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Thanks to Patrick Altoft’s Blogstorm

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Javascript Snippet Lets You Edit Screen Shots

photo credit: Svadilfari

First of all, If you’ve been here before you might notice that I’ve changed WP themes. The reason is that my previous one quit working for no particular reason (hacked?) and because I’ve been too busy (or lazy) I just turned on the default WordPress theme for a couple of weeks until I got around to dealing with it. Sorry about that.

The SEO Experiment

I have a couple of SEO questions that so far I haven’t been able to get a satisfying answer to.

1. For organic search rank (not type in traffic, or navigational searches that include the TLD) does a domain name which is an exact or near match for the query phrase rank higher – all other things being equal.
2. If the answer to that is yes, and the exact match domain is 301ed to another domain does it pass that higher ranking?

Because of some work that I’ve been doing I think that the answer to both of these questions is yes. But, my evidence is anecdotal, and I know that I could be wrong. However if I’m right this could be a useful tool.

So, I’m going to do an experiment to attempt to answer these two questions. Here’s what I have in mind:

1. Obtain several domain names (at least 3 but more would be better) that consist of more or less random combinations of letters. Ideally they would be of equal length, bought at the same time and perhaps alphabetically sequential. I have to control the cost of the experiment so ideally these would be nice cheap .info domain names.
2. Also obtain two or more .com domains that are an exact match for a bogus key phrase(s). The main point of this is to target valuable long tail searches so these domains would need to reflect this goal, thus – abc-defg-hijk.com or abcdefghijk.com although the distribution of vowels and consonants should be at least word like. There should be 0 results for a Google search of the bogus key phrase “abc defg hijk”.
3. Set up bare bones web sites for each domain on the same shared host. While not ideal for real SEO this should help to prevent hosting from being a factor in relative rank.
4. The web pages should be very simple plain vanilla html with no style formatting at all. Content should be extremely similar but not at all duplicate. I’m thinking something along the line of recipes with the bogus phrase being a key ingredient – not lorum ipsum gibberish. It needs to look like real content, and I’m thinking not optimized for anything on page.
5. Submit site maps, and wait to be indexed. In the mean time don’t give any link love at all, and hopefully no one else would either.

Now my guess is that at this point the exact match domain would rank #1 and the others would fall out randomly behind it.

• Now 301 the exact match to one of the others and see if it now consistently ranks at the top.

Another experiment that could be done simultaneously with the same domains plus another (different) exact match domain would be to redirect it without it ever containing any content at all – nothing but an .htaccess file. Just to see what happens. I’ve actually done this, and it seems to work, but there are too many other factors to tell for sure.

I realize that a larger number of domains and repetitions of the test would be required for defensibly valid results, but this is what I have resources for, and I think that if it’s properly executed this could yield worthwhile results.

Questions? Comments? Predictions? Anyone see any problems with the method? Anyone know if this has already been tried?

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An SEO Experiment

Once however I ran across a case where content consisting entirely of Adsense ads was extremely helpful, and actually led me straight to what I was looking for when the search engine results were not - and probably earned the spammer a decent income while it lasted.

I wanted to blog about this as soon as I found it, but I really hate to spoil someone else’s well crafted scheme. Anyway the circumstances have changed for this particular niche so here it goes.

I was shopping for a construction contractors bond (as in “licensed and bonded”) and really not having any luck with the search engines. This kind of bond is basically a third party guaranty that a contractor will do the contracted work within the terms of the contract agreement - kind of like a specialized insurance policy, but not exactly. Most government and commercial (EI most profitable) jobs require the contractor to supply a bond.

Anyway, the organic search engine results just didn’t contain what I was looking for at that time, so I clicked on an Adsense ad - something I don’t usually do. However, in this case I was taken to a whole page of Adsense ads that were all completely relevant to what I was looking for, and I ended up clicking on several of them and even bookmarked the MFA site.

Here’s what the Adsense Arbitrager knew that the bond vendors didn’t: Their potential customers call their product “bond”, “performance bond”, “construction bond”, or “bid bond” while the companies that sell the things call them “surety”. This terminology was so ingrained into the industry that they hardly used the term “bond” at all on their web sites, so they just simply didn’t show up in the search engines at the time. Once I realized that and started searching for “surety” I found tons of vendors who were in competition for my business.

