Commenting is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your site. Assuming you’ve got great content waiting for your visitors when they get there, it’s also a great way to initiate conversations and build community in your target market. You can use commenting to get the attention of and build relationships with other bloggers which might turn into JV partnerships down the road. And of course, allowing comments on your own blog gives your visitors, customers and referrals a way to connect with you and give you feedback about your content, products and services.

This is the seventh post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

This step really has more to do with your site overall, rather than individual content. Though you do want to have a site navigation plan in place from day one, some of what I discuss here will only make sense when you’ve been adding content for awhile.

Great site navigation is extremely important because it helps you keep your visitors on your site longer. Remember, all the great content in the world won’t help if your visitors can’t find it. So, let’s make sure visitors can easily find all that great content you’ve got!

This is the sixth post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

Short, but illuminating exercise today: determining your keyword density.

What’s Keyword Density?

Keyword density is how often your keywords appear in your text relative to other words. Let’s say you’ve got a 500-word post and you’ve used your keyword 25 times - that’s a keyword density of 5% (25/500 = 5%) - and that’s the target that’s most widely recommended. Any more than that and you run the risk of Google thinking you’re “stuffing”…

This is the fifth post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

We’re heading into more familiar territory in this step. You’re probably already used to highlighting words and phrases within your text using bold and italics. The only thing new here is to be a little more purposeful about your highlighting.

This is the fourth post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

You’ve done your keyword research, you’ve got your list of keywords you want to optimize for, and now it’s time to put all that good research to use.

Ready?

When it comes to SEO that you can do for your site, the page title, page description and the keywords in your keyword META tag are extremely important. But let’s clear up a point of potential confusion before we start.

Your page title is NOT what you think it is…

This is the third post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

A permalink is the URL of an individual blog post. To see what I’m talking about, click the title of any of your blog posts. What you’ll end up with is just that blog post, in its entirety, shown on that page. The address bar of your browser will reflect the URL (permalink) of that blog post.

You want your permalinks to make sense to both people and the search engines.

photo credit: Matter = Energy
This is the second post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.
Compile Your Keyword List
Write down all the keywords from the list you generated using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool that have high search volumes and low advertiser competition. I won’t try to give you cutoffs or thresholds, because every market is different, so make your selections relative to the list you generated.
Write down keyword ideas you think should have appeared on the list. These will come from that ‘gap’ between what you think your …

photo credit: Matter = Energy
This is the first of a series of posts called DIY SEO (Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization): Step by Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today. While you could pay hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to an SEO company to optimize your site for the search engines, there is an awful lot of SEO good you can do for your site all by yourself - for free - even if you’re not a programmer or particularly “technical” by nature. So why not do what …