I was listening to a phone conference today Mike from The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur was giving. The topic: EST, no not Eastern Standard Time, but to be the EST at something, such as the BiggEST, the SmallEST, the RichEST, the PoorEST.
If you are using the internet and social media you want to be the toppEST when it comes to using SEO. Which leads me to another guru I like: John Jantsch who wrote Duck Tape Marketing In a recent blog post John wrote about the 7 important SEO Factors for Bloggers. Since I am ‘N Training, I wanted to share his advice:
WordPress, and other Blogging Software gives your content an advantage when it comes to the “on page” factors that search engines consider important in determining what content to show in search results.
photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc
It is important that every business big or small blog as it helps your site stand a better chance of ranking for key terms.
However to make this work you need to be consistently feeding your blog. Blog food is high quality, rich in keywords and educational content.
You blog to share what you know about a topic, or you blog to help others have your same experience.
So what is the first step to blog optimization:
Title
A default of most blog software is that the Post Title /Headline is the same as the title. Consider what you title things ask yourself: Is this title the best title for people searching this subject?
You can change default settings in the code or you can use one of the many SEO plugins designed to give you the flexibility to alter the important the elements . John recommends: a plugin from Yoast called WordPress SEO.
Once the plug in is installed you should see a screen that looks something like this:
Preview of how this post, with modified settings, might show in search results.
URL
is a permalink for your blog post. You can change that too. Step 1 here is use a search friendly URLs. WordPress default creates a database URLs with numbers not so friendly numbers when it comes to searching. Customize your URL by going to your settings, then to permalinks and then choosing the custom structure that includes the post name. Seems easy. WordPress will default. So keyword, shorten, create your own here.
You can edit the URL in post screen for keywords and length
H1 tag
H tags are used in HTML to show hierarchy for things like heading and subheadings. (Search engines use these tags as another way to determine what’s important on a page .
By default your blog post headline is shown in the HTML as an H1 tag. You may also want to style subheadings with H2 or H3 tags . Choosing good keywords in the Headline can often times give your blog post a nice boost.
Description
The description show up quite often when your post in featured in search results – it’s the text that describes what the post is about.
Using the SEO plugin write descriptions that read more like an ad for the post so that someone reading it really wants to dive in and read the entire post.
You can add a title and alt image description in the Add Media screen
Images
If you use images in your posts, choose the featured image setting for the image that you want to show when someone retweets or shares your post to Facebook.
Sitemap
Sitemaps are files or pages the term suggests map out all the pages on a site.
The WordPress SEO plugin comes with a sitemap function and there are many others available as well. You just have to remember to click on it.
Make sure that you also submit your sitemap to the Google and Bing Webmaster Tool Portals.
Speed
Not an SEO or page factor, but search engines, hate sites that load slowly. (Don’t we all) Hey doesn’t Google penalize you in some way if your site is a slow loader?
There are many factors that impact site load speed, including theme issues, caching and plugins. Using a caching plugin such a W3Total Cache has become a pretty standard recommendation.
Another factor is hosting. Larger WordPress sites have big databases and when that’s coupled with lots of traffic a host configured for WordPress is a must, switched to Synthesis hosting coupled with the Genesis Theme framework to become faster than a speeding bullet.
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights test to see where you might have issues.
Go Visits John page to get all the details. So much to learn, So much to do, to be and EST.
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