I got two points of information from this experience:

1. It’s not spam if it’s what you’re looking for.
2. Know thy keywords - more to the point, know thy customer’s keywords.

It was also the most outstanding example of Adsense Arbitrage that I ever saw. But now when you search for “construction bond” those companies that were formerly sequestered behind “surety” pop right up.

I’ve notice the same kind of keyword disconnect on other sites as well like where the website uses the term air bed and miss out on traffic from searchers looking for airbed or air mattress, but the surety industry a year ago was really out of touch with what their customers were looking for.

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If it’s Useful is it still Spam?

photo credit: orngejuglr

In a recent post on SEOmoz “…Only the First Anchor Text Counts” Rand Fishkin relates an experiment and the conclusion that for a given web page only the first link pointing to another page counts toward Google pagerank. In other words you could have 50 links on your page all with different anchor text, all pointing to the same document, and it wouldn’t count any more than if there were only one - the first one that Googlebot finds on the page. All of the rest are just so much content text according to Rand.

As is often the case on SEOmoz the comments contained what I consider to be a real gem:

As I work on loads of small sites with 5 - 10 pages, I tried all sorts of bits and pieces - my mistake was to assume that the the anchor text in a top horizontal navigation count the most - this clears it up.

Say for example I am targeting “prostate cancer surgery” for one client - if I dont have a 100% relevant URL, then I make sure that the top horizontal navigation has a text link with those words linked to a page that has strong content centered around that phrase and the URL matches perfectly.

I tried this with a range of pages and it always worked.

Your post kind of clears up why.

Rishi Lakhani

There’s some degree of controversy among SEOs about which is a stronger link - one in the editorial content, or one in a global element such as the main navigation. So use your own judgement, because there are good logical arguments for both positions - and Google ain’t talking. However it’s usually going to be a lot easier to add a bunch of identical links to your site by incorporating it into a global element.

So here’s the light bulb that went off in my head: Want to give a page a boost? Craft your best relevant anchor text - exactly matching the URL and main key phrase of the target page - and put a link to it in a global element such as the top navigation found in Wordpress - Presentation>>Theme Editor>header.php. This should result in sending about as much link juice to the target page as your site is capable of.

This also means that you might want to take a good look at your global elements and make sure that you want to spread the joy to every thing that you have in there, and if you don’t then get to work adding nofollows (define) to some of it.

These strategies are sometimes called siloing or pagerank sculpting in SEO speak by the way. Here’s a timely article about pagerank sculpting and the controversy around it.
Needless to say you should get your on page elements and site wide structural SEO in order first .

Speaking of nofollowing - Joost deValk’s Robots Meta Plugin allows you to nofollow or noindex a page or post with one click from the WP editor page. This powerful plugin does much more than just that, and I highly recommend it if you want to control the flow of link juice through your site.

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Quick SEO Tip - Squeezin’ Link Juice

photo credit: Maproom Systems

I just had a random thought. What if I had an evil secret black hat seo plan to eventually sell toasters from Metatoast.com? It would go something like this:

1) Continue to metablog for a couple of years building a good number of incoming links. Lots of those links would actually containing the word “toast”.

2) In the mean time I start sprinkling “toast”, “meta toast” and “Toasters” into the text. Perhaps referring to my loyal readers as “Meta Toasters”.

3) At some point I convert the home page to a landing page for a retail shopping cart to sell toasters.

I know, it’s just about one step beyond “Steal Underpants - ? - Make $$”, but then again we rank and file metabloggers may just be the Underpants Gnomes of blogging. We know we want to make money somehow, but don’t quite have that step between blog and make money figured out.

As someone who does both e-commerce and metablogging I can tell you that it’s exactly one million and six times easier to get editorial inlinks to a metablog than an e-commerce site. And it’s no secret that’s probably close to an inverse ratio of their earning potential.

I’m just messing around, I know nothing about black hat (define) SEO, but I wonder how an evil scheme like this would pay off if you started with a better keyword to target than “Toaster”.

What is that middle step if you aren’t destined for A-list glory?

Questions? Comments? Nasty Remarks?

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Evil Secret Black Hat SEO plan to sell Toasters

This post is part three of a series on Wordpress Structural SEO. The other two are: On Page SEO for WordPress, and WordPress Optional Excerpt. I’ve tried not to rehash very much of the information contained in those two articles, so to get the full picture (my version of it anyway) you should check them out if you haven’t already.

