Learning SEO Basics
So what exactly is Search Engine Optimization, commonly refered to as SEO? It is when you optimize your site to rank highly in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. There are other engines out there as well, but those are the Big 3 that really matter (and out of that group, Google is really the only one that matters.)
The reason you want to learn SEO basics is that it is the best way to get targeted traffic. The users finding your site will do so after entering specific keywords that are tailored to what your site is all about. You don't have to pay for this traffic and if you keep up your rankings you can ensure a steady flow of new visitors for a long period of time.
If you have been reading at all about SEO, then you probably have seen the term SERPs. SERPs is an acronym for Search Engine Results Pages. These are simply the pages full of site listings that is returned when you query the engine for a keyword.
There are two types of SEO that we need to worry about when optimizing our site. On-page and off-page.
On-Page
On-page refers to the content actually on your site. While it isn't as important as off-page optimization, it will still play a role in how high your site ranks in the SERPs. The basics of on-page SEO optimizing are keyword density, internal linking structure, and title tags.
Off-Page
The most important part of your SEO campaign is off-page. This entails building up the link popularity of your site with both quantity and quality of sites that send links back to yours. If you can get links back from high quality, high PR, and relevant authority sites that use the keywords you are going for in the anchor text, it's not going to take long for your site to rocket up the SERPs.
Those are the basics of what optimizing SEO is all about. We will get into more details about both on-page and off-page with additional articles down the line.
Must Have WordPress Plugins
Each team I create a new site that uses WordPress, I use plenty of different plugins depending on the needs of the individual site. However, there are six that I use every single time, and I think you should too. These are the must have plugins for running any WordPress site:
1. Akismet - You need to check your spam comments and if you run a popular site, you can't manage it all yourself. This plugin will check your comments with the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.
2. All in One SEO Pack - The must have if you want to rank highly in google. This allows you to customize your titles, descriptions, and tags in posts. Plus you can noindex categories, tags, and archives and customize your title and description for your homepage, plus titles on other automatically generated pages.
3. Google XML Sitemaps - Automatically generates a sitemap of all your posts and pages that is supported by the major search engines.
4. SEO Slugs - This shortens up your URLs by removing common words like "a", "the", and in" from the permalink.
5. WordPress Database Backup - You don't want to lose all of the posts you worked so hard to create do you?
6. WP Super Cache - Saves your server resources in case your site gets hit hard with a ton of traffic.
Why Content is King
Finally it seems that even the big boys are starting to understand that when it comes to making money on the the Internet, content is king. Just a few days ago I wrote an article about why people go online and it came as no surprise to me that "to learn" was the number one reason to surf the web. Well now that large businesses like Time Warner, Yahoo, and AOL are finally catching on.
Of course ad spending is supposed to go down 7.6% this year and since we are still in the midst of a recession, that number isn't likely to make a large jump any time soon. The reason for optimism you ask? Ad spending on newspapers, magazines, radio, and television is going down, but online advertising revenues are projected to grow by nearly double digit figures!
Most companies are considering content to be valuable because they want consumers to pay for high-quality products, but instead they should realize that higher quality content builds links, which increases your search engine presense, which builds traffic, of which more are going to keep coming back if you give them something that they are interested in. That's a nice little cycle to have, a constant flow of new traffic coupled with readers who keep coming back for more.
So, even if you run a blog or small-business, produce quality stuff that people want to keep coming back for and you'll grow your business. You don't have to charge people to read your content to make money, you can benefit from the increase in ad spending and still cash in while keeping your information FREE!
One Day SEO
I know that a lot of you don't want to put a lot of time into marketing or SEO, but instead want to focus on running your online business. Hiring someone to come on board isn't for everyone, especially if you are just getting started and don't have a lot of cash to throw around. For those of you looking for a quick fix, Conversation Marketing posted 9 quick SEO upgrades that you can make today in order to help you make a jump up the rankings. Let's take a quick look:
1. Directories - If you can, get yourself listed in Yahoo or other major directories. The important thing is an editorial review so spam sites are not included.
2. Reduce Links - Every page of your site probably does not need to link to an about us page, contact us, privacy policy, terms of service, etc... This wastes valuable link juice that you could be sending to paging you actually want to rank well.
3. Set up Google Webmaster Tools - this will help you find any errors Google has seen on your site. From duplicate titles and meta tags to crawl errors. Plus you can add your sitemap to help get more of your pages indexed.
There are six more valuable tips over at Conversation Marketing, but these were my favorite three. If you have anything to add, let me know in the comments.
