The goal of Search Engine Optimization is to attract the search engines to pages on your website by employing some “best practices” including:

• Writing titles that are key-phrase focused, relevant to content on the page and as short as possible.

• Giving the spiders as short a distance as possible from their point of entry to the relevant content on the site. This translates into reducing “code bloat”. One of our top recommendation in the next section deals with this and how it relates to your site explicitly.

• Writing a unique description for each page that summarizes the content of the page in a couple sentences – leading with the same keywords used in the title – and ending with a marketing message and phone number.

• Writing relevant headers for each piece of content (not with identical keyword configuration found in title and description) that is searchable text and not image based.

• Putting some hypertext links within the body text of your site that leads to other related content elsewhere on your site.

• Ensuring that your address and phone number are present in searchable text in an appropriate place on each page for people who use geographic search terms but aren’t necessarily using “local search” per se.

• Usability. Many think usability isn’t an SEO issue, but it certainly is. No one knows exactly how the search engine algorithms work except some select insiders, but enough of us have been able to observe some patterns and have found that sites that focus on the end user experience do better. This does not mean that every time you run a search, the top sites will all be user friendly. It’s a factor, probably not one of the top 5 most important issues, but we have seen a steady increase in the importance of usability in search engine rankings that leads us to believe it will continue to grow in importance.

• Page names, or URL’s. It is important to name your pages from the planning stage, according to the content of the page. However, if your site has been in existence and already enjoys some search engine traffic and ranking, we suggest that you not make any changes to URL’s as it would involve considerable cost to redirect old page names to the new ones and, potentially, loss of ranking for quite some time (or none at all, but not worth the risk).

•Create a structure that:

o Has menu items titled intuitively. For example, people tend to look for an about page where you have “Our Camp” which covers About and also some other important info that perhaps should be located under section called Camp Info. See below Recommendation #1 for our interim suggestions regarding home page redesign.

o Is scalable so that your website can grow. Your structure is completely flat, which is fine for a small site. I do not recommend changing that at this time, but in future you may want to group your main menu “categories” into directories to capitalize on some SEO benefit of having more index or home pages for content groups.

o Use some two and three word page names that are key-phrase rich.

• Accessibility – use alternative text for images, video and audio presentation for those without the appropriate technology or who are handicapped and using a text reader on the web. This is another one that is becoming more and more important in a site’s ranking. Also, make sure that your alternative text represents the content and isn’t used as an opportunity to place more keywords. Just summarize as simply as possible the content that the text will be replacing.

I love that I get an email from my website telling me every time someone links to one of my articles from their blog. I’ve spent so much time helping clients understand who and how people are linking to them. Sometimes, looking at Analytics, clients have been surprised at unsolicited links that have appeared just because they are putting the original content out there.

Taken directly from the WordPress Codex:

Pingbacks

Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with trackbacks. The official pingback documentation makes pingbacks sound an awful lot like trackbacks:

For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.

There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.

Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).

1. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.
2. Pingbacks do not send any content.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:

• Person A posts something on his blog.
• Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
• Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post. In this way, all editorial control over posts rests exclusively with the individual authors (unlike the trackback excerpt, which can be edited by the trackback recipient). The automatic verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it harder to fake a pingback.

Some feel that trackbacks are superior because readers of Person A’s blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say, and then decide if they want to read more (and therefore click over to Person B’s blog). Others feel that pingbacks are superior because they create a verifiable connection between posts.

Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Comments on blogs are often criticized as lacking authority, since anyone can post anything using any name they like: there’s no verification process to ensure that the person is who they claim to be. Trackbacks and Pingbacks both aim to provide some verification to blog commenting.