These two widgets are made by third-parties, so there is a slight risk if you want to use them. In case they remove their services in the future, the widgets will stop working on your site, and you have to remove/replace with widget from other party. As the rating data also stored on the widget-developers’ database, your rating counter also will be set to zero when you change to different 5-star rating widget.

Couple of 5-Star Rating Widgets for Blogger, and how to install them:

5 Star Rating Widget from js-kit:

The special feature of this widget is the information button just beside the stars. If you click it, you’ll see additional information, such as how many people have rated the current post, or top rated posts on your blog.

1. Login to your Blogger’s Dashboard. Go to Design > Edit HTML.
2. As usual, Download Full Template to backup, in case you mess up.
3. Check the Expand Widget Templates box.
4. Find this code:

   <data:post.body/>

5. Copy and paste following code just above it (if you want the rating widget to appear after post’s title), or just below it (if you want the rating widget to appear at the bottom of the post):

   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
   <div class='js-kit-rating' expr:path='data:post.url' expr:permalink='data:post.url' expr:title='data:post.title'></div>
   </b:if>

   This will display the star rating widget only in post/single pages. If you want to display in homepage also, then delete the red colored lines.

6. Now search this code:

   </body>

7. And paste this script above it:

   <script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script>

8. Save Template and you’re done.

5 Star Rating Widget from Graddit:

The special feature of this widget is the information of how many people have rated and how many have viewed the post, which can be seen beside the stars. Also, if you hover your mouse above the stars, there will be a pop-up info about how many have given 1-star, 2-star, … rating. See the example of this widget at the bottom of Funny Riddles page.

There are also some variations of the widget, such as change the stars with thumb up and thumb down. You can check the code at Graddit website to replace the code from step 5 below.

1. Login to your Blogger’s Dashboard. Go to Design > Edit HTML.
2. As usual, Download Full Template to backup, in case you mess up.
3. Check the Expand Widget Templates box.
4. Find this code:

   <data:post.body/>

5. Copy and paste following code just above it (if you want the rating widget to appear after post’s title), or just below it (if you want the rating widget to appear at the bottom of the post):

   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;static_page&quot;'>
   Rate this posting: <div expr:id='data:post.id' style='padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px; display: inline; visibility: hidden;'>
   {[[&#39;&lt;img src=&quot;http://img.graddit.com/img/star.png&quot;/&gt;&#39;]]}</div>
   <script expr:src='&quot;http://graddit.com/rate/eng/5/&quot; + data:post.id + &quot;?stats=&quot; + data:post.id + &quot;&amp;info=info-&quot; + data:post.id + &quot;&amp;info_delay=2&amp;class_star=ffbs_star_img&amp;class_star_set=ffbs_star_img_set&amp;class_star_vote=ffbs_star_img_vote&amp;views=yes&amp;id=&quot; + data:post.id + &quot;&quot;' type='text/javascript'/>
   </b:if> 

   This will display the star rating widget only in post/single pages. If you want to display in homepage also, then delete the red colored lines.

6. Now search this code:

   </head>

7. And paste this script above it:

   <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.graddit.com/css/graddit.css" />

8. Save Template and you’re done.

That’s all about how to install 5-Star Rating Widget for Blogger. I hope you will get a lot of good rating for your posts!

To overcome this, we need to implement a 301 redirect, instead of the default 302 redirect used by WordPress. 301 redirect tells search engines that the redirection is permanent, instead of temporary redirection of 302 redirect. So, if someone link to non-WWW address of my blog, the WWW one still get all the link weight.

Note that although I and most people prefer to choose the WWW version, it’s okay if you want to chose the non-WWW version. I just assume that most webmasters usually include the WWW if they want to link to other sites. Either way, the most important thing is for you to chose only one version, instead of let them go both ways like the default setting.

