Ranking high in search engines, isn’t that what everyone wants? If you are trying to target the new generation, then this is what you need. Because time to get top listings in yellow pages is over. I don’t know a single college student that checks that. Majority of us just google it. So I was consulting with a local client, and they asked me will I rank high if I add a blog to my website? So I asked him why he asked me that question. So apparently there is a rumor out that blogs help search engine rankings.

So Balkhis is the rumor true? I will say Sure it is. But there are variables that account to it.

I remember a little over three years ago when I entered the directory industry, shortly after a new wave came in which basically encourage the use of blogs with sites. So any directory that had a blog had higher traffic. That is when a web directory start going from a web directory to a portal. It wasn’t just with directories. Corporates started using blogging softwares to post news. The reason behind it was not to get search engine rankings. But Corporate goal was to encourage the users into interacting. They had blogs, or inside news in a form of a blog. But the discovery was that it actually helps your search engine ranking.

The key to rank high in search engines is dynamic content. But just dynamic content doesn’t work. You need to make the dynamic content look static. Blogging softwares like Wordpress can do it with just a little trick. So since you post new entries it actually helps because Wordpress actually have the way to report search engines. These software actually encourages the search engine robots to crawl the new pages and new entries. Therefore your index rate increases. Next important things with blogs are RSS. So you have the content on the site available in multiple format.

From my personal experience, these really helped the search engine ranking when I had the directory. Actually I realized my directory blog was the powerhouse. The one that ranked me high in a lot of places. Heck at the time I was ranked for Webmaster Blog on the first page. Site’s alexa was around 150k before the blog, and once the blog was added it went down to 30k. Now you can see how much traffic the blog itself was getting. I could easily marketed anything that I wanted to with that because of the search engine ranking.

So I will say yes it is a good idea to have a blog with a corporate. But it is not as simple as it looks or sound. You need correct coaching/advices.

Wordpress is an awesome tool, but wordpress alone cannot accomplish a lot. You need to know how get search engine friendly urls. Then you need to have All in One SEO Plugin. The bottom line is just read all the seo related tips that I have shared on this blog, and you should be well of.

For the past few days I have been talking about the moves that I made which helped me increase my search engine traffic by 258% in less than a month. This is the last post in this series. But before you read this make sure you read the past three posts in the series. Post 1, Post 2, Post 3.

Structure of a Design plays a very significant role when it comes to indexing rate, and search engine ranking positions. So you need to start taking notes as I discuss the two perfect design structures your website/blogs should use. Mark my word, if you don’t use the following ways, your site is losing a lot potential.

What is Perfect Design Structures?

A perfect design structure features content FIRST in the coding, and everything else such as sidebar comes after when you see the codes. There are two methods you can use to achieve a perfect design structure. These methods are essential if you are using 3 column template, as well as a template with a sidebar on the left side.

What are the Advantages of Perfect Design Structures?

perfect design structure increase your Search Engine Indexing Rate. Through this you are increasing the number of pages indexed of your website in the search engines, also you are increasing your chances of getting higher search engine position and traffic.

How does Perfect Design Structures work?

Search engine bots visit your website, and see the important parts on the page first which is the content. Sidebar links are secondary. Therefore they should be placed towards the bottom. Well if you are using the normal table structure and a sidebar on the left hand side, your sidebar would be appearing towards the top of the codes (above the content). Same if you are using sidebar on each side, one sidebar will appear above the content. Perfect Design Structure Methods make the sidebar appear below content in the codes, and therefore you have SEO Advantage.

How is that really a SEO Advantage. Well look in the example below:

Do you see how the content is being override by the links that were placed above the content. I identified this problem with my previous directory long time ago and then I fixed the issue. Which led me to get higher SERPs and a PR 5. I was successfully able to sell the site for $20,000. So now you know how this structure will really help.