There’s more to SEO than just using keywords in your copy and generating a site map - things like networking, link building, and leveraging social networks - things that happen outside of your site. That external SEO work is very important, but the structural SEO that you can do on your WordPress Blog prepare it for the attention that you hope to get from search engines. Structural SEO is kind of like getting ready for a date - you still have to go out there and interact, but if you aren’t properly groomed and dressed you’re unlikely to get lucky - unless of course you’re really hot.

Even though at first glance this looks like a lot of work, it’s really not, and much of it only has to be done one time, and not even all at once. When considered over the lifetime of your website the benefits from just a few hours work can be huge.

The Path to Structural SEO Nirvana:

Site Architecture

• Use an SEO friendly permalink structure - More about permalinks - This is one thing that you should do ASAP.
• Keep your website architecture as flat as possible - More about flat architecture
  
• Use a plugin like: Google Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold to automatically generate and submit a new Google sitemap whenever you create new content.
  
• Also install an automated user readable HTML sitemap like one generated by the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Plugin for Wordpress.

Duplicate Content and Canonical Issues

• Use htaccess to redirect to your canonical URL. - What it is and how to deal with trailing slash canonical issues using htaccess.
  
• Use the more tag to actually reduce the amount of duplicate content that WordPress creates. - More about the more tag.
• Use the post excerpt feature to avoid duplicate content and add value to your category pages. - More about post excerpts.
  
• Install something like Joost deValk’s Robots Meta plugin to block duplicate content like archives and undesired pages from being indexed. - More about blocking duplicate content.
  

Tips

• Use a keyword/phrase in your tagline if possible.
  
• Link to other pages on your own site – especially the important ones – either manually or by using a plugin like: Similar Posts
  
• Apply On page SEO techniques to every post or page you write. More about on page SEO
• Enable Trackbacks and Pingbacks.
• Use (free) Google Webmaster Tools.
• In GWTs declare your preferred domain structure and stick to it.
• Apparently in the past putting a post into multiple categories created duplicate content, but with later versions of WP this isn’t the case, so despite what you might have read in older articles, don’t worry about this one.
• Your robots.txt file should point to your xml sitemap expecially if you’re sitemap isn’t actually called sitemap.xml the line of code would look like this:

  Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml Even if Google already knows about your sitemap via webmaster tools this will help other search engines to find it.

Helpful Resources

• How to Make Scrapers Work for You
• How to Install WordPress Plugins

SEO Friendly Permalinks

The permalink structure determines the URLs that your site uses, and is something that you want to configure before you start blogging and hopefully never change - so try to get it right the first time. For some reason the default configuration of WordPress uses “ugly” permalinks. Fortunately fixing this is very simple - In WP administration go to Options>>Permalinks and check the custom button then use a structure that contains the post name - /%postname%/ - or even use only the post name. The best structure to use is debatable, but the broad consensus is certainly to use the postname in there somewhere, and probably the category also. Whatever you choose, take a look at it on your site, make sure it’s right, and then stick with it once you start publishing posts.

If you have a blog already, and you now realize that your permalinks are set up badly there is a way to fix this without losing whatever incoming link love that you already have. You can use a plugin like Scott Yang’s Permalink Redirect to permanantly redirect any old posts to a new improved permalink structure of your choosing. A word of caution - think about it before you do this because you should only do it one time ever, and even that contains some elements of risk. If your blog is brand new, and you have very few, or no incoming links yet, it might be best to just change the permalink structure, and forget about the redirects.

Flat Architecture

You want every page on your site to be accessible with as few clicks as possible from the home page - preferably no more than 2 or 3. Until you have more than 10 posts WordPress automatically gives you the ultimate flat site architecture - everything will be only one click away. Until you have more than 10 posts in any given category nothing will be more than two clicks away via the category pages. Soon after that point you’ll need to take some action to keep your site architecture as flat as possible.

Eventually you will need to keep in mind that the Google Webmaster Guidelines suggest that no page has more than 100 links on it. There are lots of ways to deal with this issue including plugins to generate site maps and extend the number of posts linked to from the category pages, along with hacks that can be done to WordPress itself if you have that skill.

