With the default installation and using 7 of the 8 settings below, WordPress is about 90% there, as far as search engines go. With a couple of SEO plugins (or SEO -aware themes), you can get to 95%.

1. Make sure your site title is descriptive.
2. Make sure you have changed the tagline from “Just Another WordPress Blog” to a description of what your website is about.
3. Install and activate Google XML Sitemaps and All in One SEO Pack (or WordPress SEO by Yoast) plugins.
4. Set your permalinks to something that includes %postname%; we use /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ for the majority of our clients. (Yes, our site is set at something different. Like most of you, we jumped straight to Appearance when we started and learned the best practices later in the game.)
5. Create categories for what you’ll be talking about on your site. Remember, these are general topics; specifics are best as tags.
6. Edit your About page (or Sample Page). Make sure it’s either about you or just delete it. Remember that all content on your site will be indexed.
7. Delete the first default post (Hello World!) and comment.
8. Change the name of the default category from “Uncategorized” to something more descriptive about your site. (Refer to step 5.)

There’s not much to the list, right? When you get through step 8, you’ve hit the 95% mark. To get to 100% (or at least 99%), you also need to adapt how you write your content.

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There are three things that good keyword research will help you uncover:

• Who is your target audience?
• What are your customers interested in?
• How will you answer their needs and problems?

Some people are looking for ideas, some for information, and still others may be looking to build up their education.

Start your research using free keyword research tools found here and here.

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I’ve always been a lover of checklists, so I was thrilled when Stoney deGeyter published The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!

We use the checklist to shape our web marketing conversations with businesses. The list doesn’t cover any “how tos,” which are essential ingredients to successful online marketing, but sometimes you need to first know what to do so you can then discover how to do it.

Download a PDF version of Best-Damn-Marketing-Checklist-Period now.

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How do you know if your web marketing is invisible? Was your web site built in the last decade? When was the last time you asked an internet marketing professional to take a look behind the curtain?

Go. Right now. Check your web site!

In your browser navigation bar select View > Source (or Page Source). You will be able to see the all the geek code which makes your site look pretty and functional.

Don’t worry if the programming code does not make sense to you.

I’m going to show and tell you how to know if your site is invisible to search engines—which means your site is invisible to anyone looking for what you are offering.

If the text driving your web site looks like the picture below—with the words ‘frameset’ or ‘noframes’ or ‘scrolling’ appearing in the first few lines—chances are fairly high you are not going to attract search engines or people.

So, what do you do if your site is built using frames?

Send me a note. We’ll talk about options for bringing you into the 21st century.

Oh, by the way. Just because ‘frameset’ doesn’t appear in the code, don’t go thinking everything is peachy keen. Do you see ‘table’ or ‘flash’ anywhere? Let’s talk.

Photo Credit: Ray Lopez via Flickr Creative Commons

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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 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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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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Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell me about it in the comments.

Did you miss these?

• 10 Crucial Social Media Widgets To Improve Content Traffic And Awareness
• Embeddable Waves: The Google Wave WordPress Plugin
• (Anti) Social Lists 11/22/09

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All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools.  While the name only mentions Google, this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

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Join me for a glass of sweet tea and share the blog posts and Twitter links that caught my attention this week.

Run a Google search on “social media ROI” and you’ll get 1,140,000 results. So, starts Tim Walker’s post Social Media and the Acid-Bath of ROI. “The good news is, much of what you can do in social media today is cheap. That low “I” means that if you can hit even modest “R” numbers, your ROI gamble will pay off.”

Matt Cutts notes “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” Slide #12. That really captures the essence of why WordPress is so popular – especially with beginning or casual bloggers. A blogger can get plugins and tools to get the maximum search engine optimization for their blog – but the mere choice of WordPress hits 80% of the SEO needs and all the other heavy lifting is to get that final 20%. ~ David Silversmith

When you’re an independent consultant, eventually you’ll experience one or more of the “negotiating tactics” hilariously illustrated in The Vendor – Client Relationship.

So you want a Facebook Fan Page for Your Nonprofit? Here’s the Scoop! The piece provides 16 tips for setting up your fan page and some good nitty-gritty how-to information.

One of the most important parts of being an online entrepreneur is maintaining an intellectual edge. 20 Must-Read Blogs for Online Entreprenuers introduces 20 useful, thought-provoking and potentially lucrative sources of news and ideas.

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