New White Paper Released- SEO for Wordpress Blogs
Mary Bowling | 15 February 2008 |
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Blizzard Internet Marketing has released a new white paper by SEO’s Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling. The free internet marketing mini-manual is entitled SEO for WordPress Blogs and is available for download on our website.
If you are a regular reader of our newsletter, you already know we are huge fans of the WordPress blogging platform. It’s easy to learn and use and offers a multitude of Search Engine Optimization benefits.
The 14 page, illustrated marketing white paper covers the following topics:
- Why a WordPress Blog?
- Setting Up WordPress for SEO Success
- Start Blogging
- Promote your Blog
- WordPress SEO Plug-Ins
Blogging is here to stay and WordPress is the way to do it. In the world of internet marketing, if you’re not blogging, you’re apt to be left behind. And if you are blogging, make certain you’re taking advantage of all the SEO benefits it can give you.
Get started today by downloading SEO for WordPress Blogs by Mary Bowling and Carrie Hill.
UPDATE
Here are some great suggestions from our readers for more WordPress Tips and Tricks. Thanks everyone for your suggestions and support!
From Ed at BestRankingSites.com
I read the SEO for WordPress Blogs and it’s a good beginners guide. I wrote a more advanced wordpress seo guide if your readers are interested.
One simple thing I thought could be added is that h2 tags added to the sidebar could be changed to make the blog more SEO friendly (since the sidebar titles have little relevancy).
Open up your stylesheet by going to your admin dashboard–>presentation–>stylesheet. Add ,menu wherever you see h2.
* If you’re using widgets
Open up wp-includes/widgets.php and search for:
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2 class=”widgettitle”>’, ‘after_title’ => ‘</h2>’,
Change this to
‘before_title’ => ‘<menu>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</menu>’,
You may need to add a <br /> or two after </h2> if the spacing is off.
* Without widgets
Using the old school sidebar actually makes this easier. Just search for h2 in sidebar.php and replace it with menu
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Jonathan at GInside.com sent us these tips:
I have a few SEO tips that your readers might like,
http://www.ginside.com/2006/383/seo-tips-image-naming/
http://www.ginside.com/2007/993/seo-tips-image-naming-round-2/
http://www.ginside.com/2007/637/seo-tips-enforcing-www/
http://www.ginside.com/2007/677/seo-tips-communicate-with-the-blogsphere/
Hope some of those tips help your readers out.
sincerely,
jonathan
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From Emon Hassan @ Emonome.com
Good morning,
Very good Whitepaper. I particularly didn’t know the usefulness of ‘Optional Excerpts’ option. If I may recommend two plugins very useful for permalink structure and two personal preferences.
1. On page 4 you’d recommended renaming the permalink structure to category and post title before one begins blogging as it is tricky to switch after you’ve blogged for a while and some of your posts have already been indexed on Google. After I’d switched to the category/post title structure a few weeks ago, I’d noticed my posts on Google, with the numeric structure, wouldn’t redirect. I thought I was stuck with that structure for good. That’s when I cold emailed Stephan Spencer, of Netconcepts, asking for suggestion. One of the plugins he recommended solved was exactly what I needed. After activation, this plugin redirects all existing permalink structure to your new preferred one without having to do anything. Awesome!
http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/
2. I highly recommend the FeedSmith plugin to re-direct all existing/original feeds from your blog to the FeedBurner feed. A lot of folks will subscribe to a blog by clicking the orange icon on the browser which is not the FeedBurner feed. FeedSmith will automatically re-direct original feed to FeedBurner even if you click the source Feed.
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart
3. This is a personal preference. Chances are, a lot of your readers won’t visit your blog but will read all your posts via their preferred Feed reader. They’re likely to browse through all the feeds they’ve subscribed to and don’t have the time to visit each site. In that case, you may want to consider making the full feed available on your FeedBurner settings. If people like your post, they will click the link to your page to leave comment or find the trackback link to post on theirs. I have readers who can’t get to my new posts every day but they check them out when they get a chance because they’re all waiting for them in their Readers. Sure you can argue that that would make you write compelling titles so people will click on to your site and read the posts but chances are, if you’re new at this, it won’t work for you and even if it did, readers just might not have that extra click in them to divert their attention to your site.