How to Set 301 Redirect for WordPress:

First, you need to change the setting at your Google Webmaster Tools. Login to your account, go to Site Configuration > Settings > Preferred Domain. The default is “Don’t set a preferred domain”, change this to “Display URLs as www” or without (whichever suits you more). When you want to save, if it’s ask for verification, go to the main Webmaster Tools page and choose “Add a Site”, then submit the version (WWW or without) that hasn’t been registered yet. Here’s the article on how to verify a site for Webmaster Tools.

Second, you need to change the .htaccess of your WordPress. The .htaccess file is located on your WordPress main installation folder. You can either edit this file from your hosting cPanel, or by download it via FTP and edit using WordPad. Here is how the code looks after it has been edited:

# Begin 301
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.dumbblogger\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.dumbblogger.com/$1 [L,R=301]

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Don’t forget to change dumbblogger with your domain name. If you want to redirect from the www to the non-www version, then change line 3 and 4 with this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dumbblogger\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://dumbblogger.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If your WordPress installation hasn’t included .htaccess yet (happens to some hosting services), you can create one using WordPress and fill it with the above code, then upload it to your WP main directory.

For homepage, h1 tag should be used for blog title, while for single page, h1 tag should be used for post title. The problem is, many WordPress templates set h1 tag for blog title in all pages, which is not good for page optimization, especially if your blog title is meaningless and not contain important keywords (for example, if you titled your blog with your name).

You can check your current template h tags by open your site in browser, right click on blank space and select ‘View Page Source’ (or something similar). In the source code, search for <h1 and <h2 to see to what these tags are assigned. Do this for both homepage and single page.

A while ago, I’ve posted tutorial on how to rotate h1 tag for Blogger platform, which assigns h1 tag for blog title in homepage and for post title in single page. Now we’ll learn to do the same thing on WordPress platform.

h1 for Blog Title (homepage) and Post Title (single page):

1. Login to your WP account. Go to Appearance > Editor.
2. Open the header.php from right sidebar menu. Make a backup of this file if necessary.
3. Search for <h1>(…Site-Title…)</h1>. The code can be vary as every template has its own unique name, so you should be very careful when applying changes. It’s should be located somewhere under </head> and <body> and above <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>
   For example:
   
4. Replace the code with this code:

   <?php $heading_tag = ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) ? 'h1' : 'div'; ?>
   <<?php echo $heading_tag; ?> id="site-title">
   <span>
   <a href="<?php echo home_url( '/' ); ?>" title="<?php echo esc_attr( get_bloginfo( 'name', 'display' ) ); ?>" rel="home"><?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></a>
   </span>
   </<?php echo $heading_tag; ?>>

5. Click Update File.
6. Now choose Single Post (single.php) from the sidebar menu.
   Find this code (or something similar):

   <h2 class="posttitle"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

   Change all h2 with h1 so it will look like this:

   <h1 class="posttitle"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

   Click Update File.

7. Do step 6 for page.php too if you wish. Search for class=”pagetitle” and repeat the process.
8. Done? Probably. If you check your site and nothing is wrong, then you’ve got nothing else to do. However, most templates will have a weird blog title’s font, since it’s no longer h1. To fix this, just open your style.cssfrom right sidebar menu, and add this code:

   #site-title {
   font: bold 2.7em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
   letter-spacing:-0.01em;
   float:left;
   }
   
   #site-title a, #site-title a:visited {
   color:#444;
   text-decoration:none
   }
   
   #site-title a:hover {
   color:#686868;
   }
   
   #site-title a:active {
   color:#929292;
   }

   Change the font type, size, and color to the ones that suit your blog. You can copy the parameters from h1 {……..} that located on your style.css.

9. Click Update File, and done.

You can check the result of this rotating h1 title tag by seeing the homepage’s and single page’s source codes like I’ve explained above.

In single post, h1 tag is now assigned to post title instead of blog title

Additional Tips: I’m not so sure about this, but from 6 tags available, many suggest that you should use at least the h1, h2, and h3 tags on every page. To play safe, you also should have only 1 h1 tag on every single page. Like I said, this is only a presumption, although it works fine for myself.