Web Analytics & Tracking
If you have a website or a blog then you should know about web analytics. You can learn a lot about your site, what works, and what doesn't if you take a look at your stats on a frequent basis. Most hosting companies provide some kind of stats software, but I recommend adding Google Analytics to your site in order to get a complete picture of what your visitors are doing and where they came from. Best of all, it's FREE to use!
Here are a few metrics that I think everyone should keep a close eye on. There are countless of different options in the Google Analytics back end that you can track, but don't get bogged down in spending too much time back there. However, if you are paying for any advertising I would track the ROI on those campaigns, but that's a topic for another day so let's get started with this simple list.
Visitors
This is the most basic metric to monitor. With all things being equal if you get more traffic then that should mean your site will make more money right? If your goal is to keep increasing your general traffic numbers then you should continue to make more money from your site.
Pageviews
This is how many pages your visitors are looking at. Increasing the number of pageviews will increase the "eyes" on advertisements which will help you charge more for your space. Linking to relevant posts at the end of each article is a great way to increase the pageviews on your site as your visitors spend more time looking at your content.
Referring Sites
Who is linking to you and how much traffic are they generating for you by doing so? If you get a lot of traffic from a link then maybe you should think about partnering up with that site or writing a guest post for them. If you are doing advertising then tracking click through traffic lets you know if it's generating a positive return on your investment.
Keywords
How are your visitors finding you in the search engines? Google the keywords found in this section of your analytics to see where you rank in the results. A few more internal links to that page could boost you up a few spots in the results and bring you even more traffic than you are already getting.
You will also find topics to write about and areas that you might want to focus on when you see which keywords visitors used to find you. For long tail keywords you can rewrite some of your content to include those phrases and see a boost for those terms as well. There are lots of things you can do from an SEO standpoint if you keep an eye on the keywords people are using to find you.
What other metrics do you track? This list is pretty basic but I think it covers the most important stats to look for.
How to Get Indexed Faster By Google
Everyone wants to rank well in Google. A high listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) can bring you a ton of traffic which hopefully will translate into you making a lot of money. If you have a new URL though, how can you make sure your site gets indexed faster by the major search engines? Take a look at these easy to follow guidelines and you'll be listed in the SERPs in no time at all.
Submit a Sitemap
You first need to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, this is valuable not only for adding your sitemap but also to get information in general on how Google views your site. Next you need to submit your XML sitemap. If you use WordPress then the Google XML Sitemaps plugin is a must as it will update your sitemap and ping Google whenever you add content. If you use a different content management system then there is probably an automated tool you can use for that as well, which I would highly recommend. If you have to create your sitemap manually then run the program at Audit My PC and upload the generated sitemap to your web server before submitting it to Google.
Get Quality Links
Now I've talked about if you should buy links for SEO and I pretty much think you shouldn't, but if you want to get indexed fast then this is the only time I would consider it, if only for a short duration. I feel like this will help the Googlebot get to your site quickly, especially if you get a link from a high PR site. You can also use some of my suggestions on how to get more one-way links, but to sum that article up you basically need to write great content and then get noticed by other sites in your niche by commenting on their blogs or linking out to sites. Most of the time the site owner will at least check out your site and they think your content is relevant and adds value to their readers they will give you some link love in return.
Social Bookmarking
Another easy way to get links and to get indexed quickly is through social bookmarking. Digg is a very popular site where you can submit your content in the hopes of it catching on and getting to the front page. There is also plenty of other social sites like MySpace, StumpleUpon, and del.icio.us.
How do you get get your sites indexed? Let's hear about them in the comments.
WordPress SEO Tips
There are a lot of things that go into optimizing your site for the search engines, but with a minimal amount of effort you can cover about 80% of the important stuff. While the list below isn't all inclusive and isn't going to have you ranking number one for competitive terms, it will at least give you a fighting chance to get noticed.
Optimize Permalinks
How many blogs have you seen rank well that don't use the postname for the URL? The answer is "not many." Go to settings/permalinks in your backend, select the radio button by custom structure and enter "/%postname%/". This will help you with SEO but also make your post URL's look cleaner and more professional.
All-in-One SEO Plugin
Install the All-in-One-SEO plugin. This will allow you to enter a custom title, description and keywords for all of your posts. Make the title of your post different from what you put into the All-in-One SEO's title field. why? Because your post title will be the <h1> tag on your page, and if that is the same as your title tag you can get penalized for overoptimizing or stuffing keywords. It's better to be safer than sorry.
