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SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin Review

If you have been blogging and using WordPress for even a few weeks, you would have heard of the All In One SEO plugin used to optimize blog posts. It is a great plugin, and is very widely used. However, it is also quite old.

Shouldn’t you be looking for fresh alternatives if you have just been blindly using some of the older WordPress SEO plugins like All In Once SEO or HeadSpace?

(Image by Danard Vincente)

Well, now you have a reason to – there is a new SEO plugin available that can be used for search engine optimization of your blog posts, and a lot more!

SEO Ultimate – The ultimate plugin for SEO that does a lot more

Yes, that’s true. The SEO Ultimate plugin obviously does a lot when it comes to SEO (including everything that the All In One SEO plugin does). But it goes further and does a lot many other useful things as well.

SEO Ultimate – List of Modules

• 

  SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin - List of Modules and Functionality

  404 Monitor

• Canonicalizer
• Code inserter
• Competition researcher
• Deeplink jaggernaut
• File editor
• Internal relevance researcher
• Link mask generator
• Linkbox inserter
• Meta description editor
• Meta keywords editor
• Meta robot tags editor
• More link customizer
• Nofollow manager
• Permalink tweaker
• Rich snippet creator
• Sharing facilitator
• Slug optimizer
• Title tag rewriter
• Webmaster verification assistant
• Whitepapers

Now that’s a long list, eh? The best part is – you can enable or disable each functionality individually! So you have full control over what you are entrusting the plugin with!

Now let’s dive in and look at the functionality of each of these modules.

Core Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Modules

Title Tag Rewriter

You can customize and format the title of any post, page or homepage using this module.  It also puts your title at the beginning of the title tag, which is good for SEO.

Meta Description Editor

You can edit the meta description tag of any post, page or the homepage. This is what’s usually shown in the search engine results below your link, so tweaking this gives you an opportunity to influence the searchers and increase the click through rate.

Meta Keywords Editor

You can edit the meta keywords tag of any post, page or the homepage. There is also a facility to generate meta keywords using the category, tags, frequently used words in the post, etc.

You can also specify global keywords that apply to all webpages of your blog. You can also edit or update keywords for multiple posts using the mass editor.

Meta Robot Tags Editor

You can easily add no-index attribute ( <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />) to archives, login page, search results page etc. This is very useful in order to avoid duplicate content penalties, especially if you have set your theme to show full blog posts in the archives pages.

You can also set the meta robot tags for individual posts, pages, categories, tags, etc.

Deeplink Jaggernaut

This is an excellent tool to interlink your blog posts based on keywords.

You specify the keywords you want to target and the destination URL of the blog post you want to rank higher in search engine listings, and SEO Ultimate searches your blog’s content to create links to that post with your keyword as the anchor text.

The best part is that within WordPress, these auto generated links point to the actual post or page and not the URL. Therefore, even if you change the URL or slug of a post or page, the link would remain valid.

You can also specify the maximum number of links generated for a keyword and the maximum number of links generated on a post / page.

You can also exclude specific posts and pages from this autolinking functionality – no autolinks would be generated on these posts or pages. You can also force the module to link only to other posts in the sae category!

One cool feature of this module is that you can create links to draft posts as well. These links would not be active when the post is in draft state – they would get auto-enabled as soon as the post is published!

Slug Optimizer

This module removes small, filler words (like of, the, or, and, with, etc.) from a post or page’s URL. This way, your keywords get more weightage in the URL.

You have full control over the words that are removed from the URL.

More Link Customizer

You can replace the default “read more” anchor text with the title of your post / page, which means the anchor text would now be keyword rich. You can also make this text bold if you like.

Permalink Tweaker

This module helps you remove the category base and tag base which is the default for WordPress. As a result, the permalinks for your categories and tags would look like http://www.abc.com/category or http://www.abc.com/tag instead of http://www.abc.com/category/caegory or http://www.abc.com/tag/tag.

Keyword Research and Analysis Modules

Competition Researcher

This module gives you access to search engine data and tools using which you can analyze multiple keywords or URLs. You can:

• Check the number of webpages competing for a keyword
• Analyze keyword relevance in their titles, anchor text, URLs or body content
• Check the number of webpages present in Google’s index from a competitor’s blog / website
• Analyze a blog’s incoming & outgoing link profile

Internal Relevance Researcher

Using this module, you can find out which of your posts and pages that rank well in Google for your keywords. You can use this data to optimize your link building efforts.

Other Modules

404 Monitor

Using this module, you can see which of your URLs are giving 404 errors. Then, you can wither update the URLs or use a redirection plugin to point visitors / search engines to the correct URL.

