SEO Strategy

I’ve been wanting to delve a little more deeply into SEO for Wordpress, so I’ve compiled some Wordpress SEO tips from a few different sources. My sources are at the end of the article.

1. Put your primary keywords in your blog name, and make sure your blog name is wrapped in an h1 tag in your stylesheet. In Wordpress your blog name usually appears in the header on every page.

2. Use the SEO Title Tag plugin to allow you to make your page titles different from your post titles. Each post has its own page title which by default has the Blog Name first followed by the Post Title. But this is less than optimal on two counts. First, the page title should be more tightly focused for SEO purposes than the actual post title, and second, the Blog Name should not come first (if at all) in the page title. For a specific example of how you should fine tune your page and post titles, see Optimizing Wordpress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs.

3. For each post put your target keyword phrase for that post in the post title - Remember that each post is considered a distinct page, so just as with web pages, a primary SEO strategy is to make sure you optimize the title. This, along with your page title is probably the most important thing you can do. Both titles (page title and post title) should contain the exact keyword phrase you are optimizing for.

4. Write your post title to attract readers. This is what will show up in the search engines and should be designed to get clicks.

4. Wrap your post titles in an h1 tag - Many themes are set up so that the blog name (e.g., SEO Strategy) has an h1 tag and the post title has an h2 tag. From the SEO point of view this is not correct. You want your post title to be recognized as the primary title for the page. Leave these titles as h2 on the index.php page, but change them to h1 on the “Single Post” page.

This will take some tweaking of your theme pages. Go to your Admin dashboard, then go to Theme Editor. Click on Single Post and find where it says

<h2><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

Change the <h2>tag to an <h1>. Make sure you tweak your Stylesheet so the <h1>tag looks correct.

4. Use your target keyword in the text of the post - Optimize each post just like you would optimize a web page. Use your precise target keyword, especially in the first few sentences. Then use related keywords throughout the post.

5. Put your post names in your permalinks - If you have put your keywords in your post titles this will also put them in your permalinks. So instead of looking like this,

http://www.rickhendershot.com/?p=123

Your permalinks will look like this:

http://www.rickhendershot.com/article-marketing/article-marketing-insights-in-ebook/

For instructions on how to do this see Top Wordpress SEO Tips for Top 10 Rankings

6. Post links to your best posts in social networking sites - Be sure to use the appropriate tags. You’ll have to discover what are the most effective ways to get powerful links back to your posts from social bookmarking and social networking sites. This will get you backlinks, traffic, links from other bloggers interested in your posts, and reinforce your SEO focus. Some of my favourites are Digg, PlugIM, Clipmarks, Mister Wong, Propeller, StumbleUpon - there are really too many to mention.

7. Link to your best posts from other resources - Use articles, blog comments, and other blog posts to link back to your best posts.

Some of my sources for this post:

Top Wordpress SEO Tips for Top 10 Rankings, from The Optimizer - Weekly SEO News

10 Ways To Optimize Wordpress For More Traffic , from BoydCreative

Optimizing Wordpress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs, from Graywolf’s SEOBlog

Here’s a post (Make Money with This Niche Marketing Model) where Bo at Marketing Syndrome suggests creating a niche site using nothing other than videos supplied directly from one or more of the major video uploading sites.

For instance, rather than going to Youtube and sifting through hundreds of videos about everything under the sun. create a site focused on your target keywords that contains only videos from that catgegory.

In fact, I found a a nice little piece of software called Youtube Video Sitemaker that will create sites like this in about 10 minutes, all neatly formatted, titles and keywords and Adsense blocks in place. You can even create a list of keywords that will form a tag cloud in the margin. Click on one of them and you’ll be presented with a selection of Youtube videos about nothing other than that keyword. So far I’ve used this on about 5 different sites and haven’t had a hitch installing it yet.

Here’s a couple of examples built around specific keywords:

Article Marketing
Help With Acne
Loans and Credit

The ebook called “Article Marketing Domination” by Josh Spaulding contains some interesting and very useful information if you use, or are considering using articles for marketing your online products or services.

Josh makes many practical suggestions, but perhaps the most important are:

1. Don’t get hung up on writing primarily for link building purposes. Write for your human readers so you will get clicks on the links in your resource box. Drive traffic by writing quality content and drawing readers to your embedded links.

2. If you are using an article distribution service such as isnare.com or articlemarketers.com you are probably not maximizing your article marketing efforts.

These are what I call “old style” article distribution services, and I too stopped using these services about two years ago. Why? Because they distribute the exact same article to hundreds of relatively low quality article sites - resulting in what is essentially article spam.

They may also miss the most important article sites such as ezinearticles, articledashboard and ideamarketers.com (along with several others). These are the sites that get the most traffic, are considered most important in the eyes of the search engines, and are usually the most picky in terms of article quality. Because of these things they will drive the most traffic to your sites.

Josh suggests you should focus primarily on the five or six most important sites - make sure your articles get into those directories - especially ezinearticles.com. He also makes some very useful suggestions about dominating your niche(s) in ezinearticles.com and getting even more readership and links back to your articles.

I highly recommend “Article Marketing Domination” by Josh Spaulding.

Article marketing is generally assumed by almost everybody involved in internet marketing to be one of the best ways to build traffic, links, reputation, and even authority in your niche.

In its most simple form article marketing just involves writing something with links back to one of your websites, and then posting it on a few (or many) article sites. Here are some things worth remembering:

1. Write quality material. You are not just after links, but presumably people in your target niche will actually read your articles, come to recognize you name and judge the quality of your opinion and knowledge based on what they read in your articles.