Note that even though the proper use of an XML sitemap should insure that the spiders will find and index all of your content, it won’t guarantee that the flow of link juice created by your internal linking structure will be correctly registered by Google. So use a sitemap, but also try to keep your architecture as flat as possible so that your important content gets the full credit that it should.

Maximizing Available Link Juice

Link juice / Page Rank is created to some degree when an internet document links to another even if those two documents are on the same web site / domain. Since webmasters usually have little if any control over external links from sites that we don’t control, the main concern for the purpose of this article is the creation and flow of internal link juice.

The goals concerning link juice (define) in WordPress are the same as in any other web site – create as much as possible, and concentrate it in the most advantageous places.

Duplicate content

The problem with duplicate content is that it divides a finite amount of pagerank / link juice between the duplicate pages instead of concentrating it where you want – in the canonical version.

A default installation of WordPress will create several virtual copies of every post that you publish – A copy of the latest 10 posts on the homepage, the canonical copy of each that is linked to from the home page, and a copy which is archived by date. If you do a site:http://www.mysite.com Google query you will probably find that Google thinks your WordPress website has many more pages than it actually does, and that most of them are duplicates. Most SEOs (not all) agree that this is a bad thing.

Dealing with duplicate content and Concentrating Link Juice where you want it

Use the more tag effectively – If you use the more tag (in the post editor the icon that looks like a page torn in half) only a small part of each post will appear on the home, category, and archive pages – the complete post will only be in one location. That one tip will take care of a great deal of the duplicate content issues in WordPress. If you also use the Optional Post Excerpt feature you will eliminate the duplicate content that usually occurs on the category pages while also turning them into well focused content.

In addition to duplicate content a site:domain search may reveal that your Login, About, and Contact pages out rank some of your articles because there’s a link pointing at them from every single page of your site. This is probably not what you want. For this and ninety percent of WP duplicate content problems you can use Joost deValk’s Robots-Meta plugin to selectively block feeds and pages. This plugin is a really powerful tool with lots of options, and even includes an htaccess editor so that you can view and edit that critical file from within WordPress. If you’re not too sure about all of those options then just leave them alone – the configuration of the plugin is correct for most sites right out of the box. However, if you’re going to use the Optional Excerpt feature, then you need to uncheck the box for blocking category pages. Joost has lots of his own great WordPress plugins and information on his site. If you haven’t already you really should check it out.

Trailing Slash Canonical Issues

If you want to really sanitize the duplicate content issues from your WordPress site then you will have to deal with the fact that some incoming links will include a trailing slash and some won’t. Apparently some of the search engines think this means that www.somesite.com and www.somesite.com/ are two identical but different places. Scott Yang’s Permalink Redirect plugin can deal with this issue along with helping you to change your existing ugly permalink structure.

If you’re adventurous you can edit your htaccess file manually instead of using a plugin. You can get the details about how to do this from Andy Beard’s excellent article “Ultimate WordPress Htaccess file” or from Sebastian’s Pamphlet on trailing slash canonicalization . Be careful with your htaccess file though - a mistake there can make a wretched mess of your entire site. Always back up first.

If you sell something on your website, you certainly want to have lots of links going to the page which starts the sales conversion process, but you don’t want many links going out from those sales pages - this is sometimes referred to as a funnel process (define). There are two reasons for this - 1) Any page with lots of links coming in, but few if any outgoing links will retain a maximum amt of link juice, and will be more visible in the search engines. 2) Once you have customers on the path to making a purchase you don’t want to distract them away with outgoing links. For usability you might want your conversion pages to have normal site navigation, but even that is debatable. You also want to design that first page in your sales process to be able to stand alone as a landing page (define) so that people who arrive directly from the search engines will continue through the funnel process and convert to customers - but that’s another subject completely.

Links Between Articles on your Site

Links between articles on your site contribute to the pagerank of the pages that those links are pointing to. This is probably most effective when the links use targeted anchor text (define) are coming from pages with related content, and especially from pages with higher PageRank due to incoming links. Nonetheless you should make a practice of linking to other articles from within your posts, and especially to the pages that you would most like to be visible in search engine results such as conversion or landing pages.

Use links with absolute references (define) to your site and within articles (have each article link to itself in other words) to help combat scrapers (define). This way at least if you get scraped the spammers will be linking back to you, and Google will be able to tell that yours is the original.

Internal linking can be somewhat automated with plugins that list related or popular articles such as Similar Posts - Works great easy to install.