Linkbox Inserter

This module of SEO Ultimate inserts a textbox at the bottom of your posts and pages that contains auto-generated link HTML. Your readers can use this to link to your post / page.

File Editor

This module lets you edit the .htaccess and robots.txt files from within WordPress.

Code Inserter

This module of SEO Ultimate helps you insert customer HTML or JavaScript code into the head, body, header or footer sections of your blog. You can use it to add Google Analytics script or any other scripts.

The advantage of using this module is that you no more need to use your theme to add the code – so even if you change the theme, you don’t have to worry about these codes!

Rich Snippet Creator

You can add snippet code to your posts using this module and make them more appealing to your readers.

Sharing Facilitator

This module of SEO Ultimate provides social bookmarking functionality to your readers. You can choose either an “Add This” or a “Share This” button so that your visitors can share your content on social networking sites.

Webmaster Verification Assistant

This module helps you put the Googl Webmaster Tools verification code in your blog.

Link Mask Generator

This module of the SEO Ultimate plugin creates masks for the external links on your blog, so that the external URLs look like http://www.abc.com/recommmends/seo_ultimate instead of http://www.seoultimate.com/benefits/listing.html.

This is definitely great for affiliate marketers who want to hide their tracking links, but is also good for regular bloggers since it makes the links pretty.

You have full control over which links are masked, and you can also change the base directory to anything like go, suggests, etc. (Example: http://www.abc.com/go/seo_ultimate or http://www.abc.com/suggests/seo_ultimate)

Other Features

Here are the other noteworthy features of the SEO Ultimate plugin.

Import from All In One SEO plugin

If you are already using the All In One SEO plugin, you can import the post meta data (title, description and keywords) from it. This way, you can avoid a lot of manual work if you want to switch to the SEO Ultimate plugin. You can also retain the data in the All In One SEO plugin so that you can go back to it if you don’t like the SEO Ultimate plugin (which is quite unlikely!).

Extensive help

The plugin provides extensive help which is context sensitive – you can find help on the relevant pages within the admin of your blog through WordPress’ help menu itself.

Notices

The plugin provides notices if any of your settings are blocking search engine spiders. It also displays notices if there is a conflicting plugin (like the All In One SEO plugin) active.

Uninstalling the SEO Ultimate plugin

SEO Ultimate plugin includes an uninstaller which can gracefully remove the plugin from your blog without leaving any data behind.

How to get the SEO Ultimate plugin

Now that you know the features of the SEO Ultimate plugin, I am sure you want to take it to a test drive!

SEO Ultimate is a completely free plugin approved by WordPress.org. You can download it from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-ultimate/

What are you waiting for? Go get the SEO Ultimate WordPress plugin now!

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SEMRush - SEO Keyword Research & Analysis Tool

Ever wanted to know what your keywords are, and the other websites / blogs competing for them? Want to know your competitor’s main keywords? Want to know the main Google AdWords keywords for a blog? Want to know the search engine and AdWords traffic to a site?

SEMRush is the tool for you – its free, and it does all of the above!  Here are all the things you can do with SEMRush in detail.

What keywords your competitors use

When you pout a domain name in the search box and hit search, you would get the keywords for which the domain gets traffic from Google, their positions, number of queries per month and more.

The results can be sorted by keyword’s position, percentage of traffic and estimated cost of targeted visitors coming to this site from Google search results. You can also export this data and analyze it offline.

To know what keywords that blog or website buys in Google AdWords, just go to the report “AdWords Keywords” where you will be able to view all the keywords from that site’s AdWords Campaign. You can sort and export this data as well.

[sniplet SEMRush_Banner]

Collect list of best keywords to optimize for your site

When you generate the report for your domain (as explained above), go to the “Google Organic Keywords” report and export it to a file. Open this file in Excel (or another spreadsheet program), and sort it by position in reverse order. You will get the list of keywords for which your blog already has enough high positions in Google SERP.

You can take this list and further optimize your blog posts for these keywords, drawing even more search engine traffic. It’s the easiest way to collect long-tail keywords for your blog.

Obtain related keywords

This can be used to get appropriate keywords for your blog. This is most useful when you are doing the initial keyword research for your blog, but can also be used while researching individual blog posts.

Begin with the main keyword, and generate the report for it. You can know how much a click costs for this keyword in AdWords, the average number of searches for it, and the competition of advertisers in AdWords for that term. The trends column shows changes in volume of searches for this keyword.

If you want to get more phrases that include your main keyword, go to the “Full Search” report. You can also export those results and sort & analyze them in Excel. You get details like the average number of queries per month, CPC and the number of search results in Google SERP. This is how you can find all queries with your min keyword in them.

