Category Archives: SEO Tips
6 quick reasons WordPress SEO is NOT about Plugins
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OK, WordPress SEO is assisted by Plugins, but if you are expecting them to do the job for you, think again.
SEO plugins are easy to find and they do some great work, for example, All-in-One SEO Pack, Google XML Site Maps, and SEO Ultimate all add to the inherently SEO-friendly nature of WordPress. However, there is more to SEO than just plugins.
Here are some easy basics that you should always keep in mind for your blog posts and SEO Strategy.
1. Good Content and Keywords.
I know, we’ve all heard it before, right? That’s because it’s true. Good content is the basis for good SEO. You want backlinks? Write something worth linking to.
You want Google to take your page seriously? Make sure you are speaking the language it considers serious for the search results you want, i.e. keywords and phrases.
This topic has been beaten into the ground on blogs everywhere, so I’ll leave it at that.
2. Fresh Content.
Search engines love fresh content. This means you need to keep writing. Sometimes life just gets in the way, but you have to keep getting back in the habit. There is a saying I love “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is right now.” If you have some downtime and don’t write for a while, don’t worry about it or give up, just get back on the horse and start writing again.
3. Keep track of what people are reading; on your blog and elsewhere.
Set up analytics both on your blog and with the search engines. It is essential to set up Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. Once you see what people are reading you have a sense of why the came to your blog; cater to these people, they are your audience. This doesn’t mean you never branch out, but definitely play to your strengths.
On your blog, be sure and check your WordPress stats for the same information. In this case, there are some plugins that are handy for expanding on that information, the key is to actually use the information they give, and that is up to you to do.
What are people reading elsewhere? That leads to…
4. Do the search that you want to rank in.
Do you want on the first page for “Holistic Life Coach”? Then do a search on that phrase and see what comes up, read some of the articles and pay attention to which articles are getting real comments. I think it is generally a good idea to set up Google Alerts for your search terms. Google alerts will send an email to you with what it finds out on the web according to the setting you give it.
5. Bookmark your WordPress Posts
You’ll want to bookmark your posts on services like Digg, Delicious, Hi5 and StumbleUpon. There are semi-automated services like OnlyWire to assist in the efffort, but you will still have to follow-up on many of the services. Some people complain about it being slow, but I haven’t really had that experience.
6. Be Social! (But not spammy!)
Comment on other blogs that are relevant to your topic. Don’t spam, be social; make relevant comments.
Set up a Facebook Page. If you have a personal Facebook account it will probably take about 10 minutes to set up. After it is set up and has some content, invite everyone you can to it. From here, you can also consider Facebook advertising for your page. I’ve seen the Facebook advertising work pretty well, just make sure you are targeting appropriately and write compelling ads.
Twitter… Honestly, I’m not the greatest fan of Twitter, but there is no denying that it has made some great strides for some people. Here’s a tip that may seem counter-intuitive; promote others more than you do yourself on Twitter. It’s a great way to get attention. Also, once again, be social, don’t spam.
Set up a LinkedIn account for yourself. Most people see LinkedIn as a job search tool, but it is much more than that. Join some discussion groups; make relevant comments and link back to your blog. Be interesting, be social and don’t spam. (Sense a theme here?)
Under this heading I would also add Comment Moderation. Moderate your comments to get rid of spam and respond to the real comments. Keep the conversation going as much as you can.
Image Alt and Title Tags as illustrated by Megan Fox
It’s the end of the day and I’m basically just mindlessly surfing various websites and I come across the story of Megan Fox being dropped from Transformers 3.
Celebrity gossip is not my normal reading, I promise.
Anyway, I’m at the NY Daily News website, reading the story on this big Michael Bay vs Megan Fox brouhaha, and the geek in me decides to look at some code. Earlier today I was explaining to someone how alt tags make pictures visible to the web crawling bots as they index your website, so that’s what I decide to check.
“<img src=”http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2010/05/20/alg_megan_fox.jpg” alt=”Megan Fox, co-star of the first two ‘Transformers’ movies with Shia LaBeouf, will not be in the third Michael Bay-directed film.” title=”Megan Fox, co-star of the first two ‘Transformers’ movies with Shia LaBeouf, will not be in the third Michael Bay-directed film.”>”
Wow. They went over board. OK, so I bet they have alt tags and title tags automatically generated on their images. While that’s handy, I’m not sure it’s the best idea.
