What a great discussion we had this past Monday on Advanced WordPress topics. I really love these sessions because I never know where they will end up. I always have a rough idea of what I want to cover but depending on who asks what questions, we always end up going down roads I never would have anticipated.
This week we got into a rather in-depth, on-page search engine optimization discussion. Here is what we covered:
Google Webmaster Tools
When you set up your blog, also set up a Google Webmaster Tools account.
- You need a Gmail account to sign up for Webmasters Tools
- Login to your Google account, then go to google.com and search for ‘Webmaster Tools’. Click on the top search result and follow the instructions on the homepage to set up your free account.
- To verify ownership, click on the alternate methods tab and select ‘Add A Meta Tag To Your Site’s Home Page’
- Copy the code
- Go to your blog and add the plugin ‘Webmaster Tools Verification’ then paste the code where it shows you and save the settings
- Go back to Webmaster Tools and click the ‘Verify’ button
Webmasters Tools is extremely useful because it gives you access to an incredible amount of information about your site. It will give you a sense of what keywords people are searching for and how many clicks your blog is getting. You can also see what sites are linking to yours and will know if there are pages on your site that the Google bots can’t spider, plus a lot of additional information. All this helps you make informed decisions about how to make your blog better and attract more traffic.
If your URL is brand new to the Google index, setting up Webmasters Tools and submitting your XML sitemap will allow you to get found by Google faster. You submit your sitemap through the Webmaster Tools in the site configuration area. To create an XML sitemap:
- Log into your blog and add the plugin ‘Google XML Sitemaps’
- This will generate the XML sitemap and will provide you with the URL to that sitemap
- Copy the sitemap URL and log into Webmaster Tools
- Go to ‘Site Configuration’ in the left hand column and select sitemaps from the dropdown
- Click on ‘Add/Test Sitemap’ in the top right of the screen and past the URL there; then click ‘Submit Sitemap’
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
There are two main components of Search Engine Optimization: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. Our discussion revolved around on-page optimization. To optimize your blog for search, your need to start by creating your targeted keyword list:
- This is the list of keywords that you want to position high in the search engines for
- To do this you need to start by thinking about what keywords you think people would use to find the content that is related to the topic of your blog
- Try to create a list of 20-30 keywords
- You then want to use keyword tools to expand that list
- The best tools are free and accessed through Google Adwords
- To set up a Google Adwords account, log into your Gmail account, go to Google and search for ‘adwords’. Then follow the instructions on setting up an Adwords account
- All of the tools discussed below are found in the ‘Tools and Analysis’ section of your Adwords account
- One of the best free tools is the Google Adwords tool called ‘Contextual Targeting Tool’: you type in one phrase and it will spit back at you a series of phrases that Google thinks are related to that phrase. Use this tool to build out your keyword list to as many as possible.
- You then want to use Google’s ‘Keyword Tool’ to research which of those phrases gets the most traffic and how competitive they are
- o From there you want to cull your list down to 5-10 keywords. You do that by comparing the estimated search traffic to how competitive the term is and what your gut tells you
- Those are the keywords that you want to optimize your site for
- To optimize your blog you should start by logging into your blog and adding the ‘WordPress SEO’ plugin
- Then go to the plugin and scroll down to the ‘Titles’ section and fill out the ‘Homepage Title Template’ section. Be sure to create a title that is both keyword rich – try to include 2 or 3 of your keywords – but also descriptive, as this is the title of your blog that will show up in the search results page
- Also fill in the ‘Meta Description Template’ section. This is the little blurb that shows up under the link to your website on the search results page. For this section it’s more important to make the content enticing for visitors than keyword rich. You want it to be a short, 2-sentence ad explaining why someone should visit your site.
- As you are writing your blog posts, you want to keep in mind the keywords that you are trying to position for. You should target just one phrase per post. You want the keyword phrase to show up:
- In the title of the post
- In the URL for the post
- In the first two sentences
- In one other place in the body of the post
- The Yoast plugin adds an SEO section at the bottom of the screen where you write your blog post. This gives you the ability to easily add in the keywords where they matter most
Blogging On The Go
We also discussed how you can write blog posts on the go. There is a great WordPress iPad app that you can download for free from the app store. The only trick is that before you download the app, you first need to:
- Log into the back end of your blog
- Go to the settings section and click on ‘Writing’
- Now scroll down and you should see ‘XML-RPC’ with a check box
- Click on the check box to enable this feature
- Now download the app and log into your blog
You can also configure your blog so that you can email in blog posts that are automatically posted. This is a bit trickier and will probably require the help of your IT guy. To configure this feature:
- Log into the back end of your blog
- Go to the settings section and click on ‘Writing’
- Scroll down to the ‘Post Via Email’ section
- This is where your IT guy comes into play as you will need to set up a unique email address and get the POP3 access for it. Be sure to use a completely random email address, as anyone can post to your blog just by sending an email to that email address