Using WordPress, you’ll have two options for related post widget, they’re by installing plugin, or by manually modified the template. Plugins are a wise choice if you’re looking for something customizable, as various plugins offer options to change the parameters of the widget that suit your blog more. If you seek simplicity like I do, then you can manually edit your template, which also give the benefit of faster page loading time, as it doesn’t use additional plugin.

Code for WP related post without plugin:

1. Login to your WP account. Go to Appearance > Editor.
2. Select Single Post (single.php) from right sidebar menu.
3. It’s up to you where you want to add the related post widget, but it’s usually at the end of the article. If so, then find this code: <?php the_content…….>
4. Put this code right below it, if you want to show related post by tags:

   <?php
   $tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID);
   if ($tags) {
   $tag_ids = array();
   foreach($tags as $individual_tag) $tag_ids[] = $individual_tag->term_id;
   
   $args=array(
   'tag__in' => $tag_ids,
   'post__not_in' => array($post->ID),
   'showposts'=>5,
   'caller_get_posts'=>1
   );
   $my_query = new wp_query($args);
   if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
   echo '<h3>Related Posts</h3><ul>';
   while ($my_query->have_posts()) {
   $my_query->the_post();
   ?>
   <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
   <?php
   }
   echo '</ul>';
   }
   wp_reset_query();
   }
   ?>

5. Put this code right below code in step 3, if you want to show related post by categories:

   <?php
   $categories = get_the_category($post->ID);
   if ($categories) {
   $category_ids = array();
   foreach($categories as $individual_category) $category_ids[] = $individual_category->term_id;
   
   $args=array(
   'category__in' => $category_ids,
   'post__not_in' => array($post->ID),
   'showposts'=>5,
   'caller_get_posts'=>1
   );
   $my_query = new wp_query($args);
   if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
   echo '<h3>Related Posts</h3><ul>';
   while ($my_query->have_posts()) {
   $my_query->the_post();
   ?>
   <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
   <?php
   }
   echo '</ul>';
   }
   wp_reset_query();
   }
   ?>

6. Customizable:
   ‘showposts’=>5, you can change 5 with any number, this shows the number of related posts that will be shown
   Related Posts, you can change this with any text, such as ‘Similar Post’, ‘Other Articles in this Category’, etc.
7. Don’t forget to click Update File!

If you want to see an example of the result, you can check at Chinese Food Recipes blog as I don’t use one in this site. WordPress template that I used in this blog already comes with built-up related post widget that you can see on right sidebar.

Now we’re gonna go straight to how to submit WordPress blog to such services, which slightly different from Blogger blog because WP rely much on plugins.

1. FeedBurner

First, go to www.feedburner.com. If you have any Google account (Blogger, Gmail, etc.), you just login with the same username and password. If you don’t have one, then you need to register first. Now you just fill your blog’s URL in the column under the “burn a feed right this instant” text and click next. Follow the instruction until your feed is set up, and you’ll be given with your feed’s URL, which should be something like feeds.feedburner.com/your_feed_name.

Don’t forget to activate the option Publicize > Email Subscriptions in your FeedBurner setting, and then place the given code in your blog. This widget, which you can see the example on this blog’s right sidebar, give a form that can be filled with email address if user want to be notified every time you’ve made an update.

Now you need to install FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin for your WordPress. This is not mandatory, but will give you the benefit of the plugin will detect all possible access of your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.) and redirect them all to your FeedBurner feed. This will make you able to track all of your possible feed subscriber easily, and not split them into numerous feed services.

After finish installing this plugin, just go to your WP’s Settings > FeedBurner. Fill the empty column in option number 2 with your FeedBurner URL and click save.

2. Google Analytics

Using the same Google account as your FeedBurner (off course you can use new/different account, but why?), go to www.google.com/analytics and login. Choose “Add New Account” and fill your profile information and the blog’s URL.

Since the main functions of Google Analytics are to track and monitor your site’s performances, it’s obvious that you need to install some kind of tracking code to your site. The code will be given after you’ve finished set up your account.

