http://boostranks.com/SEO Search Engine Optimization Brain Dump Sat, 12 Apr 2008 04:39:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As far as software goes, it's hard to beat wordpress at this stage. There's tons of free themes and plugins to extend its functionality. It's widely used and there's plenty of documentation and support for it. Hosting is a different matter, there's no clear choice. If you've got the inclination to ... http://boostranks.com/SEO/your-first-professional-blog-hosting-and-software/ It's pretty hard these days to register a cool domain name, but for your first professional blog, a longer name with your targeted keywords in it is good choice. Say for example you wanted to target "homemade red widgets". You could choose a domain name like homemaderedwidgets.com. Later on down ... http://boostranks.com/SEO/your-first-professional-blog-choosing-a-domain-name/ For your first professional blog, run part time from home, one designed to be popular, monetized, and authoritative, you'll want to chose a topic that isn't very competitive. For the reason that you'll have a better chance of getting on the front page of google in the first few weeks, ... http://boostranks.com/SEO/your-first-professional-blog-subject-topic-niche/ One way to strengthen the community in your niche is to start a planet. A planet is an aggregation of blogs with a web page and a feed. The idea of a planet is to join and build a community around a niche. This just happens to have SEO benefits, too. ... http://boostranks.com/SEO/building-a-community-in-your-niche/ The more high quality sites that link you, the more authority you'll get. The higher up in the search results you'll be, and the more traffic you'll get from search engines. When you're first starting out, it's not always easy to get links. There's a few places that allow you ... http://boostranks.com/SEO/building-authority/ There's a lot of talk about duplicate content, people go to great lengths to try and stop search engines indexing duplicate content. But just how bad is it? Well, it depends. There's different types of duplicate content. For example, you could have a site.com and a site.net, personally I would redirect ... http://boostranks.com/SEO/the-low-down-on-duplicate-content/ Meta description tags can be used by search engines to show searchers what a page is about. You can leave off the tag and let the search engine create their own description, or you can provide the tag yourself. Even if you provide the tag, the search engine might not ... http://boostranks.com/SEO/meta-description-tag-use/ The title gets used by search engines for ranking and displaying to searchers, so the title must make sense to someone that hasn't visited your site yet. A title of "Home" is meaningless to them, it should include your site name and what the page is about. Each page should ... http://boostranks.com/SEO/meaningful-and-unique-titles/ The very first post is the simplest. Most URLs aren't typed out, they're clicked, so they can be long and descriptive. Include important keywords in them, separated by - . Don't include every keyword under the sun, you'll look like a desperate spammer. http://boostranks.com/SEO/descriptive-urls/