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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.

As a web marketing professional or website designer, or even just as a blogger, you spend a lot of time on the Internet doing research, using ecommerce sites, and even just reading news. When you do a search and a result comes up promising certain information will be found upon clicking, how do you react when you find something else entirely?

Personally, I don’t even give the website a chance. If what I was promised isn’t immediately obvious I just scowl and go back to my search results.

You think being the number one result on a Google search results page will increase your business? You are only potentially right. It can, but if you don’t provide what you promise, you lose that business right away.
Always provide what you promise, and make it obvious and easy to find on your landing page. If your ad copy or description is too specific for your front page, then set up a specific landing page for that copy.

If you do anything other than what you promise, you are just lumping yourself in with the cliché misleading websites that are ruining the reputation of ecommerce in general. Don’t do it. It doesn’t help you, it doesn’t help your visitors and it will hurt your reputation and make you look desperate. Worse, it might even be considered Bait and Switch, a form of fraud that can leave you open to lawsuits.

Got any stories of broken promises or bait and switch? Share with us in the comments!

This is important because people often find out there is an issue by having their website pages suddenly drop out of Google listings or getting an email from an annoyed user.

To get the most out of this handy warning system, be sure and have the messages forward to you Gmail account. Do this by logging into your Google Webmaster Tools account homepage and change the drop-down menu to “Forward to [youremail]@gmail.com”

You can even choose in which language the email will appear.

If you don’t have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you should get one. There is too much information you are missing out on otherwise.

There are a lot of changes we’d like to make when things slow down, but sometimes, as they say, the cobbler’s children have no shoes. We’ll get some killer boots on this rugrat soon though, we promise.

Feel free to contact us with suggestions, complaints or topics you’d like us to touch on; we love to hear from you.

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.

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.

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?