2. Be sure to give your articles an effective title. For your human readers the title should be interesting and catchy - something to entice them to read it. For the search engines it should contain your target keyword phrase. It is usually the title that determines the SEO value of an article.

3. Be sure to distribute your articles to the most effective article directories. There are hundreds of article sites out there, but some are more influential than others. The most influential from the SEO point of view, and the ones that generally get the most traffic are the ones with the highest page rank. You might want to do a search for a variety of search terms and see which article sites come up the most.

Chances are you’ll see ezinearticles.com coming up a lot. After that some of the best are:
ideamarketers.com
articledashboard.com
buzzle.com
articlebiz.com
articlecity.com

All of these are included in the distribution list of Content Spooling - an article writing and distribution service which I highly recommend.

Here are some more articles about article marketing.

It is common practice to put the website navigation bar along the left side of each web page within a site. If you have done any web page building, and if you have reflected at all on the problems of SEO, you have probably recognized that a left nav bar may very well have a negative SEO impact.

Why? Because it is often the first thing read (after the header) by the SE spiders. Most of us who have done any SEO research have concluded that the content at the top of a page (main headline, first few paragraphs, first few links) establishes the theme of the page and tells the spiders what the page is about.

So we assume that most of our optimization efforts should be devoted to the text at the top of the page: put your desired keyword phrase in the main headline (h1), a number of times in the first couple of paragraphs or sentences, and possibly include it in an outbound link to another highly relevant page within your site.

But if you’ve got a navbar before your primary content (in the left column), then chances are you’ve got a bunch of different keywords and outbound links (to other pages in your site) that seriously dilute the focus of your page. This means that you are counting on your page title tag and headline in the header area to do all the heavy SEO lifting.

Continue Reading »

In his recently released report titled “Search Engine Myths Exposed” Jonathan Leger tackles some of the most basic assumptions most of us make about getting successful ranking in Google.

He presents case studies and actual research to show that most of these assumptions are nothing but “myths” propagated by “gurus” who are just repeating stuff they have heard elsewhere, usually to promote their own products.

Of course Jonathan himself is promoting a product - a link generating product called 3-Way Links - so we might wonder if that has influenced his emphasis in the report just a bit.

Personally I think not, since he has been consistently saying the same thing ever since I have been following him. He also provides some pretty convincing evidence that, Continue Reading »

Most SEO discussions about “spam” focus on the search engines - what you can get away with vs. how likely you are to get “banned”. In the case of those people trying to market using social networking sites this discussion shifts slightly to “How can I get lots of links on these sites without getting caught (and frozen out)?”

For instance, I belong to a video uploading service where it has been recommended that the same video be uploaded to the same site with some minor changes in order to multiply exposure, backlinks, etc. The suggestion is that certain things about the video be changed for each upload - the title, the tags, the description, the encoded format - but not the actual content of the video itself.

Others in other contexts have suggested that the openness and current Google-love towards social bookmarking sites can be exploited by opening several accounts and bookmarking the same sites in each account. The discussion as to the appropriateness of these practices is always “Can I get away with it?”, “Will I get banned?” This is similar to a discussion about the morality of stealing or murder focusing on whether or not we will get caught. But anybody who has ever thought about “good” and “bad” knows that there are other, “deeper” reasons why we should not condone things like lying, stealing, murder, fraud, etc.

Continue Reading »

I’ve put together a short video showing how the Microsoft adCenter Labs Keyword Forecast tool works. It gives you the same sort of data you get from Google Trends - it shows you how searches on specific keywords have trended over the last few months, and this lets you do a rough and ready prediction of where that keyword is going in the near future.

This Microsoft offering is quite different from Google Trends. First, the data used by MS (right now anyway) seems to be at least 6 months old. Google Trends gives you a more current trend line.

But Google Trends doesn’t give you any actual search volume numbers. They removed this information from Adwords about a year ago, and they don’t provide it here either. So in GT you can see the “trend”, but you have no idea of how many searches are being done on a search term without using another tool that actually gives you those numbers.

MS Keyword Forecast gives you the numbers, although they don’t tell you where they come from, and it is not likely they are very accurate. The same can be said of the numbers you get from other tools such as Wordtracker or Adwords Analyzer. The search volume numbers are really only useful because they show you relative search volume numbers. For example, in the video linked above we see that “sending flowers” gets much less search volume than “send flowers”. Google Trends doesn’t give us that information.

The MS tool will also let you graph two or three search terms together so you get a direct comparison of the search volume for the terms, and the way they are trending.

Click on the image above to watch a short video about MS Keyword Forecast.

Here’s the first step in creating and implementing an effective SEO strategy -  Do a preliminary keyword analysis to find the most potentially lucrative search terms.

A good search term is one that

1. gets some searches and
2. does not have a ton of competition.

Here are some tools you can use to find keywords like this:

1. Adword Analyzer
2. Google Trends
3. Google Adwords Keyword Analysis Tools
4. Microsoft Keyword Forcast Tool
5. Wordtracker

If you don’t want to do the analysis yourself, contact us for a <a href=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/free-keyword-analysis.php” mce_href=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/free-keyword-analysis.php”>Free Keyword Analysis</a> and we’ll suggest some keywords that are likely to work for you.

You don’t usually want to go after the most popular keywords because the competition will be fierce to get good Google ranking for these terms. Choose “long tail” terms - usually consisting of 3 or 4 words - that you have a chance of scoring well on and that will get you good ranking.

Remember, these are the kind of keywords you are looking for:

1. Keywords that get some searches and therefore can generate some traffic, and

2. Keywords that do not have a lot of competition - the fewer websites chasing ranking for them the better.

Once you find some good keywords, then you’re ready to go to town optimizing some webpages for them.