Especially important pages can be included in the global navigation or actually created as a “WordPress Page”. In WordPress the term “Page” refers to a (pseudo) static page (define) such as the “about” or “contact” pages that most web sites have. When you create a “page” in WordPress it will automatically be added to the banner navigation on every document on the site. This WordPress page / post concept can seem a bit confusing, but it’s simple to understand once you start using WP.

Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Trackbacks (define) and Pingbacks (define) are both ways to automatically alert other blogs that you have linked to them in your article. Blogs with these services activated will put an excerpt and a link to your article in the comments of the page that you link to. Allowing Trackbacks and Pingbacks encourages other bloggers to link to your content, and participate in the blogging conversation. To enable trackbacks and pingbacks open the WordPress administrative interface, click on Options>>Discusion and check all of the first three boxes.

Pinging Update Services

One of the most powerful WordPress features is found at the very bottom of the WordPress Options>>Writing administrative page - a box where you can list update services to be “pinged” or notified whenever you publish a new post. WordPress by default lists only one service http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ and honestly that seems to work great. When your blog notifies pingomatic that you’ve posted a new article many other services are automatically notified and your article propagates all over the internet. Nonetheless, there are many update services available on the WordPress Codex, and even more services you can ping here - it might be worth looking into adding a bunch of them to this list. I haven’t tried it yet myself, and for all I know it might be the equivalent of submitting to hundreds of search engines (IE worthless) - use your own judgement.

There is a potentially serious issue with the way that WordPress handles pings. Apparently every time you edit and save an already published article the update services are re-pinged. If you’re like me and you repeatedly re-edit your posts (40 or 50 times in the first few minutes after hitting publish) you can be banned for ping spamming. To remedy this potentialy huge problem you can install something like the Max Blogpress Ping Manager plugin which eliminates automatic re-pinging, allows you to do manual pings and automatically keeps a log of your pinging activity. Note: the Max Blogpress plugin seems to work great, but requires free registration and the developer will send you emails hawking their various products from time to time constantly. Apparently this wacky programmer hopes to get something back for giving away his work - What’s up with that?!

Test and Tune

To truly optimize your website you need some way to measure how people and search engines are interacting with it. Depending upon your hosting service you may have access to server logs, but unless you’re something of a power user it will be hard to get the full benefit out of that data. But there are at least two tools that are very easy for anyone to use - not to mention free. The first is Google Webmaster Tools and the other one is Google Analytics. I’ve heard it said that using these services could be risky because they give Google too much information about your activities - so use your own judgment. Nonetheless they’re both very useful and popular. There is one very useful report in Webmaster Tools - “Top search queries” - that gives information that I’m not sure you can get anywhere else. I highly recommend that you install some kind of analytics package early in your blog’s life because for most of them the information only starts when you sign up or install the service - whatever comes before remains a mystery.

A word about installing Google Analytics - there are plugins available for this, but you really don’t need one. Manually installing the code is almost as easy as using a plugin except for one thing - if you ever change themes you will have to reinstall the analytics code. Manually installing it is this easy: In WP click on Presentation>>Theme Editor then select the footer.php file from the list on the right side of the edit window then simply paste in the analytics code right before the </html> tag. That easy.

One Last Thing

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that my experience with WordPress spans over a total of six month or so - I’m not an expert on WordPress or SEO. If you look closely you’ll see that I haven’t even implemented all of these things yet on my own website. So, use your own judgment as you proceed. Despite my lack of extensive experience I hope this article is useful.

I’d like to thank Steven and Pete for their input on this article, and also all of the great SEO and WordPress bloggers out there for the hard work that they do to make this information available to neophytes like me.

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Structural SEO for WordPress Blogs - Gettin’ Friendly with the Engines

photo credit: milomingo

There’s a cycle for learners. You start out being new to a topic - it’s all new and interesting, and you quickly acquire a broad overview and become fairly knowledgeable. At about this point most people lose interest and move on to something else. A few spend a lot of time to learn a little bit more and become experts to some degree. The tiny few true practitioners become Doctors of Philosophy of the subject and work long and hard to make a contribution to the discipline. We could be talking about cellular Biologists, Blacksmiths or just about any other learned group of people.

But what about the sources of information? Other than in current events or celebrity news you can’t produce a never ending supply of interesting mainstream information on most subjects, so what happens to the people who try? Most fail - because they just run out of material.

