SEO Strategy

Wikipedia gets a lot of Google love. By some estimations Google drives more traffic to Wikipedia than to any other site. Just do some random searches in Google and see how many times a Wikipedia page comes up very high in the results.

So presumably we can learn something about SEO from Wikipedia. According to this article and discussion, What Wikipedia can teach us about SEO, there are a few important things that account for Wikipedia’s SEO success:

1. Wikipedia uses search engine friendly file names, title tags and page descriptions.

2. Wikipedia has a ton of text based content - and, of course, it is very keyword focused.

3. The internal linking between Wikipedia pages is very extensive and very thorough.

4. Wikipedia has more than 5 million inbound links, and many (if not most) to internal pages.

This should make Wikipedia a much-copied model for all websites looking for good Google rankings. But the fact is, many marketers - especially those running ecommerce sites - do not appreciate the importance of on-page optimization. They are content to show a picture of a product with a short description and price. But if they were to follow the Wikipedia model they would use keyword-rich titles for all product pages, along with optimized descriptions on every page. They would also inter-link internal  pages - not just from a common navigation bar, but from within the text of pages by using such devices as “Similar products you might be interested in…”

However, as many of us involved in providing SEO services know, many clients are not prepared to go that far. It would take much more than just tweaking their page titles and metatags. It would take a remake of their entire site, involving writing of a lot of text, and actually providing some useful information about the products.

Most prefer to just offload the problem to someone else and spend their money on things like link building. But that is only half the battle. Without decent content it is hard to win at the SEO game.

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

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 »

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.

In a series of blog posts Jonathan Leger has examined some of the more common myths about SEO (search engine optimization). In the post called “Beware of “common sense” search engine optimization!” Jonathan presents concrete examples to debunk what he calls the “The Themed-Link Myth”. This is the claim that links from sites with the same theme are the only way to rank for your keywords. This is usually referred to as the “relevance” criterion: you must have links from relevant sites (those with a closely related theme) in order to do well in Google SERPs.

Jonathan presents a couple of examples that he thinks clearly contradict this claim. He says of submitexpress.com, for instance,

“If you go to Google and take a look at the backlinks pointing to submitexpress.com (using the link: command), you’ll notice that very, very few of those links have anything to do with search engine optimization or marketing at all.”

Jonathan’s point is that you don’t need links from pages with a similar theme to yours. You just need a lot of links.

This seems to square with my own observations - although I admit I have not done an exhaustive study of the situation. It should be pointed out however, that Jonathan’s study is not very exhaustive either. If, as many SEO specialists point out, a link from a “relevant” high PR site is worth significantly more than a link from a low PR “irrelevant” page, than having such a link (one from a relevant high PR site) will skew the result significantly. It is not really satisfactory to draw hard and fast conclusions until such an analysis is undertaken.

What would be most instructive is if it could be shown that there is little obvious difference in link value between a high PR link from a “relevant” site and one from an “irrelevant” site.

My own conjecture is that you would find there is very little difference (and thus I am agreeing with Jonathan’s thesis). But, apart from what I have more or less casually observed, my reason is quite speculative. I don’t think Google (or anybody else) has the ability to make the necessary evaluations about “relevance” to make such evaluations meaningful, and therefore they (probably) don’t even try to do it.

That isn’t to say they won’t have that ability in the future. And if they did, links from “relevant” sources would have more value in the future as a result.

In any event, links from “relevant” sources have other things going for them - the most important of which is to attract traffic from those sources.

Aaron Wall’s SEOBook is packed full of SEO tips and SEO strategies. It is a massive 328 pages in downloadable ebook format, and is full of case studies which describe both his SEO successes and failures.

If you want a detailed introduction to SEO theory, SEO strategy, SEO techniques, and SEO best practices follow this link for more information about SEOBook.

As you probably know, the point of SEO is to get the search engines to send visitors to your website. Traffic is what it’s all about, and SEO is meant to generate traffic.

SEO accomplishes this by helping you come up high in Google’s search results for your most important keyword phrases.

But is SEO difficult? Do you need special skills to be effective? Is it a mysterious art that only a few understand?

Not at all. Getting good search engine ranking is not as difficult as you might think. Even if you have failed miserably in the past, you can be successful right now by applying some very basic principles.

SEO is really just common sense once you understand it.

So how DO you choose the right search terms and then come up high in search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords?

You have to think like a search engine.

That’s right. You have to think like a search engine.

And the most important thing to understand is that search engines only read what is there on the page. They do not read between the lines or make assumptions about your content like humans do.

Continue Reading »

This blog is called SEO Strategy and is about SEO Strategy. SEO is a group of techniques used to get better results and more traffic from search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo and others. This blog will discuss a range of SEO tactics and strategies aimed at “optimizing” search engine results.