There are three possible methods to install this code to your WordPress blog:

• Check your template. Some custom templates have provided a column to insert Google Analytics tracking code. The column is usually accessible via Settings > (The name of your template).
• Insert it manually. Go to Appearance > Editor > Header.php.
  Find </head> and insert the code right above it. Don’t forget to click Update File.
  
• Using third party plugin, such as Google Analytics for WordPress, which not only provides column for installing code, but also gives additional tracking and monitoring function for your blog.

3. Google Webmaster Tools

Still using the same Google account, now go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools. Login and choose “Add A Site”. After filling you site’s URL, you must verify the ownership of your blog. Since you’ve already registered to Google Analytics, the easiest verify method is by choosing Alternate methods > Use your Google Analytics account. However, this method only works if you insert Analytics’ code above the </head> on your template’s header.php. So, if you use your template’s function or third party plugin to install Analytics’ code, there’s a chance that this method won’t work. Just use the Recommended method or other Alternate methods, which actually are not difficult either, only slightly take more time.

Same with Google Analytics, after you’ve done setting up, there aren’t many thing that you can do, since it will take some time for Webmaster Tools to collect your site’s data. The important thing to do now is to enter your Sitemap. Create one using XML Sitemap Generator if you haven’t, then choose Site configuration > Sitemaps > Submit a Sitemap and enter your Sitemap’s URL.

That’s all for now. Registering and submit your site to those services are only the first step. You’ll need to learn every options and functions provided by those tools for maximized your site’s performances. Maybe I’ll write (or maybe not?) the details of each FeedBurner, Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools in the future.

In term of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Sitemap is a must have for website/blog. Sitemaps are beneficial on websites where:

• webmasters use rich Ajax, Silverlight, or Flash content that is not normally processed by search engines
• site is new and has few links to it. (search engine bot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for bot to discover it.)
• site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other (internal linking).

You can easily create Sitemap by yourself, by creating a simple XML file contains the links of the pages of your site that you want search engines/users to crawl. However, this could be troublesome since you need to manually update your Sitemap every time you make change to your website, when you add a new post for example. You can automate this process by using a Sitemap generator.

If you use Blogspot platform, you can read my previous post about how to create and submit Sitemap for Blogger. While if you use WordPress, you can download and install XML-Sitemap Generator plugin.

For this plugin to work, after you’ve finished download, install, and activate the plugin, you need to build your first Sitemap. Go to Setting>XML-Sitemap from your WordPress’ right sidebar and click at the available button to generate Sitemap.

If in any case the plugin failed to built the Sitemap, you need to create it manually (for the first time only) by following these steps:

1. Create two blank files (you can use Notepad), and save them as sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz.
2. Using your favorite FTP software, upload both files to your WordPress main folder (where the wp-config.php is located).
3. From your FTP, right click on the each file, select File Attributes.
   
4. Change the numeric value to 666, so both files are having read and write permissions.
5. Now get back to your XML-Sitemap plugin settings and try to build your first Sitemap again.
6. The plugin will automatically update your sitemap of you publish a post, so theres nothing more to do. However, there are a lot of this plugin’s options that you can manage, while for me the default settings are already suffice.

This plugin is quite easy to use which you can learn by yourself. However, there are some recommended settings for All in One SEO Pack that can optimized your site even better. Before reading the tips, make sure that you download AIOSEO plugin first, and then install it on your WP site.

Now, this is the tutorial to get maximum benefits from All in One SEO Pack plugin:

Home Title

This is should be filled with your blog’s title (and tag line). Don’t spam it with keywords, and make sure its length is under 60 characters.

Home Description

This one acts as the meta description of your site. Meta description is the text shown under the blog’s title in search engine results. Fill this part with the best description of your site, also add it with adequate keywords. Keep it under 160 characters long.

Home Keywords

Okay, Google doesn’t use keyword tags anymore in their algorithm, but other search engines do, so it won’t hurt to fill this part with some targeted keywords of your site. Separate each keywords with comma, don’t repeat the same keyword numerous times, place the most important keywords first, and keep the maximum number of keywords to 20.