Methods to achieve Perfect Design Structures

There are actually two methods that can get you a perfect design structure. One is called Div Properties, the other one is called Master Table Law. [...Read the full post if you want know the rest]

This is the 3rd post in the series of showing you How I increased my search engine traffic by 258% in less than a month. Before you begin reading those, I strongly recommend you check out the past two posts in the series on Guide to refine the Semantic Web Markups and Most Effective SEO move you can make.

Ok lets get this thing rolling. Now If you haven’t noticed after seeing the past two posts in the series, the key point that I am stressing is organizing your content. By doing that you are making the job easier for search engines. That is why they will love you even more and give you the right spot in your Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs). In this post we will be discussing on how organizing your links can improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

How to Organize External Links?

You can organize your links by using relation tags. How do your links relate to you? For instance, you might be linking out to your friends in your blog roll. Your own company, Your own social media profiles, Just websites that you like. But how does Search Engines know how these external links relate to you. Well that is why rel= tags are used with links.

Most of you are familiar with rel=”nofollow”. I know some people who no follow every external link in fear of google. But that is not the way to go. You don’t need to be afraid. You need to work with them. For those of you who don’t know the definition, it means the bot should not follow this link at all. That way you get to keep your link juice and strength to your page. Theoretically you should rank higher in PR, but that is not always the case. So what should you use?

Well, I kind of made up my own categories, and I suggest you to make your own. With each rel tag, you need to have your own category associated with it. So it will be like rel=”category”.

People are afraid to put their own social media profiles without a nofollow attribute. When you do that, you are not giving your profiles the juice. I think instead of nofollow what you should do is attach a ‘me’ tag. For example my youtube profile:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/mbalkhi" rel="me">Youtube</a>

Rel=me is a well known tag around, but you can be creative and make your own categories. For example, I got accepted in 9rules. Which is an award basically because not every site that applies get in. Anyways a required term of inclusion was that you would put 9rules logo on your site with a link back.

<a href="http://www.9rules.com" rel="award">9rules</a>

Above is how my link tag looks. Obviously instead of the name I put the image, but you get the point right. There are other known tags that wordpress advocates if you ever used blogroll you should see a tab that says link relationships.

You can use all those tags shown in the picture above such as friend, sibling, spouse, child, kin, etc. Check out the XFN Guide if you want to know more popular ones.

Now I am not saying don’t use no follow. I do link to people who I don’t like linking to just to make a reference therefore I just add a no follow to their link. But if I want to give credit to someone, I don’t no follow them. If I like someone’s site, and I mention it in my posts I don’t no follow it. So if you get the point what I am saying.

Advantages of Rel tags

In my opinion, your sites look more organized. Advantages of rel=”nofollow” are well known. It keeps your link juice and page strength to yourself etc etc. But advantages of the other rel tags are relatively not known. All I am going to say is that I think this possibly played a role in my search engine traffic, but no guarantee. I know that search engines look at popular rel= tags such as nofollow and me. But I don’t know about others.

Note: I did not read any book/ebook that suggest using creative relation tag helps your ranking. No book/ebook says that you cannot use them either. This is just my sole opinion or you can say an educated inference that I am making. Things that I am trying out and liking it.

I increased my search engine traffic by 258% in less than a month and so many of you started asking me Balkhis what did you do. I was loaded with the emails therefore I have decided to write a series of post.

This is a second part of the series post. First post in this series is very essential: Most Effective SEO Move You Can Make for your Website. You must remember, this post will not benefit as much if you don’t follow my guide on the post before this one will not be as helpful.

As I mentioned in my Case Study that I refined my heading tags (h1, h2, h3 and more…) Well people asked me what do you mean by refining those tags. How did you refine them? So this guide will show you the moves that I made. You should know that Google recommend XHTML Semantics. And many free themes doesn’t even use it that well. Heck my previous themes weren’t as good as it could have been.

