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Leveraging WordPress SEO Plugins
Creating and publishing a website is no longer a mysterious, esoteric task that is reserved only for computer geeks. These days, just about everyone and their dog has a website. Anyone wanting a piece of the virtual pie can easily sign up for a free Blogger blog or one of the major Web 2.0 properties like HubPages or Squidoo in about five minutes. Plus, there are lots of WYSIWYG editors available that make creating a beautiful, interactive webpage a very simple process.
One of the most popular tools for hosting a blog is WordPress, an open-source project that is freely available for the downloading. There are at least a thousand tutorials available on the ‘net for how to set up a WordPress blog, configure the theme, upload it to your own hosting account, and so on. This article is not going to re-cover that ground. It has been done more than enough. The question is, what do you do once your blog is online, to get the word out so that you can get traffic?
The answer to that question is: search engine optimization. SEO is basically the process of driving traffic to your website organically (that is, not paid) from the search engines. To get the search engine “spiders” or “bots” to notice your site among the “billions and billions” of pages out on the web, and then rank it “high” in the results pages (so people will find it easily), you’ll need to work on these three general tasks:
- Make sure your content is relevant to the keywords people are searching with
- Optimizing your website and its content with keyword emphasis and linking structures
- Building inbound links to your website from others, preferably those in your same niche
This article focuses on the tools that can simplify item (2) in the list. Backlinking, the process described in (3), is a subject for a whitepaper, not just a short article. And, obviously, it is up to you to be sure your content is relevant to the keywords you are attaching to your pages as mentioned in item (1); just use your common sense.
The good news is that there are any number of tools to simplify the job to improve the optimization on your website. Owing to the popularity of WordPress, an entire industry is producing add-on capabilities in specialized themes and WordPress SEO plugins to facilitate optimizing sites built with the platform. You can dig up all sorts of tools, ranging from free plugins like Platinum SEO, HeadSpace2, and Google Video Sitemaps to premium plugins like SEOPressor or SEO Booster Pro.
Here is a short list of plugins you should investigate:
- SEOPressor WordPress Plugin
- Platinum SEO Pack
- All-in-One SEO Pack
- Google XML Sitemap
- Google Image Sitemap
- Google Video Sitemap
- Automatic SEO Links
- HeadSpace2
Always remember, though: put good content on your site that will provide real value for your visitors. Treat your visitors well, and you will get your fair share of traffic; just be sure to do your SEO correctly, and you can speed up the process considerably!
Leveraging WordPress SEO Plugins
Creating and publishing a website is no longer a mysterious, esoteric task that is reserved only for computer geeks. These days, just about everyone and their dog has a website. Anyone wanting a piece of the virtual pie can easily sign up for a free Blogger blog or one of the major Web 2.0 properties like HubPages or Squidoo in about five minutes. Plus, there are lots of WYSIWYG editors available that make creating a beautiful, interactive webpage a very simple process.
One of the most popular tools for hosting a blog is WordPress, an open-source project that is freely available for the downloading. There are at least a thousand tutorials available on the ‘net for how to set up a WordPress blog, configure the theme, upload it to your own hosting account, and so on. This article is not going to re-cover that ground. It has been done more than enough. The question is, what do you do once your blog is online, to get the word out so that you can get traffic?
The answer to that question is: search engine optimization. SEO is basically the process of driving traffic to your website organically (that is, not paid) from the search engines. To get the search engine “spiders” or “bots” to notice your site among the “billions and billions” of pages out on the web, and then rank it “high” in the results pages (so people will find it easily), you’ll need to work on these three general tasks:
- Make sure your content is relevant to the keywords people are searching with
- Optimizing your website and its content with keyword emphasis and linking structures
- Building inbound links to your website from others, preferably those in your same niche
This article focuses on the tools that can simplify item (2) in the list. Backlinking, the process described in (3), is a subject for a whitepaper, not just a short article. And, obviously, it is up to you to be sure your content is relevant to the keywords you are attaching to your pages as mentioned in item (1); just use your common sense.
The good news is that there are any number of tools to simplify the job to improve the optimization on your website. Owing to the popularity of WordPress, an entire industry is producing add-on capabilities in specialized themes and WordPress SEO plugins to facilitate optimizing sites built with the platform. You can dig up all sorts of tools, ranging from free plugins like Platinum SEO, HeadSpace2, and Google Video Sitemaps to premium plugins like SEOPressor or SEO Booster Pro.
Here is a short list of plugins you should investigate:
- SEOPressor WordPress Plugin
- Platinum SEO Pack
- All-in-One SEO Pack
- Google XML Sitemap
- Google Image Sitemap
- Google Video Sitemap
- Automatic SEO Links
- HeadSpace2
Always remember, though: put good content on your site that will provide real value for your visitors. Treat your visitors well, and you will get your fair share of traffic; just be sure to do your SEO correctly, and you can speed up the process considerably!
Real Web Business Opportunity thru RSS
In the past, some people made a lot of money with Google adsense with the following technique. They’d build a gigantic number of sites and pages around niche keywords, with no content of any value or even gibberish. Adsense links were featured on the sites and were the reason for the sites existence. Adsense links were the main, genuine content for these sites. And, as it turns out, sites with little or no genuine content achieved a higher click-thru rate on the Adsense links than sites that had good content.
Its a horrible thought, but It makes sense. On the bad sites, the Adsense links represented something of value to the niche visitor seeking something related to his or her interest. On the good, high value site, a visitor doesnt want to click to elsewhere and leave via Adsense links. The visitor want to stay there with the good content.
Eventually, citing “quality,” Google closed the accounts of people who presented Adsense links on such valueless pages. When you use search engines, it’s nice now to have less pure noise on the web, although, as it is with any medium, quality can still be an issue. Now, when you enter a term in a search engine the top 10 links returned are far more likely to have something related to your search term rather than an endless chain of links from directories, search engines and social bookmarks leading to more directories, search engines and social bookmarks. It is less likely, but it still happens.
This means that the best alternative for folks wanting to try some kind of internet publishing business, earning revenue for advertising is to offer genuine content of some sort. And best of all, you can do this by being a selective focal point for content that a lot of other people create and that they make available via article directories and via RSS (Really Simple Syndication.) After all, that is what newspaper, magazine and publishers do. They select and publish material created by other people. And thats what the TV networks, cable operators and TV stations usually do. They select and make available material that someone else creates.
So when it comes to using RSS in your own web efforts, think about it. In some ways, it follows a model that all media industries have used for generations. You do not have to create your own, brand new content to create value – but you can and will provide value in your ability to select and aggregate appropriately focused materials for targeted audiences that would like to get more of it in one place. And then, there is the seed of a business model – a very old and traditional business model – whereby you profit from advertising, such as Adsense, that what you both receive and propigate content by using RSS.
Additionally, though there is little awareness of this fact, you can use RSS and the RSS aggregators to increase your organic search engine rankings through backlinks (actively passed on through RSS) and other amazing RSS techniques for promotion and creating power for your revenue generating, advertising or affiliate sites.
There is a lot of material available on the web on the technical side of RSS – how to make it work. However, there is very little information available on how to use RSS to massively promote your web business and generate revenue. If you are serious, you should and can learn more about how to use RSS as a marketing and revenue tool.