Canonical URLs

There are many situations that can create duplicate contents case without you even notice (and we know that duplicate contents are very despised by Google and other search engines). For example:
http://www.dumbblogger.com/seo-for-image-tips-and-tutorial/ and

http://dumbblogger.com/seo-for-image-tips-and-tutorial/

actually have the same content, but they’re have different URLs (with and without www).

By choosing to enable Canonical URLs (already on by default), you’ll prevent search engines to detect this kind of case as duplicate contents.

Rewrite Titles

If set (and you should), all page, post, category, search and archive page title tags get rewritten. Title tag is what you see in your browser’s window title bar.You can set how they will be rewritten from the options below it.

Now, the default settings by AIOSEO are already suffice for SEO, but you’ll need to look at your site title. In Post Title Format, my preference is %post_title% only, removing the %blog_title%. Check out your browser tab, this page will be titled as: “Recommended Settings for All in One SEO Pack Plugin”

Now, if I keep the default setting, this page title will be shown as “Recommended Settings for All in One SEO Pack Plugin | Dumb Blogger” which is too long and not good for SEO. So, if your site has a long title, or it doesn’t have important keyword, you might want to remove the %blog_title% from Post Title Format. Even when your site title is short (like my Dumb Blogger), you still need to take a good care to balance it with your post title if you choose to keep the format to Post Title | Blog Title.

Leave the other options to default settings.

Meta Keywords

These are the options to automatically use the tags and categories of your site as meta keywords. Since I’ve mentioned that meta tag keywords are no longer important for Google, these options won’t give much effects to your blog. Set it with your own preference, while I just prefer to leave it as default.

No Index

These give the options to make your categories, archives, and tags to no index (or no follow). The URL examples are: http://www.dumbblogger.com/category/blogger/ or http://www.dumbblogger.com/tag/search-engine-optimization/
Why make them indexed? Because this will increase the number of pages indexed by search engines, thus increase your blog visibility in their eyes.
Why make them no index? To minimize the possibility of duplicate contents detected. As you’ve probably aware, categories, tags, or archives don’t have “actual” contents, their contents are the ones that already available in single post. However, this won’t be an issue if you are correctly using the canonical tag.

My recommendation, give no index to archive and tags. The search engines don’t need to crawl through all of them to find your blog posts. It’s really no use if http://example.com/tag/dog or http://example.com/tag/food are being indexed by search engines because they’re too short and don’t contain specific keywords. While for archives (ex:  http://example.com/2011/11) is really should be set as no index.

Part II – In Post AIOSEO Setting

So, you’ve finished set up the All in One SEO Pack plugin. Done? Not yet, now come the more important part: in post optimization. Note that after you’ve done installing the plugin and enable it, there will be new widgets appear in the bottom of your WordPress post page. There are three columns that you’ll need to fill: Title, Description, and Keywords.

Title column will give you secondary title for your post. For example, see that this post is titled “All in One SEO Pack Tutorial“, but in your browser it’s displayed as “Recommended Settings for All in One SEO Pack Plugin“. Both titles will be indexed by search engines, so you should give the second title alternate keywords (synonyms) of the main title. Remember to keep it under 60 characters.

Description column gives meta tag description for your post. If you leave this column empty, search engine will automatically use the first paragraph of the article to determine its content, as search engines weighing more on post’s first paragraph. By filling this column with brief description of your post, you’ll be like having two “first paragraph” for search engine to read. This one should be less than 160 characters long.

Keywords column gives keyword tags for your post. It’s up to you whether you want to use it or not, since this doesn’t give much benefit for SEO. If you leave it blank, WP will automatically use your post tag as the keyword meta tags.

A little bit of extra work every time you post a new article, but believe me, it’s worth it. This ends the tutorial of properly set the All in One SEO Pack WordPress plugin.

Although writing an SEO friendly post is quite simple, you can’t expect that your article will always be on the first page of search engine result. The algorithms used by the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo to determine page ranks are unknown and ever changing, which makes SEO more of an art than science.