Ostensibly, alt tags and title tags for images are supposed to assist in two instances; helping visually impaired visitors and to have something there when the image can’t load. In other words, for every time there is a reason why someone can’t actually see the image, they can read/hear the text.
You know who else is visually impaired? Website crawlers. Each search engine, Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc…, has little robot applications reading your pages and indexing the information they find but they are mostly unable to “see” visual components, like images and animations. So the only thing they can see is the name of the file (alg.megan_fox.jpg), the alt tag and the title tag.
In the html code excerpt above, they are obviously catering more toward SEO than visually impaired users. (Did you notice how the image name had her name, obviously a keyword for the story? Good idea.)
While the text is a legitimate recap of the story, it isn’t a very good description of the image. Below, Matt Cutts of Google describes using alt tags.
Note that you don’t want to get crazy with stuffing the alt and title tags with a bunch of irrelevant keyword stuffing. Not only is it obnoxious, it can get you penalized by Google and the others.
So, in summary, a mostly gratuitous picture of Megan Fox, don’t use automated applications on your image alt and title tags, do use image alt and title tags to help with usability and SEO but don’t overuse or abuse your alt and title tags.
Web Traffic 2: Why Do I Spend Time at Certain Websites?
In my last post I examined which websites I go to in an effort to remind myself that Internet Marketing is about marketing to people; and in my case, people like me.
I put together a list of non-work surfing that looked something like this;
GMail
Facebook
Links in Facebook take me to Youtube and a news story
Twitter
Google Reader (Mostly local news and weather)
I clicked through to 3 stories from a local paper
Yahoo News
I clicked through to a News Story about Frank Frazetta
Wikipedia Article About Frank Frazetta
Wikipedia Article About Flash Gordon (Frazetta did the art for many of the book covers)
3 -4 other Wikipedia Articles (I won’t bore you)
Back to Google Reader for other news and friends’ Blogs.
Webcomics
How did I most commonly end up at a given website?
Suggestions from friends took me to two websites.
About eighteen websites were reached through news aggregators.
I think I read a total of six Wikipedia articles, despite going there for just one.
Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo are just habit, but really Twitter and Facebook are another type of news aggregator, just with a social bent to them.
What do I extrapolate from this?
I like aggregators; I like my news to be delivered to me.
I like simple easy to use websites with bare-bones navigation, like Wikipedia.
I like to get news from my friends.
I like to be entertained.
What does this mean about a website I’m working on?
There needs to be a clear way to subscribe via email, RSS, Facebook and Twitter.
The information I want needs to be easy to find and easy to navigate.
I want a more personal tone with an entertaining feel rather than boring text-book like content.
With this in mind, it is easy to create content for PEOPLE, not Google’s Robots, Yahoo’s Slurp or Bing’s MsnBot.
Web Traffic : What websites did you go to today?
When optimizing for web traffic we sometimes forget about the purely human personal element. It’s so easy to get caught up in backlinks, page rank, and keywords that we forget that PEOPLE are what drive website traffic.
To sort of “reset” and remind myself of this I have a reminder set up in my Google Calendar that asks “What websites did you go to today?” When it comes up, I try to take a moment to sit back and list every where I went. I don’t list “work” surfing I’ve done, just personal surfing.
For example, yesterday I started out like I usually do; I checked Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, then I scanned Yahoo News and my Google News Reader feeds. It took me to a bit of sad point as I found out Frank Frazetta died. It would be tough for Frank Frazetta to get popular doing the same art these days, but nobody can deny his talent and legacy. I mean, his art, and imitations thereof, was spread all over groovy vans and corvettes throughout the seventies!
There are some friends’ blogs that I had to surf as they came up on my feeds; Splarks for some amusing stories, Inverted Sky for some great photography, some political junk that usually just makes me irritated (that I won’t share) and even Evolving Mommy. I’m not anywhere near being a mom, but it’s my niece’s blog and she’s really quite clever and interesting.
Then as the day wound down I ended up clearing my mind with a ridiculously long list of webcomics (that somehow keeps getting longer. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to sleep if I keep adding on to that list).
The work stuff? I checked some latest WordPress news, SEO news, Yahoo Answers (because it’s kinda fun), Majestic, Google Analytics, etc… You know, all that stuff we fill our heads with every day.
