However, this ignores the social nature of the web. In our first post on SEO software, I made the point that one must perform SEO in order to make it easier for humans to use your site and not just for search engines. By linking out, you make your site more useful to others. But how do we balance out SEO needs and usability needs?

The answer is inlinking. A logical reading of Google’s PageRankng algorithm gives us the answer. When you link to other pages in your site, you redirect more and more link juice into your web pages. Then the leak caused by linking out drops dramatically. For example, if you have just two links on your page. One to your home page and one going out, half the link juice goes out from the outgoing link. If you have 3 more inlinks, then only 1/5th of the link juice exits your site.

Most sites and blogs these days have numerous links going back into the site. Menus, archive pages, categories and tag pages. If you try and link back to pages in your site, you can happily link to external sites for the convenience of your users and suffer no significant penalty. This way, you’ll also be a good citizen of the Internet and your viewers will appreciate it.

By the way, it’s bad manners to use the rel=”nofollow” tag for links going out of your site. If you think a site is worth linking to, then do it justice by letting it have the credit for that link.

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.