Tag: search engine optimization

Categories
Kids/Parenting

Making WordPress search-engines friendly for beginners

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Set up WordPress on BlueHost

This post is aimed at beginning WordPress users. More advanced users are welcome to share tips in the comments as well. I worked in search engine optimization and Internet marketing for five years and continue to keep up with best practices.

WordPress is not bad for search engine visibility right out of the box, but there are a number of plugins that can help to enhance your blog’s search engine visibility. Several of these plugins are combined in the All in one SEO Pack plugin.

The management menu for All in one SEO Pack is located under Settings>All in one SEO. The plugin is designed to work “out of the box” for new installations of WordPress, but if you want to customize some of the aspects listed on the options page, you can do so here. Most of the boxes here are self-explanatory: click on the link (such as “Home Title”) to display an explanation of what you should and can put in each box.

Another important detail in optimizing your site is creating “canonical” URLs. This means that each unique page of your site should have only one URL that leads to it. If http://www.mydomain.com/this-is-a-post/ and http://mydomain.com/this-is-a-post/ both lead to the same page, this can confuse search engines (and users). To set a “canonical” version of your domain, you can use the Redirection plugin.

The management for Redirection is located under Tools>Redirection. Go to the Modules menu. Next to WordPress, click edit:

Next to Canonical, you can choose Leave as is, Strip WWW (yourdomain.com) or Force WWW
(www.yourdomain.com). If you want all your URLs to have the WWW, choose Force. If not, choose Strip. (Note: Strip Index is also a good idea, especially if you’re using custom permalinks.)

Finally under making your WordPress search-engine friendly, it’s a good idea to customize your permalinks (URLs). If you’re going to import a blog, be sure to set the custom permalinks before you import your old posts. Under Settings>Permalinks, set the permalinks to either date and name based or custom. Be sure to include the tag %postname% somewhere in the custom box if you select that option. For more available custom permalink tags, see WordPress’s documentation on structure tags.

Categories
MetaBlogging

Targeting your keywords to get search engine rankings

Last week, we started our series on keywords: the words people use to find your blog. We looked at a few ways of identifying those keywords—and this week we’ll look at how we can put those keywords to work.
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On your site

Use the keywords you’re targeting on your site. If the keyword is really integral to the site, you might try to find a way to work it into your blog name or even URL. In the Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Blogs, I mentioned a few more places to use these keywords.

  • Making it a label, tag or category on your blog
  • Making it part of the navigation, like your About or Contact page
  • Including it in the Title or Description of your blog
  • Writing a post that sums up (and links to) all your tips (if you do this, be sure to go back through the old posts and link to the new one, as well).

And of course, use it in the text. However, write your posts with people in mind, not just search engines—write to your audience, using the words they’re using to find you.

Around the Internet

Pages on your site are a good way to start using the keywords you want to target. But to really target these keywords, you should look at ways to get links back to your site using those keywords as the text of the links (the “anchor text”).

There are a few easy ways to do this—your friends’ blogrolls, for example. Also, blog carnivals and other memes are a good way to get links where you can choose exactly what that anchor text is.

Finally, you can try to create “linkbait”—something everyone will want to link to, share, use on their sites (with links back to yours, of course). There are many forms of this—awesome articles, fun quizzes, cool widgets. If you’ve got the imagination, you can probably find someone with the skill to create it for you.

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Using the keywords that search engine users enter to find sites like yours tells search engines your site is relevant for those terms—especially when that “vote” of relevance comes in the form of a link from another site. Using the keywords you’re targeting both on and off your site will help people who are looking for sites like yours, find you.

What do you think? What other ways do you get links? How else can you use your keywords on your site?

Keys by Kit

Categories
MetaBlogging

Keywords: Are people looking for your blog?

Keywords are the words people type into search engines. Do you know what keywords people are using to find your blog? How can you make sure your blog ranks for the “right” keywords?

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This is keyword research, the foundation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When you work on your site using the words that people would use in search engines to find sites like yours, you can work to improve your search engine rankings.

Choosing Keywords

Choosing keywords is part art and part science. For the science part, one easy, free tool is the Google External Keyword Tool. If you’ve already chosen a niche, you should have a start on the topics and areas your blog will cover.

Once you have a few keywords to feed into the Tool, it will generate related terms, so you can find the real search terms people use. If you call it “sing at home mom,” the tool’s going to tell you that most people say “stay at home mom.”

If you can’t come up with a list of keywords on your own, the Tool can also read your site to generate relevant keywords—but be careful which page you pick (my main page right now would bring back a lot of keywords on lawn maintenance 😉 ).

I know that my cute tag line [mom’s search for meaning] isn’t going to bring a whole lot of visitors (the Tool reports “not enough data” for that keyword). Keywords like [how to be a happy mom] and [mother fulfillment] also don’t get a lot of traffic. Perhaps my best bet is [moms encouragement], which has a few hundred as the traffic number, and no advertiser competition.

While we’re talking about natural search results here, and the advertiser competition has to do with the paid ads on the top and sides of the search results, you have to also look at the competition. I mean, you actually have to look at the other pages that are already ranking for those words and see if it looks like they’re trying to stay there.

If you want to rank in the top ten, [mom blog] is going to be a challenge. But maybe [knitting sahm blog] or [puppy sahm blog] or [motoX mom blog] (ooh, I’d like to see that one) would be a little less competitive.

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So an ideal keyword will be:

  • high volume (so you get visitors)
  • relevant to your site and niche (so your visitors won’t be disappointed
  • not too competitive (so you can rank high without working for a year)
  • not too long (the longer it is, the less competitive it is, but the harder it will be to incorporate it into your site.

Next week, we’ll take a look at what you can do to improve your ranking for relevant keywords.

Keys by Kit