“I have heard it is not good to include the same phrase too many times for the keywords – for example, if i was doing ringtones, it would be bad to have too many `artist ringtones` keywords. What is the WPC perspective on this or the best practice here?”

ANSWER:

That is generally correct.

Finding the Sweetspot!

On page SEO is about finding the sweet spot by carefully distributing weight between your primary keywords throughout a web page. Once you find that sweet spot, you’ve reached the peak as far as on page optimization goes.

I say ‘sweet spot’ because too little or too much is what its all about. Using the exact phrase, ‘artist ringtones’ too many times is a no-go. Using it too few times is just as bad.

Basic Keys to Onpage SEO

The keys as I have found them are:

1. The longer the tail on your keywords, the fewer times you should use it in your page. (Ie., ‘ringtones’, feel free to use it 10 times out of 1000 keywords. ‘artist ringtones’, maybe just 2-3 times. ‘download artist ringtones free online’, just once, twice max.

2. Having the keyword in the domain, Title, Meta Keywords and Meta Description and H1-H6 tags has so much weight to it that you would NOT probably want to put a long tail keyword in ALL of those places. One or two is enough. If its a more primary, root keyword, yes, place them throughout all of the above.

3. If you have placed a keyword in one of the primary places on your page (as seen above), place it at least once in the main text of the page, again using the basic rules above to help gauge your sweet spot.

4. It wouldn’t hurt to also have your keyword(s) in one or two other more obscure places like as an image name, image title, link alt, etc.

I’ve been able to achieve #1 rankings for hundreds of top terms using the above basic principles in my on page SEO efforts.

Offpage SEO

But, in the more recent years, off page is a MUCH greater factor and this is where you need to focus the bulk of your effort. Let WordPress Cloaker and the auto-content plugins do most of the work, pick your feeds and content wisely, take advantage of the WP Spinner functions to include additional keywords and/or keyword links (a great way to interlink blogs in throughout your own network of blogs over time).

Getting Backlinks

Then, submit those sites through onlywire and use every possible means to automate the building of backlinks to your blogs to increase your ranking power over time.

We have an automatic way to increase backlinks coming out soon that I’ll talk more about later… for now, lets focus on the WordPress Onlywire plugin as a temporary working solution.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://bblog.com/ping.php

The reason this short list is better than the long lists you can find out there is that this list is compiled of just a handful of multiple ping services that cover most of the important ping services out there but in a short list.

This is also a better list because most of the long lists inadvertently lead you to double ping the same ping sites multiple times and can get you banned from those sites.

For example, if you ping ping-o-matic AND feedburnder at the same time, you end up pinging feedburner TWICE!

Not good.

Feedburner could ban your IP/domain for overdoing it.

But, if you use the common “ultimate” or “all inclusive” lists you may find on the web and ping those, you may end up pinging Feedburnder 5 or 10 times. Woooah!! Definitely not good.

This is why many people have found pinging less effective in the past couple years. Mainly because so many people have been doing it WRONG.

Try the above list.

To use it in WordPress, simply go to:

‘Admin Panel > Settings > Writing > Update Services’

…and, enter the above ping services.

‘Save’

You’re done!

And, Congratulations, you NOW have the ULTIMATE ping list setup for your WordPress blog!

The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPress plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help.

Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell me more about it in the comments.

All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools.  While the name only mentions Google this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images – Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link – The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it.  SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier.  You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand.  SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs.  Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this.  Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

[Courtesy of Mashable.com]