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.

For the past week I’ve had the opportunity to try out a new SEO service called ScribeSEO, a web-based SEO service from a team which includes Brian Clark (known in the WordPress community for CopyBlogger and the Thesis theme).   ScribeSEO offers a web-based SEO software service, a WordPress plugin, and now also offers Joomla and Drupal integration.  As most of my websites use WordPress in some way, I’ve primarily focused my attention on trying out the WordPress plugin.   Here is what I’ve found:

Once installed, the ScribeSEO WordPress plugin adds a window to your post pages called the Scribe Content Optimizer.  Here you can run an evaluation prior to publishing your post which will tell you how to best optimize your post!

In order to test out the plugin I decided to try it out on this post.  After my initial evaluation, I was given the following feedback:

As you can see from the screen shot above the initial draft of this post received a 68%.  Recommended improvements include to move primary keywords towards the front of the meta description, to increase the word count to above 300 words, and to add a few hyperlinks towards the beginning of the post.

At the top of the evaluation there is also a menu with additional analysis available.  When switching to the keyword analysis tab I was greeted with the following:

This shows that after analyzing my post the search engines will think this post is primarily about the keyword “wordpress plugin”, then “SEO”, etc.   You’ll even get keyword density percentages!

Next, I went to the Alternate Keywords tab to get an idea of keyword suggestions based upon relative search frequency:

This is a great way for you to find high traffic search terms that you may have forgotten in your initial draft.

Lastly, under the Tags tab, you’ll see a list of keywords found within your post which are recommended to be used as tags for your post.

After gathering all the feedback provided and updating my posts I was able to improve my posts score all the way to 99%:

If you run a professional revenue generating blog or build a lot of niche websites, I think that ScribeSEO is a perfect fit and well worth the price.

If you’d like to learn more about ScribeSEO or get a copy for yourself you can find everything you need here!

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been focusing on traffic building, link building and SEO on my WordPress blog. All three of these website strategies go hand in hand and all build on each other.  In this post I will discussing how to make sure your WordPress blog is running efficiently.

WordPress does a lot of cool things in the background to make your website run smoothly. Have you ever noticed that when you change a blog post from one category to another, somehow, someway, you always arrive at the new location?  That’s WordPress doing it’s magic!  Unfortunately, Humans interact with a blog differently than search engine spiders, so while your permalinks might look nice and organized, the search engine spiders might see problems.

The best place to start is with a blog audit. If your WordPress blog is not using Google Webmaster Tools, this is a great place to start.  Google Webmaster tools will not only show you how Google sees your website, but also recommend tips to improve the crawling of your site.

I just did a blog audit and found a couple problems. My sitemap was not getting generated anymore due to permission problems. Even worse the old sitemap had many bad links. Using webmaster tools I could see that Google received 80 posts from me, but only indexed 4. OUCH!  Of course I have many more links in Google from other websites. The sitemap is only a recommendation to Google, but I highly recommend keeping up to date. I used the the Google XML Sitemap plugin.

I also had a duplicate content problem. To me, this is really frustrating, because again, as a human, I see my blog a certain way and it looks fine. Then looking at my website from the search engine spider’s point of view, I see many of my posts repeated as many as 5 times.

You might think that is great… 1 post, 5 entries in Google. Well, it’s not because instead of having one powerful link to your website, you have 5 at 20% power. Try cooking a potato at 20% power, it’s a waste of time.

How does this happen? I was using All-in-One SEO plugin and that is suppose to have canonical links, but I still have duplicate content.

So like any hacker, I built a simple Googlebot tracker to see how Google spiders my site… Wow, not what I expected. There is so much I’m learning from the Googlebot tracker, I will have many posts on this little bot, but for now let’s just say, I bet you are wasting Google’s time with your WordPress blog!

The Googlebot doesn’t just come into your website and spider all your content. In my case it comes and grabs one page and leaves. It’s doing this every couple minutes for a total of about 200-300 per day. Webmaster tools will show you how many times you get spidered, but will not show you what pages get indexed.

I was horrified to see that I was wasting Google juice on tags and categories. If Google is only going to hit your website 100 times a day, you better try to give Google 100 different blog posts. If you have 10 tags per post, you might be giving Google 1 blog post with 10 different links. Google then has to choose which page is the highest priority. You can see how 100 blog posts, can easily turn to 10 blog posts because we all love to tag our stuff.

How do you solve this. First of all it takes time. you have many links in Google and the Googlebot will continue to follow them, which isn’t bad… Don’t try to shut off the Googlebot, just make changes for the future of your website.

1. Make sure you have canonical link set up. This tells Google where the main blog post, and that all the links from categories and tags really are just pointers to the main blog post.
2. Make sure you nofollow internal links to categories, tags, archive, sitemap, etc… Your goal is to drive search engine spiders to your blog posts, not to a category page full of links. There are a few plugins that do this, but I manually did it to my menu and sidebar widgets.
3. If you change you permalinks, make sure you provide Google with 301 redirect messages pointing to the new link.  For this I use permalink redirect plugin.
4. Make sure you sitemap is up-to-date. Not only does the Google XML sitemap plugin update your sitemap, but it also pings Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask every time you post.
5. Audit your website often. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find mistakes and keep you blog running smoothly.
6. Use analytic software to track visitors to your site.  A free service like Google Analytics will do this well.

Please don’t just read this post as another SEO article. Put these tips into action and start with an SEO audit… If you see anything funny, post a comment below and we’ll see if we can help!

Here is what I found while checking my Google Webmaster Tools account for this website:

Duplicate Title Tags

Duplicate Descriptions

Is this a huge deal?  Probably not, but you may want to consider unchecking this box in your Dashboard > Settings > Discussion tab.   Hopefully in a future version of WordPress this will NOT be checked by default and instead be an option.

Thanks to a heads up from my friend Leland at Themelab, it looks like someone has attempted to put a fork into the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin, with the release of a new plugin called Platinum SEO Pack.  Here are a few of the features that you will get on top of what AiO SEO Pack included:

1. Ability to add follow or nofollow and noindex meta tags to any post or page.
2. Automatic 301 redirect for permalink changes.
3. Nofollow links to your archives, categories, and tags pages.

To read more, or to download the Platinum SEO Pack, check out the authors page.

WordPress has always been very search engine friendly by default, and when you add things like the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin or the SEO Sniper plugin to the mix, you have the potential for a very well optimized website without any real work.

With that said, there are a variety of SEO techniques that you can apply to your sites setup that aren’t covered with a simple plugin, and Joost de Valk has taken the time to cover WordPress SEO in great detail.

I have made it a habit to stay very current on the latest SEO techniques and I found this post extremely useful, well organized, and Joost did a great job of explaining things in a way that pretty much anyone can understand.    And hey, if you don’t like to read about SEO, you can at least click over to check out his new website design (and improved domain name).  Great work Joost!

I have added this post to our WordPress resources page.