WordPress does a greate job of SEO out of the box, but when you add in a dash of All In One Seo Pack, and a sprinkling of SEO theory, you are heading for organic search heaven.
Many of the new breed of plugins such as Thesis and Headway are SEO ready out of the box, but in case you are not using one of these themes, you should check out all in one seo.
What Is All In One SEO Pack
It’s a plugin which takes the key areas of your site and allows you to add the keywords which will bring visitors to your site.
Just in case you are not 100% sure about keywords, this is the word or phrase that someone will type into Google which should match them to your site. For example if you run the red widget blog, you may want to attract peoples attention with the keyword “metal red widget” If you can optimise key areas of your site with that phrase.
Where you Need To Optimise
Here are the areas you need to consider and optimise with your keywords.
Page Title – This as the name suggests is the title of the particular page of your site, this is the single most important area where you need to optimise yoru site,. You can see it from the top of your browser bar, here is the page title of the root of my site. Here is the game, can you tell what my desired keyword is? Leave a comment.
Site Meta Description – This is the description which appears on the results page of a search on Google or one of the other search engines. Here is the meta description for my home page
Are you any closer to my main keyword yet?
Site Meta Keywords – There is a lot of discussion in the SEO world that adding keywords to your site no longer works. People caught onto this, stuffing hundreds of keywords in their code and “gamed” the system, but still it does no harm to add your keywords here,. The meta keywords are pieces of code on your page which are not displayed but tell the search engine something about that pagee, if you do a view source of my home page you will see my keywords meta as
<meta name="keywords" content="wordpress help, wordpress support, wordpress technical support" />
Come on I’ve spelled it out for you now.
How All In One SEO Pack Can Help
Once you have installed and activated the plugin, you can begin to optimise your site as described above and add descriptions and titles which are useful both to your readers and contain your desired keywords using an easy GUI tool.
There are two ways to modify your site, on a post by post basis or site wide.
Site Wide Settings
From the settings -> all in one seo pack menu, you are given an area where you can set your home title, site metas description and keywords.
The plugin comes with some other advanced options such as canonial URL support to stop duplicate content problems but using the 80/20 rule, put your effort into the areas mentioned above for the most effect.
Per Post SEO Settings
You can change your posts individually, SEO pack allows you to create a keyword rich title and description. This will overide the title you set when writing your post.
The following SEO section is shown at the bottom of post editor screen.
How I Use All In One SEO Pack
This is my seo plugin of choice, I have my site optimised for a particular keyword and I am working on my offsite configurations to rank for this, at the time of writing I am on page three and climbing.
I also pay particular attention to my per post configurations to get my keywords into titles and metadescriptions.
KeyWord Research
One more thing to consider before you stuff your sections with keywords is the competitiveness of the keyword you are planning to use. you may think your widget site needs to rank for widget, but in reality you only sell red widgets. Go for the more specific keywords relating to your site. The second thing to consider is the competitiveness of your keyword. If everyone and their dog is trying ot rank for widget and have been for years, you as a newbie to SEO will not have much of a chance without years of hard work.
Here are some tools to help you research your keywords:
Google Adwords KeyWord Tool – inside of the adwords pay per click systme you can research keywords to see how often they are called from the google index, and how many other people are advertising on them to get an idea of hte competitive nature of the keyword
Wordtracker – use this tool to anaylse prospective keywords and use it to give you less competitive search phrases. This is a paid tool, but there is a seven day trial period.
Get All In One SEO Pack
The plugin is available to download and install from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
A Disclaimer On SEO
The search algorithm used by Google is one of the most closely guarded secrets, it’s like what herbs and spices go into KFC coating or the recipe for Coke. No-one really knows what Google looks for, rather all of the suposition is from testing done by people trying to decipher this riddle and what they have seen work.
Google changes their algorythm on occasions so what is SEO best practise now will not be in the future. The information provided here is the current thinking of what makes up good on site optimisation.
Further Reading
SEO is a huge topic and there are other areas you need to consider over and above what All In One SEO Pack does. I have not touched on permalinks, keyword density, optimising images alt text, use of keywords with your h1 .. h6 header titles. Lastly I have not touched on off page SEO, getting links to you with the correct anchor text to backup your work.
You may want to check out my post on changing your slug for SEO, this is another very important area
The man who wrote the book or blog post on WordPress SEO is Yoast, he takes these ideas and add some more tweaks over and above what all in one seo does. Here’s an idea of how good he is, type wordpress seo into Google and see who comes out tops. Say no more
Lastly I would like to point you to a couple of paid resources, Namoi Dunford the potty mouthed owner of Ittybiz wrote the e-book Seo School, this is the resource which finally gave me the lightbulb moment on seo. The other resource I want to point you to is Michael Martine and his e-book WordPress SEO Secrets. Either of these will help you to get seo for WordPress.
My Final Thought On SEO
Write for people not for search engines, but where you can tweak for search engine spiders, if you stuff your titles and descriptions with keywords and it makes no sense, what use is that to your readers?
We blog for people not rankings.
UPDATE: WordPress SEO Training Available
I have recorded a video training session about WordPress SEO for my WordPress training and support community the WP Owners Club.
I’ve got a 14 day free trial at the moment, why not take out trial membership and check out the training, here’s what you need to do
1) Sigup for a 14 day free trial account at wpownersclub.com/sign-up
2) Go to http://wpownersclub.com/wordpress-seo and watch your training