I’ve subscribed to and read just about every mainstream woodworking magazine that there is at one time or another in my life - being a woodworker to some degree by trade, and also by interest. I’ve noticed that all of the successful ones do the same thing. They recycle. That’s right, they reuse the same stuff over and over again. In a 24 month cycle the best ones that I’ve seen probably don’t produce more than 12 new articles. They just rehash the same stuff. It’s their best stuff, but rehashed nonetheless.

Why would they do this? Two reasons - 1) They make their living publishing a magazine about woodworking, so they have to print something every month. 2) There is only so much you can report about the subject that’s interesting to the readers. That’s right, for the price of a two year magazine subscription you can be exposed to just about every significant mainstream wood working technique that there is. At about this point if you renew your subscription you’ll notice that things start looking mighty familiar.

What does this possibly have to do with me you ask? Take a lesson from the print publishing industry, and realize that the majority of readers in most niches are in the early part of the learning curve where it’s all new and interesting. They’re also the ones that buy most of the tools. On almost any blog that has a “most popular” list, it will be full of basic skills articles. And a lot of the successful blogs devote a significant amount of attention to basic skills. Because that’s what the bulk of readers like, understand, and can use.

I’m not suggesting that the thing to do is to constantly repeat yourself, I’m making the observation that this is exactly what I see being done by successful publishers. And I’m not just talking about wood working.

If your goal is to supply cutting edge esoteric theory to elite practitioners then you’re probably going to have a rather small audience. But really, more power to you.

P.S. The photo is courtesy of a sweet new WP plugin called Photo Dropper that searches for creative commons licensed pictures and effortlessly inserts them into your post for you. Absolutely perfect for my inner slacker.

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Information - Finite Supply - Limitless Demand

The post excerpt substitutes on the category and archive pages for a snippet that WordPress will otherwise automatically grab from the first part of your post. There are three great reasons (that I know of) why you should use this feature:

1. The Optional Excerpt will prevent the category and archive pages from containing duplicates of the main content.
2. Content pages will be filled with keyword rich teasers to lure readers to the main content instead of vague truncated snippets.
3. Category pages will be highly optimized content for keywords related to the category, and the search engines should love them.

Use the WP Optional excerpt feature and your category pages go directly from being a possible duplicate content liability to a keyword rich unique content asset. That’s a lot of SEO goodness for one or two lines of copy.

Tips:

• Don’t just copy and paste a snippet from your post or you’ll defeat the whole purpose.
• Try to write an interesting hook for the excerpt to draw the reader to the post - just like the meta description tag does in the SERP (define).
• Put your targeted key phrase in there, and also try to target the theme of the category page.

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WordPress Optional Excerpt - Too Good to Overlook

Want more subscribers? More links? More reach? Of course you do. The answer is simple - make your material accessible to as many people as possible.

My previous post On Page SEO for WordPress has been fairly popular (for me anyway) receiving a few subscribers, links, comments, and pingbacks. Some of those pingbacks came from non - English blogs. I like to say thanks for those kinds of things, and when I dropped in on one of those sites the post seemed to be mostly a citation of my article, but the one comment - as near as I could tell - was saying something to the effect that it was too bad that the article was in another language.

So I’m trying one of the translation plugins that I’ve heard about - Universal Translator by Davide Pozza. This plugin uses your choice of several free translation engines to do the work, and is “widget ready” which means it can be drag and drop integrated into your widget ready theme without any hacking. This worked great for me without any speed bumps. BTW its the little row of flags in the left sidebar.

Aside from the self serving reasons of more subscribers, links, reach etc. this small effort should also score a few usability karma points - that’s gotta be a good thing. We’ll see how things like “speed bump”, “usability karma” and “gotta” come out in translation.

Being a typical monolingual American I don’t know how good the translations actually are, but word on the street is that they keep getting better, and anyway it has to be better than nothing. If you’re multilingual please check it out and let me know how it works in a comment.

P.S. I’ve been working on my next post on WordPress SEO, and it should be ready soon - it’s turned into a bigger project than expected, but I think the result will be worthwhile. How about grabbing my feed so you don’t miss it.

