WP SEO Mastery

I’ve found someone who REALLY knows what they’re doing with WordPress and SEO! Because, as much as I’d like to think I know what I’m doing- I’ve got a good grasp on the fundamentals and how you should optimize your content- but an overall strategy?

Not my forte’!

SO… fortunately, I met someone at the Genesis Meetup hosted by StudioPress (which was SO fun… more on that later) who lives in the Bay Area and does SEO for a living!

We talked for a while at the Meetup and I told her I’d LOVE to host a webinar with her where she could show you her mad SEO skills, what she does for a living, keyword research, the WORKS!

Oh, and by the way, her name is Lou Anne McKeefery- and she just rocks!
And we’ve got two live webinars scheduled for this week.

The first webinar is Tuesday, September 27th at 5:00pm PST and we’ve also scheduled a morning webinar for Wednesday, September 28th at 10:00am for those of you who are overseas.

There WILL be a replay of the webinar – but you have to register! Just select the time you’d like to attend and all the details will be sent to you.

I’m REALLY looking forward to this- I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned simply in talking with Lou Anne and planning this webinar.

Register for the webinar below:

If you build it, they will come.

I’m really not one for sports metaphors (o.k. -technically it’s not really a ‘sports’ metaphor. It’s a line from a movie about baseball. A GOOD movie though. Wonder what happened to good Kevin Costner movies, huh? Totally getting off subject here).

In this case, I’m referring to your blog. Or your site- whatever you want to call it- as long as it’s built on WordPress we’re good (I never said I was going to be objective).

I’ve worked with a LOT of people over the last three years- whether it was helping them with training, a new theme, customization, you name it. And inevitably, many of them give up, come back to me for a ‘makeover’ or go in a different direction completely because ‘They built it… and NO ONE CAME!”

It’s just not that simple.

Trust me.. after a solid three years of working on ‘The WordPress Chick’, there is still SO much I KNOW I need to do and SHOULD be doing. But guess what?
I’m not worried about it.
I AM doing it- just at a pace that works for me. AND… because I’ve been doing it for a while now it all makes SO much more sense.

I’m sure you’ve gotten an e-book, bought a course, listened in on teleseminars, webinars and maybe even attended a conference.
The problem?
It’s not just lack of implementation.

It’s massive INFORMATION OVERLOAD!

As someone who likes all this technology stuff and more or less ‘gets it’ (in my world anyways)… it can be totally overwhelming for me too.

Let’s just look at a FEW of the things you/I should be doing- and just bear with me. This is not an all inclusive or required list. It’s literally going to be what comes to me as I’m writing (and no- I didn’t put that little thought into this post).

• Blogging (I know.. duh)- as in NEW posts, NEW content
• Optimizing your content (as in SEO)- which of course means a WHOLE bunch of things: such as linking (internal & external links, using header tags, bold, italics, keyword density, alt tags for images, etc.)
• Social Media
• Building a list
• Creating auto responders for that list
• Marketing
• Video
• Commenting
• Guest Posts
• Bookmarking
• Networking
• Additional sharing sites: ex: slideshare (what category do these fit in? I get that they’re social… )
• Webinars
• Teleseminars
• Branding

Well, you get the point.

There’s A LOT to do.
And only so many hours in the day.

Because a huge chunk of my time is spent on client work, I don’t get to spend as much time on my own sites/projects/products as I’d like to. OR… maybe that’s just an excuse? I don’t know. I really love working on my own things, it’s just a matter of structuring my day so that when I’ve carved out that time I stick with it. Usually this works- it’s when I get reactive to other people’s crises that my life gets turned upside down. And it feels like it takes WAY longer to get back on track.

Here’s the deal.

It all comes down to CHOICE.

Even if you’re working a full time job and are building an online business on the side. YOU get to choose HOW you spend that time.

My suggestion? Well- in an attempt not to add more overwhelm to your life- I would simply pick a few things off of the above list and FOCUS intently on them. Start with a couple that you’re already doing and step it up a notch. Then pick ONE that you’re not doing and give it a few weeks/month to put some concentrated effort into and MEASURE your results!

None of your efforts will do you ANY good if you don’t take the time to track what is and isn’t working.

