to make title keywords more effective by re-using them once or twice in your blog content as “reinforcement”. Your blog titles will become even more effective when you reuse the keywords in links that point to the page. The search engines love it when the page title and the links that point to it are the same.

You can do this two ways:

Internal Linking:
Internal linking is when you link your own pages within your blog. Do you do this? You should! Like if I said check out my previous post about blog optimization tips – that’s an internal link. This not only gets people to read previous posts and keeps them on your site, google counts both internal and external links – and it should be a regular part of your link building strategy.

External Linking:

This is the type of link building most people know, where other sites link to your pages and posts. Naturally over time other web sites and blogs will link to you and usually the text they use will be slightly different. If your site is “Bob’s Used Auto Parts”, many people would link with that text. However, you probably want to come up for searches for “used auto parts”, and you should work on getting links with that phrase as well. This is a fine line, because google will reward you for multiple links with the same keyword phrase, but the last thing they want to see is 50 brand new external links in a week that all say “used auto parts”. Google would rather these links acquire naturally over time, and it would look more natural if most of them had text of “used auto parts”, but there were a dozen or more different variations of it. You have to be careful when building your own external links, that they look a bit more like you acquired them naturally over time from different sources.

Summing up SEO Tips for Blog Titles

It’s important that you use the tips combined as recipe for better blog and web page titles. If you use only one or two – they won’t be as effective. That’s why the last two tips I gave you weren’t specifically for blog titles, but tips that helped you make them even more effective in bringing you quality traffic!

Targeting keywords for better SERP rankings is a really good strategy for building incremental and additional traffic in your blog.

I’m going to give you an example scenario of how to rank well for a completely new set of keywords, meaning your blog URL, title, description, and keywords you’re using now are something different. For instance – let’s say your domain name is “cookinghealthy dot com”, but you want to start coming up for the phrase “free recipes”. You found that keyword phrase gets 20,000 searches a month and you want to grab some of that exposure (without diluting the SERP’s you already position well on).

It’s very important that you understand what you are doing here, and why you are doing it. If you have a brand new blog (under 100 posts) – continue to hammer away at your main keywords used in your home page title, description, and domain name until you get good search results for it. Then, slowly develop a list of additional keyword phrases to work on over time. The theory of “not putting all your eggs in one basket” is why it’s best to do this. Just like having multiple blogs and multiple monetization streams, multiple keyword phrases (for one blog) generating traffic will make sure that your always getting traffic, and over time these keyword phrases are like sowing seeds in a garden. With care, some will grow beyond your wildest imagination.

So, in this scenario I want to come up as high as possible for “free recipes”, but the competition is pretty stiff. I would come up with a game plan to change that, and this is what I would do:

10 Step Keyword Ranking Process

1. Write a recipe post and make the title “Free Recipes: Recipe-Name-Here”
2. In the first 15-20 words of the post say something like “My collection of <b>free recipes</b>: Recipe-Name-Here is so delicious you’ll want to make it again and again” (use different description phrase each time)
3. Write a post 5 days a week for a month using the same “Free Recipes: Recipe-Name-Here” title and intro sentence strategy
4. After the first post create a Wordpress “page” simply titled “Free Recipes” with 1-2 paragraphs of original content (100-200 words), and create a linked list of the recipes posts – adding them as you go
5. Add a “related posts” block to the bottom of posts, so all the free recipe posts show other ones
6. In other posts (that aren’t about free recipes), add a sentence somewhere in there like “I’ve been addiing a lot of <b>free recipes</b> to the site lately (and link the full URL to your free recipes page like cooking healthy dot com slash free recipes
7. Comment on other food blogs, and use “Free Recipes” as your name and the URL to the free recipes page on your blog as the link
8. Comment in lots of forums, and use “Free Recipes” as the text and the URL to your free recipes page
9. Submit every single recipe you wrote (with the first paragraph of text change a bit) to an article directory and use “Free Recipes” as the text and the URL to your free recipes page as the signature / byline / footer, etc.
10. Post additional free recipes at least 1-2 times per month for 6-12 months for outstanding results!

The 10 step process I outlined is nothing more than basic SEO and linkbuilding. Notice in the intro sentence of the blog I put the keyword phrase in bold tags. This is an old SEO trick (that may not work as well anymore). You could use this process with any web site or blog, but my version assumes a few things.

Assumptions:

* You’re using blogging software, such as Wordpress, Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, Geeklog, Xoops, etc.
* You have an SEO plugin installed that automatically uses the first xx words in a post as your meta description (like All in one SEO pack)
* You’re using a “related posts” plugin
* You know how to do linkbuilding
* You know how to do article marketing

Ranking well for keywords is like cooking a good pot of soup. The individual ingredients aren’t nearly as good until you put them all together. And over time the longer you let them cook in the pot – the better the blend together and taste! Also, as I mentioned earlier – doing this with a domain that has at least 100 posts and good indexing (and some kind of pagerank) will yield the best results.

John Pratt writes how-to articles and tutorials for bloggers striving to build monthly income online. Read his blog: JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes

Thanks to Smashing Magazine, today I learned of the Wordpress or WP SEO plugin that can and will replace just about every other SEO plugin you may already have installed. I can tell you, since I installed it – I have deleted both “Optimal Title” and “HEAD Meta Description” wordpress plugins, as well as ““. As mentioned in the Smashing Magazine post – I think that this plugin is still relatively unknown to most people, I first heard about it today. Let me point out the reasons that this WP SEO plugin is so valuable:

Not only does this plugin give the most fine grained SEO control for Wordpress I’ve ever seen – but it had one feature that I didn’t even know existed. There is one option to “Add meta name=’robots’ content=’noodp’ to sourcecode”. I had never seen this robots “noodp” tag before, so I googled it and came up with this page on How do I change my site’s title and description. Basically in a nutshell, the googlebot (when it indexes your pages) uses an automated algorithm to create the title and descriptions that will be seen by web surfers doing searches and getting the search engine result pages (SERP’s). The googlebot takes into account the content of a page and references to it on the web. To prevent search engines from automatically doing this – and force them to use your html title and description tags, you need to use the robots noodp tag in your pages (which this WP plugin will automatically do).

Now that I’ve enabled this plugin and setup the options I wanted, the next time the googlebot comes around to this site – it should dramatically change the way Search Optimization School web pages are indexed, and hopefully we get some much better rankings for quite a few. If you have comments about this plugin, or ways that you’ve dramatically enhanced your SEO in Wordpress – leave them now below!