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Triple your Potential Audience

If you’re an old hand at SEO and WordPress then little if any of this is new to you. However if, like me, you’re still learning about one or both subjects, then a cheat sheet like this might help you get up to speed much more quickly than going out to aggregate all of this information yourself. I hope that a few people find it helpful even if it’s not new and original.

The 4 Factors
1) On Page Keyword Usage & Content Relevance
2) Link Juice
3) Incoming Anchor Text
4) Domain Authority

According to Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz On Page SEO is one of the 4 factors that account for 90% of the search engine ranking equation. It’s the only one of the four that webmasters have complete control of.

Choose Your Keywords – You can’t optimize until you know what you’re optimizing for. Once you have your keyword / key phrase you need to put it on your page in all of the following places:

• In the Page URL – this is a two step process in WordPress:

1. In the administrative interface select Options>Permalinks, then select an option which includes the postname in the permalink structure. You may also want to include the category names in the Permalinks – and thus in the URLs – and propagate broad keywords via the categories.
2. When you write your post/page include your keyword/phrase in the title of the post. If for some reason you want the page URL to be different than the title then you can change the URL by modifying the “post slug” in the menu options on the right side of the write post page.
3. Remember that the Site URL is for branding, the page URL is for SEO and usability.

• In the Title Metatag - By default WordPress uses the reader visible page title as the title metatag, which is better than nothing, but less than ideal. I suggest that you use SEO title tag plugin to decouple the two. This plugin requires you to edit the theme.
• Description and Keywords Metatags – The easiest way to control the inclusion and content of metatags in WordPress is by using a plugin. There are several free plugins available for this purpose but the one that I use (at the time that I’m writing this) is called “Add Meta Tags” It allows me to include any metatag that I want and modify it from the write post page. This plugin isn’t all that automated, but the ones that I’ve tried which generated tags automatically really don’t do an outstanding job. Anyway, find a plugin that works for you and use it. Keep your title metatag to 65 characters or less, and your description tag to 160 characters, and remember that the text in these tags will be the first impression that you get to make on searchers. Think of the title and description tags as sales copy with the conversion goal of interesting the searcher enough to get them to click through.

  Don’t forget proper use of the the other heading tags. Ideally not only would your title be in an <h1> tag, but section headings would be in <h2> tags and subheadings in <h3>… etc. This will naturally help your page to be more relevant for narrower long tail terms. Add these tags manually via the code view tab of the WP post editor - thusly: <h2>heading</h2>

• In an H1 Heading near the top of the page – Your WordPress theme might already take care of this for you. To find out browse to one of your post pages, and view the source code of the page (at the top of your browser click View>Page Source) and scan for the page title - not to be confused with the <title> tag. If your page title is enclosed in h1 tags then you’re in luck, if not you have 2 options – 1) Find a new theme that uses h1 tags for the titles – easier said than done. 2) Hack your existing theme – sounds scary, but it’s easier than it might seem.
• 3 or more times in the content text
• In the Optional Excerpt - Found on the post editor in WP under the write post window. Write a unique summary for the optional post excerpt - don’t just copy part of the post. The excerpt will appear on your category page making it into keyword rich SE fodder while avoiding duplicate content.
• At least once in bold
• In image alt text - the image description in the WordPress add image dialog box- the tree icon in the post editor.
  
• NOT in the anchor text of outgoing links - But do link out to your other posts using their keywords / phrases in the anchor text.
  
• Consider nofollowing superfluous out links - But don’t be too stingy. The link juice that you save may be more than offset by the good will among bloggers that you sacrifice.
• Split your post with the More tag - (the icon that looks like a page torn in half in the post editor) to help minimize duplicate content between your index and single post pages.

These easy steps will supertune your WordPress posts, clearly targeting your chosen keywords. It’s easy and it really does make a difference. Combining On Page SEO for your WordPress Blog along with strategic linking between posts for leveraging the longtail search phrases can be a potent SEO combination to help your blog get noticed.

So, what about those other 3 factors? Even though you can’t have complete control over them, you can gain much benefit by doing all that you can. I’ll be working on those articles too. Soon. Why not subscribe now so you don’t miss them?

What WordPress plugins or techniques do you use or recommend for on page SEO? If you can add something relevant that I’ve missed leave a comment, and I’ll add your point to the article and credit you with a live link.

Related articles:

• Michael Gray on Optimizing WordPress Titles and Slugs
• Joost deValk on WordPress SEO

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On Page SEO for WordPress