Lots of so called self confessed professionals will say to you that you ought to use certain entries in your Title, Description, alts, keywords and other places. Be sure that you have enough H1 and H2 tags and use bold a few times. Forget that! These worked very well years ago, but for Google in particular, these are more or less overlooked. I have successfully got web sites to the top of Google without even mentioning one or more of the search terms anywhere in the code.

I am not sure why people still insist on using these tags and attributes. From time to time, I think it is just to baffle less technical people. There might still be a small help in filing these attributes and tags with your desired keywords, but I doubt it is much. The difficulty is that they are too simple stuffed with random, irrelevant, keywords.

Search engines instead are putting loads of value in what happens off the website. So do not worry if changing your website code sounds too difficult or you do not maintain the code. You could do everything that is needed without changing a line of code!

Well, for my own web site design web site, I appear on the first page for various local listings, without mentioning the local areas on the site. As for instance, Merseyside does not appear in the code, yet I appear on the first page of Google for searches on site design Merseyside.

My home page does naturally discuss web site design and gives more details on the services offered. And this is the key to how a well optimised website page should look. The page should naturally mention and deal with the keywords. A few mentions of them, probably in different contexts and mentioning them in different ways. For example, website design and designing a web site.

Do not ever over-do the number of times that a keyword is mentioned in a website. Some people suggest a rule of each keyword representing no in excess of 2% of the words on a page. So, if the web page contains 300 words, which is a detailed page, then you could have no over 6 mentions of any of your individual keyword.

Take this to the extreme of a 200 word page, and if you used a keyword in the title, description, and keyword meta tags and once in an alt attribute, then you would have hit your 2% exclusive of mentioning it once in the text. So, for the finest results, be certain that that you declare keywords naturally instead of stuffing them everywhere that you might. But it is the next stage, link building, that is vital.

Plugins add a lot of value to WordPress blogs, but too many will slow down your pages. So, which ones are the essential ones to use?

Akismet
Where would we be without Akismet? When I first used WordPress Akismet was near enough standard and everyone downloaded it. Now, it is standard and included in the latest versions of WordPress. And it is certainly worth using if you are leaving comments open. So get yourself an API key and make sure that you activate it. If you do not, then you are leaving yourself open to loads of comment spam.

WordPress.com Stats
I first started using this as part of another plugin, but very quickly grew to find the plugin very useful. Previously I had always relied on Google Analytics for my website stats, but this plugin, which gives less detail, presents what you need to know right in your blog. Graphs of up to the minute visitor stats, where they have come from, how they found you and where they went. Invaluable information to improve your blog.

WordPress.com Popular Posts
This is the plugin that requires the stats and why I discovered the stats plugin. This plugin in itself allows you to display a list of your most often referred to posts. These popular posts are a good way of steering visitors around your blog to areas of interest and a way of keeping them on your blog for longer. Ultimately, this builds trust and makes them more likely to join your RSS or newsletter.

Contact Form 7
A simple and easy to use contact form. It does what it says! But I think it is one of the most useful plugins because it gives you the basis for a contact page, without having to display your email address. If you do display your email, then spammers can scrape it and start filling your inbox. But do not have any contact method available and then no-one can make you advertising offers and so on!

Really Simple CAPTCHA
Again, does what it says! Only one function to this plugin and that is to display a CAPTCHA box on your newsletter. But by using this plugin you are almost fully preventing spammers from automatically submitting your contact form and saving yourself a load of spam!

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Where are your readers going to go once they reach the bottom of the post that they are currently reading? Well, install this little plugin and it will suggest similar themed posts on your blog that might interest them. You know what they are reading about now, so offer them more. Again, this is a simple method of increasing the time that visitors spend on your website and the chances of them becoming a regular reader of your blog.

Post to Twitter
Almost perfect this plugin, I use it frequently on my blogs. It just sends the title of your post to your Twitter account every time you publish a new post, which not only saves you the effort, but gives your posting more exposure via Twitter. This can increase your Twitter followers whilst increasing your blog’s readers. As I said, almost perfect, I just make a simple change to the way that it posts the title, but this is not really required so use it as it stands.