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Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches 
By: Andy Beard 2007-06-21 Take a well optimized Wordpress blog in a competitive niche, rip it apart, and help maximise its chances of ranking in the SERPs and raking in some cash. This isn't lame all-in-one optimization plugins, it is totally geeking it out!
Having previously written that I don't typically undertake consulting work, I do look on any paid blog posts as a form of consultancy. In this particular case Tim from eMonetized decided to order a review of his blog, and we negotiated a little to ensure what you read is totally impartial and any links I choose to give are in an editorial context. The negotiation itself was an interesting process, and I will be writing about that separately. It should be noted that just because I mention improvements here, that doesn't mean that Tim the site owner isn't aware of something, and as also is almost always the case, I haven't applied many SEO tweaks to this site yet. That being said, some of the linking structures I talk about in the more geeky sections of this article I have never seen anyone talk about, and it is my belief that the resulting linking structure is highly unique, extremely powerful, whilst remaining flexible. The Niche Tim's blog is one of a host of blogs looking to capitalize on terms such as make money, make money online and making money online, though it is clear that he is quite SEO aware, and from our communication this was made abundantly clear to me. As an example he has a clear "money page" for promoting his primary affiliate programs using a URL "Making Money Online". One of the hardest problems with the "make money" niche is that most of the related search terms that are provided if you use the Google Keyword Suggest tool are very much "long tail" terms, many of which receive only mediocre traffic. Many of the more specific terms receive minimal search volume unless it is related to a specific product, or product launch. The direction Tim seems to be taking is to target content in the topical community such as Adsense, Adwords and Affiliate Marketing, rather than writing a series of posts based on what Google regard as related topics, such as "How To Make Money -Insert Blank-", "Making Money -Insert Blank-" This suggests to me that we might look to optimize the site such that the categories perform well as landing pages, though I believe it is possible to significantly improve site structure to give the site an unfair advantage on a few competitive terms. SEO Strategy It is clear that Tim is thinking about his SEO Strategy, and is off to a good start. Here are some of the things he is currently doing that I can see just browsing around the site.
If tag pages are being indexed, it is potentially good to have tags in your feed as well. More Time Consuming or Technical Category listings For a home page listing, and category pages, it is normal to list all categories CODE:
For single pages, if you are aiming for a classic tree structure, it is better to list specific categories. CODE:
You probably already have links to specific category pages at the bottom of each post, thus maybe sidebar category links should be nofollowed using the add link attribute plugin. CODE:
You could also aim for a "halfway house" and include only your most targeted primary categories on every page in the sidebar, other than on your homepage which would include all categories. That doesn't necessarily mean you would have followed links in the sidebar on your front page at all, other than to possibly your sitemap. Advanced SEO & Presentation To really optimize Wordpress effectively, you need to start looking at optimizing the layout of the homepage, category pages, and tag pages, not just for SEO, but for presentation. Most wordpress blogs by default use index.php for homepage and category pages, and the same is true for tag pages with UTW if you don't define a tag.php file. You can either create custom templates, or add lots of complicated Wordpress logic. Wordpress handles templates in the following priority 1. category-6.php 2. category.php 3. archive.php 4. index.php In many SEO linking structures, the categories are intended to be landing pages for their topic, and to concentrate more google juice than individual pages. There are also linking structures that might be equally viable in many circumstances where categories pass Google juice in a single direction, either from the home page to single pages which subsequently pass juice only to the home page, or the home page passes juice to single pages through a sitemap, and the juice flows back up to the home page through the categories. If category pages were intended to pass Google juice in 2 directions as would be normal for a simple tree structure, then you would need something like the following:- 
eMonetized Category Pages Example of Google Juice Flow Ultimately however if you have ever spent any time playing around with a pagerank calculator, linking structures that feature a spiral, channelling juice around in a circle using one-way links tend to perform better than sites using 2 way links. There are a number of plugins that try to create "pretty" excerpts for duplicate content pages that contain excerpts, or you can manually create them with HTML and even thumbnail pictures. One of the best new options seems to be the Excerpts Editor though I haven't tested it yet. This should be mixed with custom query string which would allow you to have a different number of posts on your front page compared to various archive pages. Ideally when siloing you would want to list all pages under a particular category or tag page. The easier alternative is the siloing plugin. Beyond Geeky SEO Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell and the bonus Dynamic Linking Ebook by Leslie Rohde have been for many years one of the most advanced tutorials on geeky linking structures to maximise pagerank. To get any real benefit from this geeky section you really have to read those ebooks, they are available free for those who sign up to Michaels mailing list, and are well worth investing an evening reading, and maybe reading a couple of times more to fully understand how pagerank and linking structures can really help you. One of my favourite structures was the spider circle 