So what do I do with this list? I ask myself some questions, like how did I end up at any given website? What searches led me where, what news readers am I using, how many links did I follow from Facebook and Twitter (more from facebook, definitely), why did I spend so much time on Wikipedia?
In the next SEO Once Over post I’ll answer some of these questions.
Remember, you need to target people, not robots and spiders, and usually, you need to target people kind of like you. Who are you?
Your Website on a Bathroom Wall, Low Backlink Quality
Backlinks are heralded as one of the most important factors in achieving SEO success. Some backlinks are better than others however. As an IRW (in real world) example, the image below shows a website url scrawled on a bathroom wall. In my opinion, this probably isn’t the best recommendation for your website.
Oh, sure, there are advantages; you have a captive audience, low advertising costs, and not much competition for the best-ranking position on the wall. The downside is obvious though; who wants to be associated with that environment?
(By the way, yes, I did feel a bit odd taking a picture in the bathroom.)
As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad press. (That saying is wrong of course). In this case, the attention garnered by this innovative advertising method probably isn’t always going to be good, but the ROI (Return On Investment) is always going to be positive. After all, no cost was involved, so if even one person visits the website, it was successful.
However, if I had seen the same message on the bulletin board of the same establishment I probably would have been more interested.
The same is true of backlinks. They won’t harm your page rank or SEO, but a backlink from a toilet manufacturer’s website isn’t going to be that helpful if your website is focused on coffee beans.
One Important and Easy Way to Optimize Your WordPress Site
If you have a WordPress site, you will want to use this plugin. It speeds up your website by creating static HTML pages from your dynamic WordPress content.
WordPress is an excellent tool for creating a personal blog, a business blog and can even be used for small ecommerce applications, but a dynamic website can slow down how fast the pages load. Page speed is important to optimization and WP Super Cache can help some sites dramatically decrease page loading time. This plugin creates a static HTML page from your wordpress pages it will serve them up instead of the dynamic pages.
Also, there are options to decide who gets served static pages and also which pages get cached and which don’t.
This plugin is essential if your site suddenly has to cope with huge numbers of daily visitors. For example, if one of your articles appeared on Digg or Slashdot you might see a spike in traffic that causes issues for your server. With WP Super Cache the burden on your host’s ability to serve those pages will be greatly reduced.
In other words, you need not fear success!
How to Add a User to Google Analytics
When you choose to work with an SEO consultant, you will most likely be asked to provide them with access to your Google Analytics account. If you don’t have a Google Analytics account, go get one; not only is it incredibly useful to Internet marketing, it’s free.
OK, so you now have a Google Analytics account. Now you need to give someone else access to your account without compromising the security on your heavily used Gmail account. (What? You don’t have a Gmail account?)
Log in to your account and choose the website profile in question. There may be more than one profile if you have more than one website set up. Once chosen, you will see “User Manager” in the middle of the page, right below the profile information.
To give access to a new user, click the Add User link. You can only add a user that has a Google account and you will be using their Gmail account to add them. Trust me, if they work on SEO, they have an account set up for this.
In access type you will want to choose “View Reports Only” from the drop-down menu. There is never any good reason to give administrator access to an SEO consultant. Heck, I didn’t even ask for administrative access for my wife’s analytics account, let alone a client. (Quick client plug : If you want to read an amusing story involving Google search trends, check out “The Satanic Marsupial Uprising: A Google Trends Story”)
The last step is to save your changes and it’s all set!
Here’s a quick and illustrated summary;
1. Get a Google Analytics account if you don’t have one.
2. Click the User Manager link.
- 3. Click Add User.
- 4. Enter the new user’s email address and give them “View Reports Only” access.
- 5. Save and you’re done!
Questions from SEO Once-Over to Help You Optimize
Before hiring SEO Once-Over, be prepared to answer some questions.
1. Do you have a Google Webmaster Tools account? Can you provide us with a Google Analytics report? Current website statistics will help us define our work, and help you to see results.
2. How was your website built: HTML, WordPress, Joomla, or other?
3. What is your target market? What kind of customers/visitors are you targeting with your website? Include geographic scope (neighborhood, city, state, nation, etc.) when relevant.
4. What kind of products, services or information do you provide?
5. Do you know what search terms prospective customers will use to find you? These are your keywords, and we may need to work on focusing and clarifying your list.
