Wordpress and SEO

[cameron032]

All in One Seo Pack + Google XML Sitemap are a good place to start. Also, be sure to add pages for "about us", "privacy policy" and "contact us". That always seems to help..

[casinochipsj]

wordpress is a good place to start but you are just scratching the surface for seo and rankings

[dublinbetPaul]

Yep, I'd definitely recommend WP. I've used AllInOne and Platinum SEO plugins. Both seem to be pretty good.

One thing I can't get my head round is whether to have 'follow' or 'no-follow' links. I've spoken to a couple of SEO experts and they've given different answers. Aaaaaargh!

[best.hands]

One thing I can't get my head round is whether to have 'follow' or 'no-follow' links. I've spoken to a couple of SEO experts and they've given different answers. Aaaaaargh!

Linking to your site as well as linking out to other sites can incur your site good and bad effects depending on how you are actually doing it.

Linking to your site:
Pros:
- You can control the majority of it.
- You have a major control over which neighborhood you wish the algorithm would understand your site is in.

Cons:
- You can mess it up, especially when you are linking from other sites using inappropriate anchor texts.
- Your site can appear in a bad neighbor, especially when you are linking from other sites that is not, in anyway, related to your site.

(remember, bots learn about the other links in the page where your site's link appears. This means if you link to your gambling site using 'online gambling' as anchor text, but the other link on the page links to 'dental insurance', bots would simply think your gambling site is related to dental insurance, thus have it doubt if your gambling site is really for online gambling and not for something like online gambling dental insurance as it was understood in the page. )

Linking out to other sites:
Pros:
- You have full control of it.
- It's an act of declaring to bots that what you link to is your neighbor. (ex. linking to wikipedia can have bots thinking wikipedia is your neighbor. Now, imagine how great your link neighborhood can be with the ever high quality site like wikipedia in it. It can influence your linking profile.)

Cons:
- That control can possibly lead to a bad effect, especially when you are not actually checking out and regularly monitoring the sites or pages you're giving link to. (ex. linking to non-existing pages can incur bad user experience, to bots, it is bad as well. )

Think of it this way, if you are linking to your site from a site's page that's not totally related to yours, it should be issued a nofollow. This is to excuse your site from possibly declaring to crawlers that your site belongs to the non-related neighborhood, which can possibly cause a drop in rankings.

Moreover, if you are linking out to other sites, be sure to use nofollow when it is not related to your site or you are not sure if the site is good or not, but have seen the need to link to it.

The point is, employ nofollow when the link out is not relevant and assured of quality and stability.

[casinochipsj]

One thing I can't get my head round is whether to have 'follow' or 'no-follow' links. I've spoken to a couple of SEO experts and they've given different answers. Aaaaaargh!

Here are some articles that discuss when and how to use follow and nofollow:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/f...-linking/6361/

http://www.searchengineoptimizationj...no-follow-tag/

In general most affiliates would use nofollow when linking out to affiliate programs.