One of the rules of SEO is that it requires hard work. Sometimes companies propose a black hat service that can create piles of backlinks and send your site sky-rocketing in Google’s results, but such services are not a sound long-term strategy. If you invest in SEO for your website, you will reap the benefits for years to come.

While long-lasting SEO is hard work, that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to make it easier. That’s where a CMS like WordPress can team up with a variety of tools and plugins that will both save you time and produce better results for SEO on your website and blog.

Use a SEO-Friendly Theme for WordPress

You can create great, relevant content on your company’s blog, but if a search engine can’t sort out the code on your website and find your blog, there’s no point in writing it. Opinions vary about the benefit of paying for an SEO-optimized WordPress theme, but the key is picking out a theme that has clean, search engine-friendly code. Paying $50-$100 for a solid, SEO-optimized theme won’t hurt, but picking out a sharp theme with cluttered code will.

There are a number of WordPress themes that boast the ability to boost your search engine ranking. Some free themes such as Vigilance provide a clean, SEO-friendly design that website developers can modify and optimize.  However, if you want to increase your search engine ranking right from the start, consider a premium WordPress theme.

After switching to the Standard Theme, publishing and leadership blogger Michael Hyatt reported:

According to my Google Analytics account, my visitors have increased by 38.4% and my page views by 43.8% in the week following the installation compared to the week before… I really think Standard Theme’s native search engine optimization (SEO) accounts for most of the uptick.

The jury is still out regarding which theme is the best. For example, a recent review of Thesis and Genesis showed that they both offer many of the same features, and that the best theme may come down to personal preference and familiarity. You’ll find advocates of many premium themes, but for the purposes of SEO, each puts you on the right course.

Optimize WordPress with Plugins

There are many WordPress plugins that you can install in order to improve your website’s SEO, but there are only two main plugins that you need in order to immediately take your website’s SEO to the next level. For starters, you could carefully sort through your website and build a site map in order to make it friendly for search engines, or you could install and Google XML Sitemap plugin and get back to creating top notch content. It’s really that simple to create a sitemap with WordPress.

Another top plugin for WordPress is the All in One SEO plugin. This plugin enhances both your site’s overall SEO and the SEO of each individual blog post, helping to optimize your titles and meta-tags, while also providing customization options for more advanced users. The All in One SEO dashboards for the post editing screen and for the general site are easy to use and provide SEO benefits “right out of the box.”

Invite Search Engines with Scribe SEO

While Scribe SEO is still technically a WordPress plugin, it is a premium service that requires a monthly fee. Though Scribe SEO may not be ideal for the casual blogger, its SEO services are perfect for bloggers who want a sure-fire way to quickly optimize their blog posts for SEO.

After creating your blog post, Scribe SEO “shows you keyword phrases you might have missed… tells you how to gently tweak it to spoon feed search engines based on 15 SEO best practices… [and] tools help[s] you build back links from other sites, crosslink the content within your own site, and identify influential social media users who want to share your stuff.”

This SEO tool takes all of the guesswork out of the process and lets you know how effective your efforts are. When you consider what it may cost to pay for an SEO writing course and the uncertain benefits that may come from it, Scribe SEO is a tool that will be well worth the investment if used properly.

SEO requires effort, but it doesn’t have to be such a time-consuming investment. By using the right tools, you can make the most of your SEO efforts and see dramatic increases in traffic to your website.

Many business owners have launched blogs after attending a conference where an enthusiastic expert tells the dramatic story about how he made thousands of dollars and expanded the reach of his business by blogging. It sounds irresistible.

WordPress blogs are:

• Free
• Easy to set up
• Easy to share

The attendees rush home, set up a blog, and begin posting. A few weeks later they hit a wall. No one is reading their posts, let alone sharing them. Ideas for new posts have dried up. What went wrong?

Whether you’ve been blogging for a long time or you’re hoping to launch one soon, here are eight things you need to know about launching and maintaining a blog:

1. Understand Your Audience

People want stories or a high value offer that will help them. You need to communicate in terms that they can identify with or you need to offer them something valuable that they actually want.

Even if your blog is focusing on bare facts or industry trends, look for a narrative hook or brief anecdote that will draw readers into your post. Most blog readers scan posts for key content, but if you can’t figure out a way to draw them in, your hard work will go to waste.