4. Most bloggers often make the mistake - I had as well - of requiring registration to leave comment on their blogs. It is, frankly, annoying for most readers. After a few people let me know of the annoyance, I realized I had unknowingly chose the option thinking it was a better way to block spam. Well, Akismet does an excellent job of blocking spam. Random visitors are likely to drop by your blog and want to leave comments and if you ask them to register and require them be logged in, they won’t and you lose a comment and, maybe, a subscriber. On the Options>General page, I have the ‘Membership’ options unchecked. I then went to Options>Discussion and required commenters fill out name and email; I hold all comments for moderation and put ‘1′ in the ‘Comment Moderation’ option. Again, a personal preference.
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February 16th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Thank you for the blog set up white paper. It’s a really useful resource for clients.
aimClear
February 16th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Great report!! Easy to follow, and nice friendly tone.
I will be sharing the link love for this one!
February 16th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Finally, something easy to read and understand. Thank you!
February 18th, 2008 at 8:06 am
I’ve downloaded the rapport. It is a good read, but nothing really new for me. For beginners it’s a nice manual though!
February 18th, 2008 at 10:20 am
A great primer, but one little issue stood out for me: I loved UTW, but Simple Tags plays much better with the most recent versions of WordPress. Have you experimented with it, or other more compatible tag plugins?
February 18th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Great ideas about the permalinks and slugs. I look forward to testing out the plugins.
February 19th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Lots of great stuff in there. I did have one question I’d like to get clarified if anyone can help out. It’s my understanding that there is a big difference between a “dash” vs. “underscore” in article titles. In your section, “Take advantage of slugs” you use a dash between the words in the title so it reads, “/costa-rica-vacation-rentals/” vs. “/costa_rica_vacation_rentals/”.
I thought google looked at the first version as a single string or word. Whereas using underscore makes it clear to Google that these are really four unique words. Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks.
Dan
digitalsignagetoday.com
February 19th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
This is really a fantastic resource, astonishingly easy to comprehend. I highly recommend Ed’s advanced tips as well, I’m just starting to tear into h1 tags; satisfying stuff!
February 19th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
@ everyone - Thanks SO much for your feedback and support. This paper is meant to give a few tips and tricks and definitely isnt a be-all-end-all resource for setting up WordPress - there are other things you’ll need to consider and you all sound like you’re on your way to building some great WordPress blogs!
@Dan Scofield
Hi Dan, thanks for your question. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the dashes vs. underscores debate. I’m not sure where the debate has come from as Matt Cutts (Google Blogger and WebSpam team Engineer) and Vanessa Fox (former Google Webmaster Central team leader) wrote posts on Matt Cutts’ blog telling us WHY to use dashes instead of underscores. I’m linking to those articles here, mostly because these are MUCH Better explanations than I could come up with.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-post-vanessa-fox-on-organic-site-review-session/
I hope this helps!
~Carrie Hill
February 20th, 2008 at 5:58 am
Well done!
If only I have found it a few months earlier… It would solve a lot of the puzzles in my head, and saved me a lot of time. I still learned a lot!
Ivan | http://www.JobsBlog.ie
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Thank you for Blizzard Internet Marketing for releasing a new white paper, an internet marketing mini-manual . And thanks again because this is a free internet marketing mini-manual. It’s a great help.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:05 am
I must say that it is a great article, thumbs up! Wordpress starts to impress me by the day.
Thanks
Cheers
Marcel
May 16th, 2008 at 4:09 am
this is great blog article thans for sharing
May 18th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Thanks for the valuable article. Good information.