6. Who are your major competitors and what are their websites?
7. Are you willing to generate new content as suggested? Often the best tool in SEO is good content that people are interested in, not meta-tags or special applications.
With this information we’ll be able to begin helping you get the most out of your website, whether built on WordPress, Joomla, straight HTML or other platforms.
Internet Marketing Terms You Should Know; An SEO & SEM Glossary
One frustrating aspect of trying to learn SEO and SEM is how people toss around terms and acronyms as if everybody already knows what they are talking about.
For example, those acronyms above are Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, but you knew that already, right? 
Feel free to let us know if you think there are SEO & SEM terms we should add to this glossary!
Above the fold – The portion of the web page visible without scrolling down.
ALT tags – Text that is displayed when a non-text element cannot be, typically images or flash elements.
Back Links – Links to your websites on other websites.
Bounce Rate – Basically the percentage of visitors who “bounce” to another site rather than viewing additional pages. A high bounce rate is bad.
Click-through – The process of clicking through an online advertisement to the advertiser’s destination.
Click-through rate (CTR) – The average number of click-throughs per hundred ad impressions, expressed as a percentage.
CMS – Content Management System, a database driven website application used to keep track of content. Examples include Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.
Conversion rate – The percentage of visitors who take a desired action, i.e. make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, etc…
Cost-Per-Action (CPA) – Online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying actions such as sales or registrations.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC) – The cost or cost-equivalent paid per click-through. Google ads are paid on a CPC basis.
CPM – Cost per thousand.
Description Tag – An HTML tag easily found by search engines that is displayed is search engine results. Generally should not be over 16o characters.
Impression – A single instance of an online advertisement being displayed. If a search is made on your keyword and your ad is displayed, that is one impression.
Keyword – A word used in a performing a search. Conversely, this can also be used to reference the keywords on your website. A keyword may be a phrase rather than a single word.
Keywords Tag – HTML META tag used to define the primary keywords of a web page.
Landing Page – The page that a link leads to.
META Tags – Tags found in website code to describe various aspects about a Web page.
Organic Results – Search results that come from a typical search. This is differentiated from paid results, i.e. advertising.
Page – An individual HTML document, or a single page displayed by a browser. A website generally has several pages.
Page Rank (PR) – A scale of 1 to 10 of how relevant the page is according to a search engine.
Page View - Request to load a single HTML page.
Pay Per Click (PPC) – Online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying click-throughs.
Pay Per Lead (PPL) – Online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely based on qualifying leads.
Return on Investment (ROI) – The measurement of monetary benefit derived from money spent. The calculation is (Gain From Investment – Cost of Investment)/Cost of Investment. For example if you spend $100 on advertising and it leads to $50 in income, your ROI is a negative number (-.5). If you had the same return from spending $25, your ROI would be positive (1).
It is important to note that not all ROI is obvious right away, or even monetary, and long-term strategy should be considered. In the same token, not all investment is monetary; sweat equity labor investment should also be considered.
Robot – See Web Crawler
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The process of ensuring that a given website places well in searches for specific keywords. May also include ensuring that the website is easy for the search engines to gather data from.
Search Engine Friendly (SEF) – Giving search engines the easiest path to finding the data they need to place a website in its search results. For example, when applied to URLs;
www.mysite.com/Search-engine-friendly.html is friendly and readable
www.mysite.com/?option=category&id=34&Itemid=121 is not SEF
SEM – Search Engine Marketing, internet marketing primarily composed of Search Engine Submission, Eearch Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
SERPS – Search Engine Results Page, the page of results given after a search.
Site Map - This is an index to all the content on a website. It is essential in making your website easier for the search engines to read and navigate.
Site Stickiness - The amount of time spent at a site over a given time period.
Title Tag – HTML tag in the website code providing the text that displays in the top bar of the browser. Also used by search engines as the title of the page.
Unique Visitors - Individuals who have visited a Web site at least once in a fixed time frame, typically one month.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a website; www.mysite.com is a URL.
Web Browser – A software application that is used to view the world wide web. Examples include Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and Google Chrome.
Web Crawler – Computer programs that browse the web indexing the information they find. Also called automatic indexers, bots, robots and spiders.
Web site traffic - The amount of visitors and visits a Web site receives.