For getting related keywords, open the “Related keywords” report where you can get queries similar to your main keyword. You can export this report as well.

Obtain common keywords for your domain and your competitors’

When you get the main report for your domain, go to “Competitors in Google” or “Competitors in AdWords” reports to get the list of your competitors in Google SERP or Google AdWords respectively. Then click on the numbers in “Common keywords” column and look at the reports “Competing organic keywords” or “Competing AdWords keywords”. Here, you would get the keywords that are being used by both you and your competitor’s sites!

Use SEMRush now – its FREE!

As you see, there are a lots of tools available at SEMRush. You can also be creative and use the data for innovative purposes!

So start using the SEMRush tool now!

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]]> The ground work for good SEO

Ok, so you have done the groundwork for writing your posts:

• You are writing one post per keyword
• You have the correct keyword density in your post, while making sure that you haven’t stuffed the post with the keyword
• You have used the keyword at all the right places in the post
• You also have the keyword in the title tag of the post

(Please note that when I say “keyword”, it doesn’t necessarily have to be one word. It can be a group of words that you have chosen as your keyword. In fact, it is better to select a group of words as your keyword)

Should you be doing something else before you hit the “publish” button?

Yes! Read on.

Use heading tags, and have keywords in them

HTML has something called the “heading tags” which are used to indicate that a piect of text is a heading.

Search engines pay more attention to the text within these heading tags compared to rest of the blog post text – after all, headings give a summary of the content that follows.

So, use the heading tags liberally in your posts.

There are six levels of headings in HTML – H1 to H6. Here, H1 is the most important (and has the largest font size), and H6 is the smallest (and has the smallest font size).

Usually, the H1 tags are used by your theme for post titles – which is very good for SEO because the post title anyway contains the keywords.

You need to use the other heading tags – H2 through H6 – for your headings and subheadings – and make sure that you have keywords in these headings.

This way, the search engines would pay even more attention to the keywords, helping you in your SEO efforts.

Highlight – Bold, Italics, Underline

Another thing that is often ignored is using different types of text decorations for keywords – like making them bold, italicized or underlining them.

This gives emphasis to the keywords, and makes them more important for the search engine spiders.

Also, it makes your text more readable (user friendly) for the visitors, and they get a better user experience – again, something that modern search engines like Google simply love!

But please ensure that you don’t overdo it – too much bold or italicized text means your text would be difficult to read, and it would result in negative SEO!

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]]> The right keyword density, but that’s not all…

It is important to have the right keyword density, and it is important to not stuff your post with keywords.

Is there anything more to keywords? Do you need to consider anything else?

Well, yes!

Keyword placement

Its not just the number of times a keyword is used in a post – where you put your keywords plays a role in SEO too.

Where you put the keywords in your blog post or webpage is called keyword placement.

Where should the keywords be?

Search engines like Google give a lot of importance to the beginning and the end of any post.

Therefore, you should definitely have the keywords appear in the first and the last paragraph of your blog post. It would be even better if you can have them appear in the first and the last sentence of the post.

This is the most important keyword placement tip for great SEO.

Apart from this, the blog post can have the keywords naturally scattered throughout the post – of course, making sure that the keyword density is right, and that you don’t stuff keywords in the post.

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Market Samurai empowers you to achieve quick, easy, profitable front-page rankings on Google. Market Samurai helps you find keywords that can send hundreds or even thousands of free, organic search engine visitors to your blog every day. Start using Market Samurai and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords. Avail of the free trial now!

]]> Links do the job…

External links and internal links are very important from an SEO point of view.

These links make Google and other search engine spiders visit your blog, and thus, help your blog get indexed.

Apart from this, the links are treated as a vote of confidence from the linking blog or website, and your ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs) gets a boost due to this.

…but make them work harder

Yes, links do the job. But they can do a lot more than that!

Simply having links point to your blog or blog posts is enough in itself. But if you use the most appropriate words in the anchor text of your links, the links would become a lot more valuable!

Search engines like Google not only look at the number of links to your blog, but also at the anchor text of the link. To use our “vote” analogy, it means that Google treats a link as a vote for your blog for the words used in the anchor text.

That is, Google thinks that the linking website or blog finds your blog relevant for the words found in the anchor text. And if the linking site finds your blog relevant, searchers would too, right?

And that’s why Google ranks your blog higher for these terms!

Use keywords in the link’s Anchor Text

What words do you think are the most relevant for your blog? Your keywords!!

And your goal is to make Google and other search engines believe that your blog is the most relevant blog or site for your keywords.

