Say I have a blog that talks about my web design service. Now if I discover that lots of people are searching for 'prices' through the site search option, I will get a signal that lots of people are interested to know what kind of prices I charge. If I make this aspect of my service clearer on my home page, I will be able to retain and may be convert more of my visitors into prospects.

An easy way to track this statistic is through Google Analytics. Yu should edit the site profile option and activate the site search option as shown in the picture here. Click on the 'Do track the site search' option and then enter 's' in the query string parameter. Save the settings and Google Analytics will now start tracking the site searches for your blog.

While we all understand that posting regularly with quality and unique content is the most vital thing you can do to get better search engine rankings, here are a few more tips to improve your results:

• Link 1-2 times to your money pages (main site, sales pages) with keyword-rich anchor text. Vary the anchor text – don't use the same text always.
• Link to other posts in the blog. This increases the number of incoming links to those pages and improves their ranking potential.
• The links should be included in the main content. Sidebar links carry less weight.
• Use the main keyword at the beginning of the post title and a variation near the end.
• For longer posts, use H2 and H3 tags in the sub-headings to break up the posts.
• Have a juicy introduction para that draws a causal visitor in to the post.
• Have a nice summary as the last para with a powerful call to action, sending the visitor to the main sales page.
• Keep your blog software updated. The new versions include features for better SEO, while providing more security against hackers.

These quick-to-implement tips will definitely give your rankings a nice boost. Please share your experience with other fellow readers.

The redirect feature on a Semiologic blog is quite simple and works very nicely if you don't have a long blog address. Here is how I created a redirect to my reference link for Semiologic:

1. I verified that the redirect manager plugin was activated. You can activate it if it is not activated.
2. Then I added a new page. I gave it a short and direct name – Semiologic.
3. I entered nothing in the content area and scrolled down to the lower side where there was a box for the redirect URL. Here I entered the destination URL.
4. Saved the post.

That's all. Now if I type www.rentablogger.com/blog/semiologic, it gets redirected to my reference link for Semiologic blogging system. This is a 301 redirect, comes with my blog URL and therefore promotes my brand instead of the URL-shortening service's brand.

If I ever had to change the target URL, I can easily do so from my site.

Note: If you don't want to have this page included in the Sitemap, you should tick on the options shown here.

The reason is simple – we won't think much before putting a link to a golf-training guide on a dog-related site's sidebar. However the relationship has to be much closer if we were to link to it from the content. Thus it is fair to assume that a link from the content is a closer-in-context link as well as lesser likely to be a spam link (mass link exchange or paid-for link). And search engines tend to treat this as a more valuable link.

Want to keep your visitors on your blog longer? The more they read, the more they are convinced of your expert status. This will definitely increase the chance that they will buy whatever you are offering. Here's how to achieve this "stay longer" target:

Use the related posts plugin to show a few related posts just after your blog post. This way when a visitor has finished reading your blog post, she gets to see a quick list of some more posts on similar topics. Hopefully she will find one of these interesting and go ahead and read that. Then she will get another list of related posts and … you get the message.

1. It is quite easy to accomplish this on a Semiologic blog.
2. Click on Appearance | Widgets.
3. Choose "Each entry" in the dropdown in top-right side and click on show.
4. Add the Related widget from the list of available widgets (middle column list). The widget will be added to the list of widgets being used in each entry.
5. Click on Save changes. The settings are saved and the list shows again.
6. Now drag and drop the Entry: Actions widget to the end of the list. This is done to make sure that the related posts do not appear to belong to the next entry.
7. Click on Save changes again. You are done.

View the blog to see the effect. Now your visitors will be staying on your blog longer than before.

If you don't feel confident you can pull it off or are strapped for time, we can apply these SEO changes to your blog for a nominal feel. Contact us!

You must have heard that you must spend 5 times more time on your headline than your sales page. It applies equally well to the blog post titles. A good curiosity enhancing title can make more people consume your post. Here are some interesting options for the post title:

• How to <do whatever you are writing about>…
• 7 (or some other number) ways to <something you are writing about>…
• Are you making these mistakes <in your whatever>? Or some other question?

You will notice that Wordpress or Semiologic will create a slug from your title that will become part of the URL. You should edit this to take out all sundries like did, or, of, the etc while keeping the meaning intact. Think newspaper headlines. Study how they create a meaningful sentence with the minimum words.

As a final tip (only applicable if you are using Semiologic or a SEO-plugin enhanced Wordpress), edit the title of the page. Normally the title of the page (the meta-tag, not the headline) is same as the blog post title. You can edit this to score well on the SEO front while retaining a different blog post title.

You can see the image on the left to see how you can enter a specific set of meta tags for each post.

In admin section, you can click on Settings and then choose SEO to enter a title and some other parameters for the home page. I have got a nice improvement in rankings of some of my client blogs by this change alone.

Yet there are times when you feel that you need a plugin that will do a specific task that you want your blog to do and you cannot locate a plugin for that. Why bother with freelance programmer sites, paying crazy money to people you don't even know are reliable to create your plugin.

The excellent Wordpress plugin tutorial and source code reference site makes it very easy to write your own plugin. Since you refer to an existing plugin source code and adapt it from there, you can write your new plugin very easily… and quickly.

Nothing to beat the feeling of having created your own plugin and make it do exactly what you want is wonderful. Have a look at the write your own wordpress plugin site. You will love it!

If you have access to the blog database (may be through the site control panel), you can access the wp_users table and change the email address linked to your user account. After doing so, you can visit the login screen of your blog and click on the "Lost my password" link. Wordpress will first send you a link to reset the password and after you click it, it will send a new password to you.

While wordpress is a great content management system and the most popular blogging platform, a large number of users find it very cumbersome to upgrade their blogs. If you are a techno-shy user or just don't have the time for these upgrades, we can upgrade your blogs at a nominal $25 per blog per upgrade.

Just send us the FTP details (preferably the control panel details so that we can back up before the upgrade) and your payment by Paypal to arun AT ebizindia DOT com. I highly recommend you to take a backup of your blog – we take all precautions before and during the upgrade but it never hurt to take preventive measures.