Now, these are some basic tips on how to write an SEO friendly article:

1. Choose Your Keywords. Use tools like Google AdWords Keywords Tools and Google Insight to check the trend and see the competitions. It’s useless to use a keyword that searched by a million people every month if the number of competitors are very high.
2. Keep Your Article Short. 1000 words are a good limit. Long article is not just bad for search engine, but also boring for your reader. Break your article into several posts if you must.
3. Don’t Write for Search Engine, write something for your readers instead. There’s no point of getting a lot of new visitors if they won’t come back again because of your bad writing. Every article should have a readership value.
4. Use a Credible Backlink. If you need an external source for your article, use a reliable domain such as Wikipedia and link back to them. If you give credit to the original author, people will respect you and will do the same if they use facts or quotes from yours.
5. Don’t Duplicate Text. Correlated with point no.4, if you need to take facts from other website, don’t take too much. Change it to your own words if possible. Search engine hates duplicate contents from older article.
6. Watch Your Keyword Density. Never think that much is better. You need to spread your keywords throughout the article, and put them naturally into sentences. Some say that the good keyword density is between 1% – 3%.
7. Keyword Positions. Putting your keyword in post’s title is a must. Then try using the keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph, as well as the last one of the article. Placing keyword in sub-title also can be even more effective.
8. Internal Linking. Link important words to earlier related blog posts. Search engines generally assume that a blog post that has been linked to has more authority than one that has not. This can also be useful for increasing your site’s page-views.
9. Check Your Spelling. You don’t want search engine to miss your article just because you typed the keyword wrong.
10. Be Original. It proves difficult, but you will gain a lot of advantages if what you wrote can’t be found in other websites.

That’s it about tips on how to write an SEO friendly article. I hope you’ll find it useful!.

I personally think that the most powerful SEO technique is by writing unique and useful contents, combined with back-links from high quality and related sites. Although, submitting site/blog to directories still prove useful to increase site’s visibility for search engine, especially for new websites. Moreover, we also can expect to gain few additional traffics from directories, especially if our site gets high ranking in those directories.

These are the list of some known free website and blog directories. These free blog directories have the non-reciprocal link option, meaning that you’ll get one-way link when you submitting your site to them (and if they approve it, of course):

http://www.dmoz.org

http://technorati.com/

http://www.jayde.com/

http://www.blogcatalog.com/

http://www.10directory.com/

http://www.1abc.org/

http://www.5z5.com/ (feeds submission only)

http://www.a1webdirectory.org/

http://www.addsitelink.com/

http://www.allsitessorted.com/

http://www.bestdirectory4you.com/

http://www.blfree.com/

http://www.brightsidexdr.com/

http://www.crazyleafdesign.com/webdirectory/

http://directory.kcindex.com/

http://www.directory.pkdesign.sk/

http://www.directoryws.com/

http://www.esgsite.com/

http://www.exospy.com/

http://www.finest4.com/

http://www.freewebsitedirectory.com

http://www.info-listings.com/

http://www.linkaddurl.com/

http://www.linkdirectory.com.ar/

http://www.littlewebdirectory.com/links.asp

http://mastermoz.com/

http://miriblack.com/

http://www.nicksyear.com/

http://www.pegasusdirectory.com/

http://www.prolinkdirectory.com/

http://www.quickblogdirectory.com/

http://www.rankbl.com/

http://searchsight.com/Directory.htm

http://www.segta.net/

http://www.slackalice.com/

http://www.soveb.org/

http://tagspage.com/add_tag.php

http://www.the-web-directory.co.uk/

http://www.thelivinglink.net/

http://www.theshoppings.com/

http://www.topbloglists.com/

http://www.ubdaily.com/

http://www.webdirectory.co.in/

http://www.webdirectory.nu/

http://www.webworldindex.com/

http://www.yhay.com/

http://www.zopso.com/

And these are the free blog directories list that require you to place reciprocal link, usually in the form of text link or small button:

http://www.blogarama.com/

http://www.bloglisting.net/

http://www.bloglog.com/

http://www.blogsrating.com/

http://blogtoplist.com/

http://www.blogtopsites.com/

http://fuelmyblog.com/

http://www.linkreferral.com/

http://www.ongsono.com/

http://topofblogs.com/

When this article was written, all of the above blog directories provide free submission service.