2. Research Your Material

If you don’t have solid content and unique ideas that take stock of what’s been written before, chances are you won’t add anything valuable to what exists online. Why should readers visit your particular blog?

Read the blogs and magazines of your industry, and pay attention to any bestselling books. Look for fascinating angles on a story and explore counter intuitive or fresh ways to write about your topics. Spend some time learning how other professionals research so that you are never stuck with blank page syndrome.

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Making your website mobile-friendly isn’t just a good idea – it’s a necessity. With more people accessing the Web via smartphones and tablets these says, any site administrators who haven’t “mobile-equipped” their online real estate are well behind the curve. In 2011, do you really want to miss out on a substantial chunk of traffic just because your site is hard to read on an iPhone?

Of course not. That’s why many sites direct mobile traffic to sub-domains (e.g. “example.com” becomes “mobile.example.com”), a workable solution if you have time to generate new versions of each page from scratch.

Luckily for WordPress users, mobile themes like WPTouch and WordPress Mobile Pack offer a better alternative to mobile sub-domains. Here are 3 reasons why:

1. Maintenance

Having a mobile sub-domain requires you to maintain multiple versions of each and every page – a laborious task if you don’t have a large staff.

Mobile themes, on the other hand, simply deliver all of your existing content in a mobile-friendly format. You can maintain your site as usual and rest assured that everything will display properly in mobile browsers.

2. SEO

When other sites link to your content, those links help you rank higher in the search engines. If you have multiple domains, all of which have different permalinks for each page, you forfeit your ability to rank well in the search listings.

Think of it this way: I post an update on my blog and get 10 links. 5 of those links are from desktop users, and they point to the post on my main domain. The other 5 links come from mobile users, all of whom were redirected from my main domain to a dedicated mobile sub-domain. Their links go to the mobile version of the post – the one they pulled up on their phones.

Instead of getting 10 links for my post, I really only got 5 for each version – a situation that leads to lower overall rankings for my content.

With a mobile WordPress theme, however, your content stays in one place. The page you serve to mobile visitors is the same one that exists on your main domain – everyone who links to it is linking to the same page.

3. Sharing

Mobile sub-domains can also cause social media havoc.

Let’s say you tweet a link from your phone and your colleague clicks it on her desktop computer. She’ll get the mobile version of the site that you tweeted – a version that is probably all text, heavily compressed into a tiny column, and devoid of any navigational links to help her explore other corners of your site.

This is not good for the user, and it’s unlikely that she’ll share any of your content with others.

Again, your mobile WordPress theme can save the day here. With no separate link for anyone to share, you don’t risk serving the wrong version of your site to any visitors.

And since several mobile themes are free, there’s little reason to put off “mobilizing” your site any longer. Spend an afternoon setting up a mobile WordPress theme and stop missing out on all that great traffic.

This post was contributed by Adam Green. Adam writes copy for tech companies and stays up to speed on enterprise fraud management software as best he can. Follow him on Twitter @IAmAdamGreen.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a post on WPLift “Build A Plugin (Twitter Widget) into your WordPress Theme)“ which in turn was inspired by a post on WPCandy from a couple of months ago “How to create your own WordPress functionality plugin“.

The WPCandy post was advocating that theme designers should stop bundling WordPress plugins and other functionality which limits how easily users can switch themes, something which I feel is absolutely a good idea. But that’s not what I want to talk about in this post — I want to focus specifically on the issue raised in the WPLift post — building plugins directly into themes.

The post shows you how to add the DP Twitter Widget into your theme; it’s literally a case of copying a pasting the plugin’s code into your functions.php. In fact it’s so easy that there’s no reason not to build every single widget and plugin you can think of under the sun into your theme, right?

Unfortunately it’s a little more complicated than that and for the rest of this post I’ll set out exactly why that’s the case.

Firstly, the second you build a plugin into your theme, you’re assuming responsibility and are obliged to support the plugin, so if anything breaks in future updates, you’ll need to be able to fix it. Say the plugin used Ben’s timthumb and updating was an absolute necessity, the onus would then be on you to provide the update by offering an entire theme upgrade rather than just a simple plugin update independent of the theme.