Next, click on the plugin options for All-in-One SEO and enter your home title, description and keywords. Then check the box next to rewrite titles and make sure your post title format says "%post_title%" and page title format says "%page_title% ". You want to get rid of your blog name to keep all of your pages and posts with just your keywords that you want to rank for, no sense wasting juice on your blog name since you should rank well for that anyway.
One of the great things about WordPress is that it does a great job of organizing your past content for you and your readers, but the bad thing is that in doing so there are a lot of duplicate content issues to overcome. The All-in-One SEO pack makes it easy to prevent this. Click on the plugin options for All in One SEO and check the box next to noindex for categories and noindex for archives. This way the spiders will go to your category and archive pages and follow the links through, but won't index those specific pages that contain nothing but excerpts from your other pages.
How easy was that? I know there are a lot of other ways to optimize your WordPress blog for the search engines, and I'd love to hear what you have to say in the comments. I will be adding more content later detailing tips and tricks for SEO, but this should be a simple starter plan.
How to Get More One-Way Links
Everyone wants as many links to their site as possible. The more backlinks that you have, the higher your rank in the search engine results and the more traffic that you will receive. Of course, you want to have backlinks from trusted, authority sites and not spammy junk sites, but in general more is better. How do you get one way links? Let's take a look at some of the best strategies to use.
Quality Content
The best and easiest way to get people to link to your site is to write quality content. If your content encourages people to comment, talk about your post, and link to your site then you have quality content. Having lots of posts is nice, but having quality posts takes a lot of hard work and time, from the brain storming process to the actual writing phase and I think that quality over quantity is key since quality content builds your brand and builds backlinks.
Guest Posting
What blog doesn't want more great content to post? You should offer up unique content to quality blogs in exchange for adding a couple of backlinks to your site. Not only with it help with the search engines, but you also get the chance to showcase your expertise in front of a new audience. That audience will click through to your site and if they like what they see, become a consistent reader of your blog as well. Just make sure that you write your guest posts for relevant sites in your niche.
Comment on Other Blogs
I know that most blogs have nofollow tags on their comments section, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't comment anyway. Don't just do it for the comment link because if you interact with other bloggers then chances are they will stop by your site as well. If they like what they see, there is a good chance you are going to get a link to your site at some point.
Be Generous With Your Outgoing Links
This relates to commenting on other blogs. If you start linking to other blogs then those webmasters will see that either when checking their stats or if they use WordPress it shows up in their dashboard. You'll find that if you link to sites that add value to your readers, then other sites that feel you add some value for their readers will do the same. Even if the other owner doesn't link back to you, you are still helping out your readers which is a positive in the long run.
What other techniques do you use to generate one way links? Tell me about them in the comments.
Buying Links for SEO
A popular practice for many years was the purchasing of text links on blogs for the purposes of increasing your rankings in the search engines. There were a lot of sites who did nothing more than buy links and then watch their rankings rise with little to no effort on their part, but the times they are a changing. Google has spent a lot of time and money into factoring paid links into their algorithms and I feel like they have done a great job of minimizing the effects of paid links. There are still sites out there that are having a lot of success doing it, but my feeling is that in the long run these sites are going to lose their ranking benefits from the links they purchased. You have to weight the cost and benefit of purchasing text links, but I personally don't want to spend a bunch of money on a practice that the search engines are actively discouraging and trying to discount.
Why do Search Engines Hate Paid Links?
Search engines want their results to be as efficient and as accurate as possible. This means that users are able to easily find what they are looking for and anyone trying to game their system is evil in their opinion. Paid links can disrupt the search results so by eliminating the practice Google thinks they are making their results more accurate. It all started with Google penalizing sites that sell paid links, and even some that purchase the links. By harming sites that sell links it caused many webmasters to play it on the safe side and to stop selling links on their site.
Write Guest Posts for Links
Instead of buying straight links on a blogroll or in the sidebar how about writing a guest post with a few links to your site instead? I have found that this is a lot more valuable way for a site to still get value out of "buying links." With the guest posts you are at least adding some value to the internet as a whole so I don't think Google has as big of a problem with it. What you don't want to do is write a guest post about sports on a site that focuses on women's shoes. Only write guest posts for sites that are within the same niche, that way you can get some click through traffic to go along with passing page rank to your site.
Get Your Site Reviewed
If you don't want to write a guest post you can also have a relevant site write a review of your site. With this method you pay a slightly higher fee, since you aren't doing the work, and the blog owner will write a post explaining why he likes or doesn't like what you have to offer. Again, make sure that the site you are getting a review from is relevant to yours, so that way you get both click through traffic and the passing of page rank.
What are you opinions of buying links for SEO purposes? Let us know in the comments.