Here is the Spider Circle mapped out in the calculator. The big problem with this linking structure, if you look at blogging in particular, is as soon as you add any external links to the content pages, the benefits turn into a huge hazzard, because this structure is also one of the best for sacrificial sites. Totally forget anything like this if you have removed nofollow from your comments. Even disproportionate linking to your content from other sites isn't going to rescue it. In that example there is 4x as many incoming links as those outgoing. The numbers are all relative, and don't represent toolbar pagerank, but the benefit of good linking structure is lost. One of the best linking structures for a website that was discussed was called "Stacked Pyramids with Tunnels Home" The layout was something like this:- 
There are a lot more unique pages involved, so you can't directly compare this with the previous diagram. Here is how this structure looks like in a calculation. What happens when we add some incoming and outgoing links? Well it doesn't go quite as pear-shaped as the spider but still stuggles with a more realistic ratio of incoming to outgoing links. I have played around with most of the other examples within Revenge of the Mininet over the last few months trying to create a "defensible linking structure", something that performs well under severe abuse, with multiple external links on every page of unique content, as might happen with a blogger generous with link love, or using Dofollow. In the end I opted for massive ball linking using tagging, with the structure totally organic, but helping Google juice flow away from pages which were gaining a lot of links, and likewise probably a lot of comments as well, so that the juice could enrich other content. I knew this wasn't optimal I also wanted to come up with a better benefit from using internal tagging than my previously mentioned 4.9 > 3.6 ? (Titles > Duplicate Content) Introducing "Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall" I have no idea how this will work based upon all the other 100+ or 200+ ranking factors for web pages, but as far as pagerank is concerned it seems to be an extremely defensible structure, in fact you can abuse the hell out of it, and it performs well. Sandcastle Pagerank Calculation I should note that in that calculation there are still only 9 pages of 100% unique original article content. The secret lies in having created additional unique pages that in themselves are useful for humans and even linkworthy, but those pages only link through to the homepage and gather up link juice that might have passed excessively through external links on a popular post. Here is what it looks link if it is heavily abused like the previous example with lots of external links, and only a few incoming links. Here is what is happening. I first of all started off with category siloing, one way links passing juice from the homepage through the categories, and down to the content. In addition I added a sitemap link from the homepage, that has one way links also through to the content. In addition, if it is being abused on a blog, it performs better with links from the sitemap to the homepage and categories from the sitemap, though the differences are small. Juice flows from the permalink pages through one way links to one of 5 tag pages for each post, assigned at random in the model, and then again one way link to the homepage. If you throw in a couple of related posts, even with the external links it performs very well, especially for the home page. Here is a visualisation of Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall 
Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall Site Structure As I have stated before, I visualise linking structures in 3D, and this one could be much easier visualised on a 3D checkers board (I used to have one as a kid), but effectively it is built of 3 different layers. I haven't quite worked out the best way to handle single pages, maybe it would be necessary to add yet another tree link structure for those. I haven't got any sites using this new structure yet, but it is something I will be aiming for on a number of sites soon, including this one. Creating This Linking Structure With Wordpress It is possible (though a little complicated) with what I have listed above, but I will try to have a modified theme available soon, aptly named the "Sandcastle" theme, based upon Sandbox (so it can be easily skinned) Linkworthy Content Whilst a good linking structure might give you 5x to 10x the benefit of any incoming links to rank a few specific pages, you still need to have content people will link to. For me one of the highlights of Tim's blog are already the case studies. Whilst I haven't invested money in Stumbleupon advertising, the conversion rate to subscribers he achieved with $100 worth of visits seems about the same as with free traffic. From what I have seen so far, Top Stumblers are mainly interested in cool pictures and humor as one of Tim's commenters has already pointed out, and are very much anti-commercial, especially anything to do with StumbleUpon optimization. It is very easy to get post content buried, in fact easier than Digg in many ways. A post on optimizing for another social news site such as Digg however might not get buried by the sacred protectors of the SU realm, and is more likely to continue bringing traffic (that is what I have experienced anyway). I have also found support a little lacking. Tim has also been looking at Adsense Arbitrage - I think the safe bet is to convert those low PPC landing pages into affiliate or other forms of CPA income, if the cost of clicks is still quite low. Tim is a creative thinker, after all he was the one who started using Adsense site targeting on John Chows blog, which gave John the idea of using it on Problogger.net Whilst Tim's blog is only a couple of months old, I expect great things and lots of in-depth experimentation in traffic and monetization, so don't forget to sign up to his RSS feed. Comments Tag: SEO, Wordpress, Adsense Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Reddit |  Furl Have a bookmark! -  About the Author: Andy Beard - Niche Marketing - Blog search engine perfomance, Wordpress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips |
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