Therefore, make sure that you use your keywords in the anchor text of your links – it is a sure shot way of improving your search engine ranking for your chosen keywords!

Backlinks and Internal Links

Getting your keywords in backlinks from other blogs and websites is more difficult – after all, some other webmaster controls these backlinks, and you might not have the liberty to specify the anchor text!

So, start with using keywords in your blog’s internal links – it is easy, and can be done immediately!

What is “Anchor Text”?

For those who are new to link building, anchor text is the text that you click in a hyperlink.

Thus, “Blog SEO Expert – SEO for Blogs” is the anchor text in the following link:

Blog SEO Expert – SEO for Blogs

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Market Samurai empowers you to achieve quick, easy, profitable front-page rankings on Google. Market Samurai helps you find keywords that can send hundreds or even thousands of free, organic search engine visitors to your blog every day. Start using Market Samurai and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords. Avail of the free trial now!

]]> Background – Keywords in page title tag

It is very important to have your keyword in the “title” tag of your pages. This is one element the search engine spiders pay most attention to in you blog post.

(Read all about this in “Keywords in the title tag – a must for good SEO“)

SEO Title Tag Plugin for WordPress (WP)

By default, WordPress has your post title as the meta title as well.

But most of the times, you would want to have the meta title different from the post title – for example, you may want to include variations of the keyword in the title.

The SEO Title Tag plugin for WP helps you do exactly that. Not just this, it even allows you to change the post slug (the URL of the blog post) so that you can include keywords in it!

Important Features of the “SEO Title Tag” plugin 

• You can define custom titles for:
  • A post
  • A page
  • Categories
  • Tags
  • Any URL that you specify – like an author archive or a date based archive
• You can set custom slugs for:
  • A post
  • A page
• The plugin automatically puts your blog’s name at the end of the title (instead of the beginning), so that the most important keywords are visible first
• You can specify the custom post title in the “New Post” or “Edit Post” admin pages
• You can define custom title for 404 error pages as well
• There is a facility for mass editing of titles and slugs

Screenshots

SEO Title Tag Plugin Screenshot

(Screenshots from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-title-tag/screenshots/ - please check it out for more screenshots)

Conclusion

The SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress can really help boost your SEO efforts – use it!

Relevant Links

SEO Title Tag Plugin Homepage

SEO Title Tag Plugin Page on WordPress.org

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Market Samurai empowers you to achieve quick, easy, profitable front-page rankings on Google. Market Samurai helps you find keywords that can send hundreds or even thousands of free, organic search engine visitors to your blog every day. Start using Market Samurai and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords. Avail of the free trial now!

]]> It is important to have the right proportion of keywords in your post text, but there are many other places where the keywords should be present for a well optimized post.

One such place is the post’s Title meta tag.

What is the “title” meta tag?

A meta tag is an HTML element that is present in the <head> section of your post’s HTML code.

(Although the title tag is not technically a meta tag – like the keywords meta tag and the description meta tag – it is a meta tag for all practical purposes since it appears in the head section along with the meta tags).

A meta tag contains information about a webpage, and as you would have guessed, the title meta tag has the information about the page’s title.

Basically, the title meta tag tells the search engine spiders what the title of the webpage is. This is the hyperlinked text that is displayed in search result pages (SERPs) of search engines like Google.

Difference between title meta tag and post title

Do not mistake the title meta tag with the post’s title – these are two different things (although they can be, and usually are, the same by default).

The title of the post is something that is visible as the post title to readers on your blog. On the other hand, the title meta tag is the text that is displayed in the title bar (the top blue bar of a window) of the browser.

Importance of having keywords in the “title” meta tag

So why is the title meta tag important? Because it is the element of a webpage that search engines pay the most attention to.

Yes, the title tag is the most important element of any webpage in terms of SEO – and therefore, it makes tremendous sense to have your keyword appear in it.

Also, since this is the hyperlinked text displayed to the users in search engine result pages (SERPs), it helps to have the keywords there – after all, it would be more tempting to the searchers to click the link and come to your blog if that link contains the keywords they are searching for.

How to put keywords in the title tag?

In most blogging software, by default, the title of your blog post becomes the title of the webpage as well. So, if you have your keywords in the title of your post, the title tag would automatically have the keywords.

However, there might be times when you would want to keep the post title different from the title tag. There are many tools and plugins available for this – more on it in another post!

(Update: Read a review of a great plugin for customizing title tags – “Review of WordPress (WP) Plugin – SEO Title Tag“)

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Market Samurai empowers you to achieve quick, easy, profitable front-page rankings on Google. Market Samurai helps you find keywords that can send hundreds or even thousands of free, organic search engine visitors to your blog every day. Start using Market Samurai and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords. Avail of the free trial now!