Second, what’s the point? The functionality you’re providing already exists and unless you’re significantly changing the plugin, I’m struggling to see the point of just duplicating functionality. Sure, you get to brag about how your theme has thousands upon thousands of built in widgets and it makes everything really fun and it’ll do everything you’ve ever wanted, but by just adding a plugin that already exists into your theme, you’re just adding something I can do already by installing plugins. Plus, I’ll not lose everything in two years when I decide I need to overhaul the look of my site! And hey, there are sites like mine out there which show you how to do things like building a WordPress powered email newsletter without plugins anyway!

I’m not just wagging fingers from the rooftops — this was a mistake I made when I launched my ill fated theme site, WPShift nearly two years ago. At the time having a ton of functionality in a theme was the way to go and we made a decision that we would go down the route of essentially just bundling plugins with the theme.

I’m glad to say this isn’t all the range any more, so please don’t do it, it’s just making a mess in the long run.

This guest post was written by Rikard Kjellberg, a Silicon Valley blogger who works on social syndication solutions for publishers. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

According to the numbers, over the past 12 months, the number of referrals from social networking sites to blogs has doubled. Social traffic is becoming more important than search traffic according to some. How do WordPress users adjust to this reality and exploit it to your advantage?  The core strategy should be to embrace and focus.

Embracing the Social Trend

Some bloggers have shut down their blogs and moved to Facebook fan pages. Others have kept their blog and complemented with fan pages as stop-gap measure. Either way, there is a perceived threat that you are losing traffic to Facebook. It could very well be a real threat unless you embrace the trend and make it work for you.

Focus Your Social Media Efforts

In an effort to please all readers and maximize reach into social networks, bloggers are integrating a plethora of social tools. One favorite is the AddThis plugin which offers some 100+ options for sharing. In my opinion this approach will clutter your site and distract the user. Pick a winner instead. All indicators are that Facebook is becoming the de-facto standard for social syndication.

Courtesy Gawker Media

After their launch of Open Graph in April this year, Facebook has grown from 15% to 35% of all social networking referrals. This assumes that Gawker Media is a good reflection of the industry average. My personal choice will therefore have to be Facebook, however StumbleUpon is another good candidate. Twitter is already prevalent but it is a typically a disappointment in terms of referrals. There are two reasons:

1. Twitter is undoubtedly the noisiest channel on the web.
2. People in general are not spending any significant time on Twitter.

What are my Tools?

With Facebook, you have some excellent tools. You also have some great plugins for WordPress integration. Most likely you already use several of these tools today. The key is how you use them and how you combine them.

The Facebook Fan Page

The fan page is a great tool for dialog and brand promotion (yes, you are a brand and you should cultivate it):

• Do use the fan page as a personal relationship tool by engaging your audience in discussion and dialog around the topics you are focused on. Use it as a place to share news about you, your brand and your site. The purpose is to create an “exclusive” community where your dedicated followers get the inside scoop on everything you.
• Do not use the fan page to push your RSS feed and manage relationships at the same time. First, your relationship efforts will drown in your content updates. Second, you are creating an intermediate (proxy) between your audience and your blog. Thirdly, the updates are indiscriminatory, lowering relevance which results in fewer revisits to your fan page and web site. Instead use a Like button for your feed (see below)
• Do one or the other of the above.

Get a Like Button for your WordPress Site

In its basic form, the Like button provides a one-time sharing function. There are tools that connect the Like button with your RSS feed, thereby providing a way to connect directly between your site and the Facebook News Feed (no Fan Page intermediary). Explain to the user that you want to connect for updates in conjunction with the Like button. Use a text widget to insert the button HTML on your site. If you want to connect your RSS feed to your fan page instead, Pheedo offers a solution with Dlvr.it.

Get a Like Plugin for my Posts

Let people “Like” your posts. There are WordPress plugins that allow you to automate the insertion of Like buttons. The Like button offers a one-time sharing event. It can also connect with the user for ongoing updates related to the topic of the particular post (a.k.a “Like for Tags“).

We recently did a case study on CNN.com. If they implemented these strategies, they would see 25%-40% increase in page views over time. CNN is already a user of Facebook social plugins but they are currently not using them as described in this article. The increase in page views is significant from a revenue perspective, most likely seven figures.

Note: This article includes opinions of the author based on working with the blogging community to develop social syndication tools. Your reactions to these opinions are greatly appreciated.