Refining the Semantic Web Markups

Before we begin to refine these markups, we need to know which markups to have on each page. You need to have the following markups in the meaningful order: (<title><h1><h2><h3><h4>…)

I don’t think you would need to go further than h4, but you are free to go there. Remember you need to use them wisely, and in a logical order, so <h1> is the most important followed by <h2> and so on. So use them in the logical order assigning the important parts of the page with the right type of heading tags.

Take a look at the images below before I start discussing each of these markups. (Click on the image to see the full view)

Explanation of each Markups

First Rule – Fix your Titles

Fix your titles on your page because they are going to matter between you ranking on the first page or the second.

These are <title> tags the most important tag on your web page. The second thing that Google checks when ranking the site is this <title> tag. So you know how important it is. The first thing they see is the keywords in the url then the title (We are leaving the popularity aside for some other post). Guys make sure your title in the wordpress are SEO Friendly.

The titles that came in with the default wordpress: Blog » Page

That is not the best title you can have for your blog.

The first post in this series can help you get the title right. So check it out if you want to rank high and increase your search engine traffic like I did.

Efficient use of <h1> Tags

You have no idea how many people overlook <h1> tags. This is the tag which tells the search engine what is the most important part on the page. Personally I use image as my logos, so I don’t worry about having these at the logo. Instead, I keep my post title inside <h1> tags. You must remember, you can only HAVE ONE <h1> tag on any given page, so I suggest you use it wisely.

I have posted the image screen shot above on both the home page and the post page to show you how I am dealing with it on Balkhis to give you an idea.

People who don’t use <h1> tag, and just use <h2> for all their posts are on the dark side. That is what sets best aside from good. I am going to tell you specially on the posts page because they are very important, make sure you have your title in <h1> tag as long as your logo is an image.

Rebirth of good posts with headlines

I decided to use headlines in the post because they are appealing. They look much better than the normal bold feature in wordpress. But there was another reason why I used it, and I am still using it. That is because of the search engine advantage. Since your title on the post page is <h1> then you should highlight your main areas in the post with <h2>, <h3>, and other tags as they fit.

I use <h2> tag for the main headline in the post, and then <h3> and <h4> accordingly depending on how I want the post to look, and how it is categorized. I suggest you start with <h2> and work your way down. Think of your posts as an outline.

I know a lot of blogs don’t use these features in their post. Which is their personal choice, but I am sure you will start using them right now. First the bold just look ugly. This way you have more variety and you can organize your posts well. Next is search engine loves organization. So it is a win win for you. Search Engines happy, and your users are happy.

Sidebar Headings and misconceptions

People just tend to use <h2> tags for their sidebar tags. Do you know how many people use that. Heck I used to do that as well until I discovered these techniques. Really think about it, are your sidebar headlines as important as your post headlines? I don’t think so. Well maybe some of them, but not all. I am using <h2> tag in my sidebar for some things, and <h4> for the others just to highlight the differences between the most important part and not.

Just make sure you distinguish them. I know I used to put all of them as <h2> before and I was also the one to put my post titles to be <h2> also. Until I realized it doesn’t really make sense. Most free designs will come like this, so if you are using a free theme, you got some editing to do. I don’t know how well coded these premium themes are, but you can count on my next themes (maybe Premium) to be SEO Friendly using all these aspects.

Home Page Explanation

I am sure you guys see I have my featured post wrapped around in <h1>. The reason for that is because that is the most important area on my site. I noticed this way I tend to rank high for that particular keyword for that day just because of the homepage. And that post rank high for the keyword later on as well. Then you will see in my category excerpts I am using a combination of <h2> and <h3> tags. I assigned the category title with <h2> tag and Post title with <h3> because I think this is the way they are organized the best. Like I said think of it as an outline of your paper.

Points to be Noted

Make your Wordpress Titles SEO Friendly
Only use <h1> tag ONCE and only ONCE on the page.
Add headlines to your posts and they will keep your content organized.
Organize your sidebar headings and give them less weight than your content.