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Keyword stuffing

Importance of optimal keyword density

Having the right keyword density is very important for successful SEO. The optimal keyword density is between 3% and 5%.

(Image by Tambako the Jaguar)

This density gives the best visibility to your keywords in the post in the eyes of the search engines, and thus gives you the best ranking in the search engine results page (SERPs).

What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing means having the keyword occur too many times in a post or webpage.

For example, if the keyword density is 20%, it is treated as being too much – naturally written text would never have any word (or group of words) repeating so many times.

So, it becomes obvious that the text of the post has been written (or manipulated!) with SEO in mind.

Why should you avoid keyword stuffing for good SEO?

When keyword stuffing is done, it seems rather unnatural to the search engine spiders, and this has a negative impact on your SEO – in fact, your post would be penalized by the search engines for keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing would also make the text of your post hard to read – it would not be reader friendly. And search engines only reward good writing.

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique – meaning that it is implemented specifically to fool the search engine spiders or bots.

This used to work in the past, but today’s search engines like Google are very, very intelligent. They can detect such techniques very easily, and would end up penalizing your post for this.

In fact, if excessive keyword stuffing is detected, Google can even throw your blog out of its index altogether. Now that is not something we would ever want!

Bottomline

Keyword stuffing doesn’t work. Period. In fact, it harms your SEO efforts.

Stay away from it!

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Market Samurai empowers you to achieve quick, easy, profitable front-page rankings on Google. Market Samurai helps you find keywords that can send hundreds or even thousands of free, organic search engine visitors to your blog every day. Start using Market Samurai and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords. Avail of the free trial now!

]]> You have selected your keywords, and you know that it is best to write one post per keyword for better SEO.

And now you want to finally start writing your posts!

What is keyword density?

The question that you face is – how to incorporate the keyword? This is where keyword density comes into play.

(Please note – when I say “keyword”, it doesn’t have to be just one word. It can be a group of words that you have chosen as your keyword. In fact, it might be better to select multiple words as your keyword)

Keyword density is the number of times the keyword appears in proportion to the total number of words in the post. It is expressed as a percentage (%).

Mathematically speaking,

Keyword density = (Number of times the keyword appears in the post / total number of words in the post) * 100

For example, if you have a keyword appear 11 times in a post having a total of 300 words,

Keyword density = (11 / 300) * 100 = 3.67%.

How much should the keyword density be?

People disagree on this, and there are figures out there that are anywhere between 1% and 10%.

Personally, I have observed that a keyword density between 3% and 5% gives the best SEO results.

Your experience

What do you think – what is the best keyword density? What has been your experience? What has worked for you?

Do let me know through your comments.

Readers who found this post were searching for:

This blog uses Market Samurai - The Best Keyword Research & Analysis Tool Available
Market Samurai empowers you to achieve quick, easy, profitable front-page rankings on Google. Market Samurai helps you find keywords that can send hundreds or even thousands of free, organic search engine visitors to your blog every day. Start using Market Samurai and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords. Avail of the free trial now!

]]> Chosen the keywords – What next?

Ok, so you have chosen the keywords that are relevant for your blog. How do you proceed with writing your content?

You have three options:

1. Write a big, long post or page that contains information about everything you want to talk about, and have all the keywords in it
2. Write multiple, medium-sized posts and include 3-4 keywords in each
3. Write a separate post for each keyword

Which option is the best?

The search engine spiders evaluate a webpage, and see the relative density of words to find the keywords relevant to that page or post.

What happens when you choose option 1 or 2? Your posts have many keywords – which means that no particular word would stand out for that post.

That is, the words that you wanted to highlight as your keywords to the search engines get obscured among all the other words on that webpage.

That is not something that we want for good SEO!

To each his own – One post, one keyword

This leaves us with option 2 – Writing a separate post for each keyword – as the best option.

(Please note that when I say “one keyword”, it doesn’t necessarily have to be one word. It can be a group of words that you have chosen as your keyword. In fact, it is better to select a group of words as your keyword)

When you target each post at only one keyword, you are better able to highlight that keyword in the post. Your posts are focused, and therefore, the search engines can immediately link the post with your keyword. And this results in better position in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The user benefits too

And remember, this is not good just from the SEO point of view – when your posts focus on one keyword each, it also means that the content is much more relevant for that keyword.

So, the readers coming to that page get crisp, targeted content. Which, in turn, results in even higher search engine ranking! (Remember, search engines love good content).