SEO process blogs for beginners / newbies

I recently had a problem with my wordpress permalink.
My blogs wouldn’t show up. On my home page, all my blogs appeared (10 posts per page), with all the links on the side menu etc. But as soon as I clicked on any link on my home page, or any blog heading to see that blog on a page by itself, the page was completely BLANK. NOTHING appeared. I viewed the page source and nothing. It’s like the page didn’t exist at all.

I didn’t understand why this was happening, because I posted my latest blog last week, and my blog rss feed URL and all my other blogs were showing up when I clicked the heading.

Luckily, I got help from the Wordpress support forum. I was really pleased. Basically what I did was reset my Wordpress permalink structure to default. I checked the page  and the blogs were showing up again. I put back my custom permalink structure just to make sure all wasn’t lost and this time, everything was still fine.

Wew! Obviously this could have really screwed up my SEO efforts. Let’s say someone bookmarked one (or many) of my blogs or some blogs had been indexed by the search engines. I would have been screwed if my custom  permalink structure didn’t work because that would have meant that the URL didn’t exist anymore. Someone goes to the link of one of my blogs and sees blank.

I changed the post slug in WP for some recent posts so the post URL will appear similar to the name of the blog post, for instance:

a. http://www.seomommy.com/blog/hello-world to http://www.seomommy.com/blog/more-keyword-targete-text

I want to track how long it will take Google to index the new URL for the same posts.

I started keyword research for one of the porn sites that I’m working on using the Keyword Discovery tool. It’s been helpful so far, but there is room to improve my keyword research skills though.

I was reading about SEO for PHP sites since most of the sites we work with are dynamic websites. Just can’t get away from those. But dynamic websites are a musss-have nowadays, since data needs to be supplied immediately, and this way it’s easier to update information. Dynamic websites can cause problems too, like duplicate content issues. For instance, a page can sometimes be accessed using entirely different URLs. The dynamic URLs should be rewritten into search engine friendly static URLs. You’ll notice my blog entry URLs are keyword-rich rewritten. This feature comes with Wordpress. The URL is created with the title of the blog

Also on my list- SEO for images. Imagine a website that’s made up 90% of sliced images. This gives little room for text content. Ways to optimize images for search engine spiders include:

• adding image alt attributes
• making sure the meta descriptions, page titles, and internal and external anchor text are optimized
• focus on uncompetitive keyword phrases
• focus on long tail keyword phrases
• naming images with keywords (where it makes sense, and not overdoing it-of course)
• adding image title attributes (I read somewhere that this has become less important, thought)

As always said, keywords should be placed where they make sense. And image alt attributes should be descriptive of the images. More and more I’m getting the hang of this SEO thing. I’ve read the same things over and over and over. So now it’s time to do! Soon I’ll no longer be just a beginner.

Technorati Tags: Keyword Research, SEO, PHP, image optimization, duplicate content, dynamic URLs