June 12th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Loved the link, thanks man! Geld lenen
June 13th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Great ressource! Even for me some aspects found in your whitepaper were new. (e.g. the “slugs”)
June 19th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Even for non wordpress users it has some good value ;)
June 26th, 2008 at 7:50 am
I’m using wordpress since 4 years ago but don’t know how to optimise it. thanks for the paper and will report the progess to later ;)
June 30th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Absolutely awesome white paper, passed on to app dev team and I can’t tell you how happy I am to have a “go to” for best practices. This adds so much support to any pro seo / wordpress stance. Thank you for making my life easier.
July 8th, 2008 at 7:24 am
I love wordpress because it seo friendly and its plugins. When i need something i look on the wordpress site and its there
Yhank you community
July 8th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Random question I’m sure but has anyone here properly integrated Ning with Wordpress?
July 17th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Good stuff guys!
July 31st, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Thanks for the report, I have just subcribed to your reader. There is so much confusion out there about plugins, but this seems concise to me.
August 18th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
A great resource for Wordpress is Revolution Themes, as it provides WP templates that can be embedded within a core site, but do not look like a blog.
From an SEO standpoint, this is advantageous for the client and their visitors as newly created pages on a variety of topics can interlink to core target pages in efforts to increase internal linking numbers.
This is a great resource!
Also, for those who havent seen SEO Digger yet - CHECK IT OUT. It does a reverse index of Google pages to accurately assess all top two page positioning levels. As an seo services company, this data helps us set gameplans into low hanging fruit
August 21st, 2008 at 11:04 am
Apologies if my previous comment appeared spammy it was genuinely meant to aid not hinder blogging seo
September 1st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Your blog and information on it is very usefull. I am a bigginer in WordPress.
September 6th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I love wordpress, but sometimes when i use wordpress with al those plugins i think it’s flippin’. Is there any information available of using different kind of plugins next to each other?
September 8th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
We look forward to downloading the whitepaper. As a Seattle SEO firm, we’ve recently been experimenting with many of the Wordpress plugins and already, within a couple weeks, we’re seeing some benefits. I agree with the other commentator though…there are so many plugins available for Wordpress that pretty soon we’re going to need a plugin that manages all the other plugins.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:39 am
Is there any plugin available for wordpress with the help of which we can place adsense?
September 16th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Yep… there is a plug in called Adsense Manager. Try it out. Wordpress has a plug in for everything!
September 18th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Great resource, thanks for providing this. Im glad I found it. Wordpress is such an amazing toolset for marketers to use when trying to optimize their site from a content perspective, and too many businesses just dont use it.
The reason, in my opinion, that it works so well is the frequency for which content can be quickly updated…not to mention the integrated ping capability which garners backlinks at an accelerated rate. As a seo services company, we manage this component for our clients and use RSS submission software to help drive the viral effect that builds pagerank.
Again, thanks for the sweet resource, we will pass it along…
September 24th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Thanks for sharing this useful resource. I like to browse useful stuff and read about SEO. Better than playing computer games ;)
October 1st, 2008 at 11:36 am
I’m glad I found this. You provide a lot of useful information in your 14 page guide. Instead of me trying to explain Word Press SEO to friends and family, now I can just point them to your guide. Time saver for me.:)
October 10th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Am I the only one who likes blogger templates better? lol
October 30th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
yes lenen, you are the only one!
November 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
although I use blogger now, I intend to move to WordPress and start my own wordPress blog soon this paper will be of great help
November 12th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
I always give preference to wordpress, because of it’s wide variety of seo plugins and extra ordinary style.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:42 am
outstanding info, the idea of unique seo techniques just for wordpress promotion is a good one. Excellent white paper, thank you
November 15th, 2008 at 12:51 am
Blogger has it’s place, but WP is way more versatile.
November 15th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Great article, easy to follow, and nice friendly tone, thanks for sharing :)
November 26th, 2008 at 8:53 am
I must say thanks for sharing the valuable article with me, very nice..