What you REALLY have to realize though is that just because you put up some kick ass site (visually, great content, etc.)- it doesn’t mean you’re going to become a wealthy entrepreneur over night. You HAVE to work at getting traffic, opt-in’s, conversions, sales, creating products, etc. It doesn’t matter how awesome it looks or how fab your product is if no one knows you exist.

I’m SO not an expert on linking, building links, finding links, etc., but I am very aware that building links- QUALITY links, is extremely important! If you’re somewhat new to link building- there are three different types of links you want. Don’t quote me on this, but the most important would be inbound links (and without being completely redundant or stating the obvious- let’s just state right off the back that we’re talking about QUALITY inbound links, k?). Then of course we have outbound links (were you link to another site) and finally, what is so fab about this latest update from WordPress- internal links!

So, what are internal links? (just play along here- I know this is another one of those “stating the obvious”…). Internal links are when you link your own content to other relevant content within your site! There are a few key things you want to consider when doing this- and of course you want to consider the anchor text when creating internal links.

Anchor text? What the bucket is that?

Well… in chick terms:
Anchor text is the word (or words) that you select to create the link (select to hyperlink) to another page, post, content, etc. (internally OR externally).
SO.. here’s an easy peasy example:

SO… let’s get down to this super fabulous new feature! The easiest way to share this/explain this is of course, through a video. If you’re currently using a plugin like “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” , “Microkids Related Posts” or Related Posts Thumbnails, you can still continue using those if you want- it really just depends on what you’re looking for visually. Even if you continue using one of the related posts plugins, you can still benefit from the new linking feature built into WordPress 3.1.

Take a look at this quick little video on using the new linking feature built into WordPress 3.1- and start using it TODAY! I’ve also included a few great resources for reading more about linking at the end of the post. But I have to warn you- you may just get sucked in to both of these sites for a while because there is a TON of great content (I subscribe to these sites feeds AND their newsletters!).

Here are a couple great resources if you want to learn more about Linking:

Traffic Generation Cafe

Yoast

If you’re not sure what your title bar is, it’s the title that appears at the VERY top of your screen (not the web address or URL that’s in the browser – but it’s next to the firefox icon if you use firefox and next to the IE icon if you’re using Internet Explorer). This is the first thing the search engines see when they come to your site. Don’t waste this space of something that’s NOT one of your keywords or is a generic term when you could be using something specific.

A simple example of this would be the WordPress Installation page I have. If you click on that page, the title bar will read ‘WordPress Installation – The WordPress Chick. So you know exactly what this page is about. The great thing about using this plugin is that once it’s set, you’re done. You don’t have to go back and configure anything. It automatically puts what you want, where you want it! Each time you write something (and this applies to a page or a post). This really is something you should implement right away! And then of course, track your traffic and visits before AND after you’ve set it all up!

One of the basic plugins he recommends is the SEO slugs plugin. I’ve just installed it, so I’m curious to see how it works and how it helps. It will definitely help on a couple other of my sites.

What this pluggin does is it takes any post title that is long (or basically a sentence) and removes the stop words. For those of you who don’t know, stop words are like ‘the, a, and, it ,is, etc.  You obviously don’t want any of these stop words in your domain name, but sometimes it’s hard NOT to use them in your post title.

Here’s an example of how it works from a post on another one of my sites:
The post title was ” Learning to pause with your kids..”    – with the SEO slugs plugin, the post title would look like this:
learning-pause-kids. Which is much easier for the search engines. Such a simple little plugin, but SO important.

One of the most important pieces to having a website or blog is that people need to know you’re there- and you need to know how they found you. Google has some great free resources to help you get started as well as take your site to the next level- whatever that may be for you.

The first thing to do is to sign up for an account with Google. It’s totally free and there are a ton of resources that will walk you through what you need to do. I’ll also have some videos posted here in the next week or so that walk you through different tasks. But first, get signed up with Google. There are lots of things you can add to your account, but for now you should just start with Google Analytics and Google sitemap (I’d recommend a gmail account too). Once you’ve set up your account you need to download both the analytics plugin and the xml sitemap generator plugin for wordpress. You can find them here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

If you need help uploading these, drop me a line and I can help you get them installed. Just make sure you’ve signed up with Google too!