WordPress is a well known and supported blogging platform and content management system. With the ability for developers to create new and useful additions or plugins, it’s no wonder why it has become so popular. When it comes to plugins to give you the advantage in SEO, Pagination and new blogging features these plugins come in first.

All in One SEO
This plugin allows you to set title and meta tags on posts and pages. It even has the ability to noindex categories and archives.

Spam Karma 2
Prevent spammers from spamming your blog with this handy plugin.

WP-PageNavi
Improve the usability of your blog by replacing the “Previous” and “Next” links with easy to use pagination.

Comment Relish
Improve your subscriber base by automatically sending an email to your commenters to ask them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

iflickr
Easily add Creative Commons photos from Flickr to your blog posts with this handy plugin.

Google Sitemaps
Automatically generate a Google compliant XML sitemap of your site.

Live
Want to watch visitors on your site? This plugin allows you to do just that. Monitor which pages your visitors are going to.

Redirection
Create seo-friendly 301 redirects from within WordPress. Simply enter the source location and the target location and you are done.

How many times do you search for your name in Google? Do you do it out of boredom or as an ego boost? Believe it or not, ranking well for your own name can be an easy task. Here are a few tips to get a top 10 ranking for your name.

Competition

When you search for your name in Google, how many results are returned? If there are less than a million results, you may have a good shot of ranking well for the term. Try putting quotation marks around your name such as “John Smith”. This will search for exact matches on web pages. The lower the competition is; the better.

On-Page

If you have access to the page you wish to rank well for, make sure that your name is in the title tag. Also make sure that your name is used at least three times throughout the entire document. Have you registered a domain such as yourname.com? By having your name in the URL, it will greatly increase the chances of a high ranking.

Off-Page

Building links is an important step that will aid in top rankings. If you participate in forums, put a link in your signature with your name as the anchor text. Participate on blogs by posting comments with a link back to your web page. The more links you can build, the better your ranking will be. But beware that if you build too many links too fast, Google may flag you as a spammer and your ranking may be compromised.

Results

Results can vary depending on the number of links, the on-page optimization and the number of competing websites. You can sometimes see results in a matter of days or even a matter of months. SEO is a continuous process of adjustments in order to rank adequately in Google.

Nobody likes limitations, especially on the web. Nine years ago when I was just starting out on the web design scene, the truth hit me and it hit me hard. After designing a few personal sites using a non web safe font, I realized that although it looked great on my screen, it looked absolutely horrible on everyone else’s. Surely, there had to be a way.

Fast forward to a few years later, I began to use images as heading text. This was the ultimate solution to my font crisis. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize the SEO benefit of text-only headings. Therefore, my image solution would have to go and I would have to search for another way.

Typically, header text is defined by the H1 tag. The H1 basically is a brief summary of what the content of the page is about. Search engines use this information when ranking web sites.

Let’s take a look at a common H1 tag:

After using some CSS to style the text, the output can look like this:

But what if we wanted to use a different font to jazz up that heading? We would modify our HTML like so:

Next we create an image to replace our header text. Make sure that the text in the image is the same as your H1 tag, since this helps with accessibility.

And finally, we apply our CSS:

This code will position our header image above our header text. When CSS is disabled the original header text will be displayed accordingly.

Here is our result:

Okay, so this works out great. But let’s say that you have dozens of pages on your web site. That’s a lot of images and different CSS classes to create. What if the header text needs to be changed? That would take more time and effort. Thankfully, there is sIFR.

sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, is a way to replace text on a web page with richer typography. sIFR uses Javascript, CSS and Flash to create a nicely accessible and search-engine friendly text replacement. sIFR will find the element of the page you wish to convert to a nicer font face and change it automatically. There is no need to create hundreds of image files or create many CSS classes.

You may notice that the headings on this blog have a non web-safe font. This is thanks to sIFR. Google has recently announced that sIFR is SEO friendly and ethical for their crawlers. Since Googlebot cannot fully see and understand flash, they will only see the original HTML H1 tag.

So there you have it, two ways to replace header text on a web page. Thanks to CSS and sIFR, header replacement is no longer limited. Be sure to be ethical and not abuse this information which may lead to getting banned from the search engines. Enjoy!