7 Simple Steps to Improve SEO

May 26, 2010 by Kathy Drewien · View Comments
Filed under: Social Business - Strategy & Networking 

Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) today in seven simple steps.

Search Engine Optimization

Image by Hobo! via Flickr

  1. Find keywords.  Pick a list of words relevant to your business. Think about which words are most likely to get people to do what you want them to do (convert into leads) and focus on those words.


  2. Put keywords in Page Title. The Page Title is one of the most important things that Google and other search engines evaluate to determine what is on a web page.  Put your keyword or phrase in the title, keep it short.


  3. Put keywords in Page URL.  Google and other search engines also use the text of the URL of the page to determine the content of the web page.  You should use your keyword or phrase in the URL of the web page.


  4. Put keywords in Meta Data.  While the page Meta Data (Page Description and Keywords) are not nearly as important as they used to be, they still count.  Take advantage of them by putting your keyword or phrase there.


  5. Put keywords in your H1 text. The H1 to H6 tags are used to define HTML headings. H1 defines the largest heading and H6 defines the smallest heading. There should only be one H1 tag on your site – the name of your business or the name of the page or the name of the article. The following tags are secondary; much like the outline for a class term paper.


  6. Use keywords in the page content.  Putting keyword phrases in your page content also signals to search engines that the page is actually about the keyword and should show up in search results.


  7. Monitor your rank. Give the search engines some time to do their thing (couple days) and then keep checking your rank to see what happened and track your progress.
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SEO Tag Cloud Widget and More Plugins

January 19, 2010 by Kathy Drewien · View Comments
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts, WordPress - Blog Tips, Plugins & How-To 

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs.  Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this.  Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO Wordpress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

What did we miss? Let us know in the comments.

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How Do People Find YOUR Content?

December 8, 2009 by Kathy Drewien · View Comments
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts, WordPress - Blog Tips, Plugins & How-To 

How do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO). Here are 5 of the best SEO plugins.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings

Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images

Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin

If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link

The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it.  SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier.  You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links

Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand.  SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

Do you have SEO favorites? Share them in the comments.

 

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