There is a lot of complicated information in this module, but most people are going to use it to find out three things. Which sites are sending you traffic, how many direct hits to your site, and most importantly, which keywords are being used to send visitors to your site. The last one is is a real boon for SEO masters as they can also see how much time each visitor spends on the site broken down by keyword. You might suddenly find a niche that you haven’t explored yet by looking at what people are searching for.

Good SEO experts will also use this tool to find out commonly used variations of keywords that they have overlooked and optimize their pages accordingly. Really, with the wealth of data available the uses are only limited by your imagination. Along with Visitor Tracking information, Traffic Sources provides a rounded profile about your sites visitors.

A mostly neglected part of on page SEO is the <b> or <strong> tag. Enclosing an important keyword in these tags will have a small impact on your page’s SEO. This is so because the eye of a human is naturally drawn to such text and search engines like Google try and duplicate human behavior.

However, also keep in mind that search engines are very sensitive to spammy techniques. Keep to the straight and narrow. Don’t bold more than one phrase per 250 words or so. More than that, and you risk a search engine penalizing you for trying to be overly manipulative. When in doubt, ask yourself the question – does this make my content more readable? If it does, then go ahead.

If possible, ensure that the first “bold” phrase arrives within the first 100 words. This is because the first paragraph of an article sets the tone and a bold phrase in that article is of high importance – not as important as a h2 heading of course, but certainly noteworthy.

However, one aspect of Wordpress has always bugged me. If you go to a typical wordpress post page, you will find that the important H1 tag is used up by the blog name and that the most important part of the post – the title of the post – is relegated to a meager H2. There’s no easy fix for this via the GUI and your best bet is to wade into the PHP files that make up your theme and hardcode the tags yourself – a bit complex if you don’t program, but you don’t need to know PHP to do that. If you can program in any language yourself, then you should be able to pick out the syntax easily. If you’re familiar with the ASP type spagghetti code, it’ll be a breeze.

The exact file to change will depend on your wordpress theme. What you need to do is the following:

1. Find the php file that gives your blog title the H1 tag. Could be header.php or index.php
2. Use the conditional statement is_single() to check if the page being displayed is a single post page or the home page or any other archive like page with multiple posts
3. If it’s a single post page, use H1 for the post title and the H2 tag for the blog name
4. Enter your style.css and change the styles of the H2 and H1 headings so that they look OK

If this looks complex, it’s because is. There’s no easy workaround. If you know of one, feel free to post your comments.