Please contribute to this article by leaving a comment if you find any of the above directory are no longer in service, or no longer provide free submission. You can also give some suggestion if you know any other free blog directory that I can add to the list. Thanks!

When practice SEO for image, we need to remember that search engines can’t see what the picture is about, that’s why we need to help them to “read” the image. There are several tips that you’re gonna find from this article that you can try. Note that these SEO for images tutorial is only for optimizing the picture for better search engine result, not to optimizing for faster blog load time. We’ll get to that in other post.

It's a shame if this beautiful girl won't be appeared on search engine result because of bad image's SEO, right?

Blogger and WordPress Image’s SEO Tips:

• Keywords in image file name. I’ve seen some people keep the original file name of their image, such as DSC123456.jpg, which is a terrible naming, in the term of SEO. Give name like SEO-for-image.jpg or niagara-waterfall.png for your pictures.
  Important: Keep the name short, use - or + instead of space.
• Use the ALT tag.The ALT tag is the text that will be shown when image can’t be displayed by browser, whether because of incompatibility or slow internet connection. More importantly, the ALT tag provides alternate information of the image, which used by search engine to understand what the image is about.
  • For Bloggerplatform, you have to add the ALT tag manually. When you upload an image to Blogger, the HTML will look something like this:

    <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5qwaQC-bE80/TpaDEbHTZtI/AAAAAAAACDM/fmQHXim5PIw/s1600/whatever.jpg">
    <img style="cursor: pointer; width: 110px; height: 100px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5qwaQC-bE80/TpaDEbHTZtI/AAAAAAAACDM/fmQHXim5PIw/s400/whatever.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5662857693486081746" border="0" /></a>

    Fill the alt tag between the “ and “ marks.

  • For WordPress platform, you can fill the ALT tag right in the given column when uploading an image.
• Use the Title attribute. This is not mandatory, but recommended, as it has little effect for SEO, but it will be shown as tool-tip (text that appears when you hover your mouse cursor over an image) on most browsers.
  Example:

  <img style="cursor: pointer; width: 110px; height: 100px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5qwaQC-bE80/TpaDEbHTZtI/AAAAAAAACDM/fmQHXim5PIw/s400/whatever.jpg" title="whatever picture" alt="whatever it is" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5662857693486081746" border="0" /></a>

• If possible, do not use the same ALT tags and Title attributesfor two or more images on the same page.
• Surround image with keywords text. When ALT tags, filenames and TITLE attributes aren’t SEO friendly, search engines will use the surrounding text to determine what the image is about.
• For self-hosting blog/website, name the folders where you upload your images with your keyword variants in place.
• Edit and crop images to avoid duplicates. Well, you must be aware that you can’t copy and paste article from other blogs without worry about penalties from search engine, right? This also applies for image. Image also has its own attributes and resolution. To avoid duplicate images, especially if you copy the image from Google search, edit and change the image resolution might prove useful.
• Avoid naming your image with unfriendly keywords, such as hot, sexy, nude, naked, lingerie, leaked picture, etc. Your pictures will be banned from image search results (unless if you turn off the safe-search mode). This doesn’t mean that your site is being banned from search engine, it will still shown on SERP. Only the images that are considered not family-friendly, thus won’t be shown even when safe search is set to moderate.
• Note for WordPress user, although filling alt and title tags in WP are much more easier than Blogger, you still can automate the process by using SEO Friendly Images plugin. You can choose whether you want to use the combination of your image file’s name, post title, post category, and post tags as the alt and title tags. Be careful to not set the “Override default WordPress image alt tag” on if you want to use your own specific image tags.

That’s it. I hope by applying those SEO for images technique you can gain more traffic from search engine.