Guys, I am not going to say if you don’t make these SEO moves you will be doomed. But remember there are several good websites, but only few best ones. This is one of those factors that sets aside the best and help search engines like Google to think of you as best also.

So what I am saying is that if your site and another site is very close in authority such as backlinks, age and other factors. But the other one have a few more backlinks then you do that is why it was ranking higher then you. And you make these changes, you will most likely be placed above that site. This is how I gained most of my search engine ranking.

While these techniques sounds so basic, you need to remember that everything starts at a simple step. People now a days are so into the complicated stuff, they forget to get their building blocks. Good SEO is the building blocks of a website. So make sure you have your backbones strong. Even though these techniques are old school, you have to understand that a lot of old schoolers are the one that do well in SEO. And the reason for that is because they combine the old school with the new school. So do the above and join the road of excellent sites. Otherwise there is nothing wrong with being just good.

I just like perfection… Thats why I did it, and I got awesome results…

Keep up to the blog for the next posts in the series as well. If you are not subscribed, you should, so you can be updated.

After I wrote about my Case Study post on How I increase my search engine traffic by 258% in less than a month, I was getting numerous emails, and each had various different questions. So I would like to present to you a series of posts that you will see here for the next few days which will boost your site’s Search Engine Ranking to the top.

This effective move is having Dynamic Descriptive Titles for your website. That is what your audience loves, and that is what Search Engines love. Did you get that Dynamic Titles really mean two different things in these two contexts. Well yes it does.

Dynamic title that your audience loves are eye-catching title that you use for your post.

Dynamic title for search engines are new generated <title> tag for each page on your website.

The dynamic eye catching title for your audience is creativity. I really can’t help you with that, all you got to do is practice. At least write 5 different titles for your post and pick the best one before you publish it. Always look at top blogger’s titles, titles of articles on digg’s homepage to give you ideas.

But what I can help you with is adding dynamic titles for search engines on your website. If you are using a html website, then it should be a piece of cake for you because you are just making a new html page every time. But wordpress users, I can definitely help you.

Even though wordpress is open source and by far the best blogging software, the SEO of a default wordpress is horrible. It is the plugins that help you get everything optimized.

Why do you need to add Dynamic Descriptive Title tags?

Well as you see that by default wordpress titles aren’t very SE friendly. You have your blog title on each page, and that is what you need to get rid of, if you want to stand a chance for ranking on first page for competitive terms.

You don’t want the default wordpress title: Blog Title » Post Title

What you need is dynamic titles meaning unique titles for each post/page that use good keywords which will help you rank high in search engines. I am sure you are now convinced.

But if you still need more, Let me tell you that these keywords are bold as you see in the image above. So the users notice it more then others that don’t even have their full titles because it had all the useless info making it extremely long so you couldn’t highlight the important keywords.

How to add dynamic titles

No I will not give you bunch of php codes that you can add in your header and make changes. I know you don’t want to disect through the files, neither do I. A simple step to do this is a plugin called All in One SEO Pack. Download it NOW if you haven’t. And if you decide not to, then don’t send me an email asking how to rank high in Search Engines.

If you are wondering what settings to put in this plugin, you might want to head over to see the directions.

If you do that, your titles will look just like mine, then you would be able to rank high in search engines as long as you read my next few posts, so you get the full secrets.

Anyways once you have this plugin installed, make sure once you are done writing your posts, you go through and towards the bottom of the post editing page, there will be a tab called All in One SEO Pack, which you need to open and edit all the information. Add a custom description, title, and keywords for that page. This is ESSENTIAL. You must do this if you want good results.

Results

Believe me when I say this, after doing this step you are one step closer to the top. Your site now should have a custom title that will be highlighted in the search results, and you should have a unique description unlike other sites that have their main description overriding everything.

Now all you need is writing good titles. Believe me when I say this, the only thing that will help you learn is practice, so keep practicing.

Do make sure to read the next posts which will go in details what else I changed to get my search engine traffic increased by 258% in less than a month.