Tag Archives: YARPP

SEO with Lou Anne McKeefery (November 2009 Meetup)

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Overview

More than 200 factors go into determining your site’s ranking in Google.

You see results from optimization faster with WordPress than with HTML sites.

Lou Anne took her example client from 189 to 1055 keywords—those are the terms real people actually used to find the site.

Keyword research is critical. The most searched term was “weight loss”, which the client thought was 90% relevant. “Fitness” was 100% relevant.

The trick is to find the words that people haven’t found your site with, that you want them to.

Tip: When people phone you, they may actually tell you the keywords they used, or would use, e.g. “I’m looking for a 3-bedroom home in…”

KEI: Keyword Effectiveness Index

From her keyword research, Lou Anne creates categories so she can organize the site. She works with the web designer in the early stages. If the only pages you have are services ABC, you’re only appealing to people who are already ready to buy. Use the terms people use when researching. The site will end up larger, but it will appeal to a greater range of people.

Ellen asks how SEO for WordPress differs—Lou Anne says in the implementation. (Regular websites don’t necessarily have categories and tags.)

Lou Anne doesn’t know how much tags affect SEO. But think of them in terms of keywords anyway.

Note: No search engine uses the keyword meta tag field. Lou Anne only uses them to keep track of what her client is trying to optimize on.

Permalinks

Don’t change your permalink structure without setting up 301 Redirects. (You can use the Redirection plugin (see list below) for this.)

Lou Anne’s preferred permalink structure is %category%/%postname%
Metadata

• Page title—THE MOST IMPORTANT
• Page slug
• Description—Not used for ranking, but people will click based on this.

Search for “site:yourdomain.com” to see what your page descriptions look like now.

You want every page’s title and every description to be unique.
Plugins for SEO

• Headspace2 rather than All in One SEO. It lets you put your Google Analytics code and other IDs
• Robots Meta plugin helps take care of duplicate content
• Automatic SEO Links
• SEO Smart Links
• SEO Friendly Images
• Google Sitemap Generator
• MaxBlogPress ping optimizer
• Redirection to fix broken links and otherwise create 301 redirects
• Surveys (search-friendly) http://wordpress.org/…
• PollDaddy (not searchable, if you’re asking about something not relevant to searches)
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
• Folding Category Widget

Video

• Noel recommends FastTube plugin for YouTube:
• Marco suggests WordTube

Resource
103bees.com $10/year

Notes

Work on the words/phrases in 5th to 9th position. Those are the ones you can move, and make a difference with.

The reason you might use “noindex” is if you’re writing something not related to your main topic.

For more SEO expertise, contact
Lou Anne McKeefery,
Be Found
http://be-found.net/…
408 946-8632

Author-izer

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Site

www.author-izer.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

The Author-izer is Sallie’s other business.

Theme

screenshot

Authorizer2 by Sallie Goetsch, created with Artisteer

Active Plugins

November 12, 2009

Notes

The plugin that deserves honorable mention here is Redirection, because I installed it on my old authorizer.fileslinger.com site to redirect the original Author-izer blog to the new author-izer.com location. Depending on the kind of 404 messages I start to get from SEO Ultimate (I just switched from All in One SEO Pack), I may install it here, as well.

I did more than move the Author-izer site from a subdomain, however. I expanded the static pages from three to 26 (at last count). That makes a plugin for organizing pages absolutely critical. PageMash works wonderfully. It makes the back end of WordPress look a lot more like the mind map I used for my site redesign.

Another great tool for a large site is Dagon Design Sitemap Creator. Where Google XML Sitemap Creator builds sitemaps for search engines, Dagon Design builds them for humans. You insert one short code phrase into the HTML editor of your sitemap page, and it does all the rest.

I used Podcasting rather than PowerPress mostly because I had never tried it before. As a podcasting consultant, I thought I ought to know how the plugin worked, even though PowerPress is now the podcasting plugin of choice. It works, but I won’t be switching any of my other sites over to it.

Query Posts lets me show recent posts without including the posts that are just collections of Delicious bookmarks inserted by Postalicious. (It lets you do other things, too, but it’s very handy for excluding certain post categories.) While I think it’s useful to have those links collected in my blog, I don’t think they’re the items of most interest to visitors.

I may be taking the Collapsible Archive Widget out, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but just because the current thinking seems to be that including your archives takes up space you could use for something more interesting to your readers. (Also, a colleague told me that all those links to archive pages can slow down your page loading.) Expect to see some updates in the plugin list.