Tag Archives: seo

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:

  1. Make sure your content is relevant to the keywords people are searching with
  2. Optimizing your website and its content with keyword emphasis and linking structures
  3. 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!

SEO Flaws That Reduce your Search positions and Cost Your Time

You can always find a healthy disagreement among people about which tactic is best. It is very similar with SEO, and the reason for that is a number of people think the returns do not justify all the work. Working for high rankings takes a lot of work, and many feel it is not justified. A lot of marketers think there’s too much effort required, and the rewards do not justify all that work. Plus the campaigns to gain links going to your site never ends. Then other people will highlight that search algorithms are constantly changing, and you never know what will happen. Of course it is still possible to have success with SEO, and if you optimzed for the right keywords it’s going to exciting. If you’re going to optimize for SEO, then you must keep the mistakes to a bare minimum.

Only using the best content achievable offers you a great edge with Google. From time to time they do go overboard with what they do simply because no software program can do anything flawlessly. But you must know that they appear to be making a more powerful effort to remove bad content. They are undoubtedly placing a much stronger inclination on sites that are more authority in nature. It is the authority site that is clearly being preferred in this latest change from them. The most significant take-away out of this is to produce the best content possible that delivers good value.

One extremely important, and quite often ignored fact with on page seo has to do with inner link structure. Of course you always want to backlink to your internal pages a lot more than to your home page. But far more about the benefit of hyperlinks on your internal pages. You never send your entire incoming, external links to your home page, in fact it is your website’s internal pages that should have the most. Because your inner pages are linking out to your home page, they are going to give backlink page rank to your home page. For blogs, there’s at least one plugin that automatically creates links to associated posts following each post you make. For non-blogs, or regular websites, then basically add good anchor text in your content and link to other pages of content.

You need to get involved with social websites and the various tools that make it quicker to share. You need to make this take place because it is a natural part of social SEO which is where Google is proceeding. It is not difficult to get blog plugins or scripts for use on static sites to share to the major sites. You will discover about close to a dozen large social sites including Twitter that you should have. What this really is exactly about is social networking optimization which has undoubtedly become a factor in SEO.

Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what you need to learn about. Even Google’s algorithm is not perfect so understand that. But they’ve already mentioned that they feel social endorsement of content should be considered in rankings.

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:

  1. Make sure your content is relevant to the keywords people are searching with
  2. Optimizing your website and its content with keyword emphasis and linking structures
  3. 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!