Creative Storefront» Search engine optimization

How to write for SEO

Laurie McAndish King — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:30:40 +0000

Search engine optimization is part art, part science, and always changing. To do it well you’ll want to get expert help. In the meantime, here are the basics of SEO writing:

Determine the keywords and phrases most applicable to your content.
Be sure people are actually searching on them. SearchEngineWatch.com is one of many sites that can help you find popular keyword searches.
Consider variants of phrases (the “longtail” approach). For example, if you’re writing about WordPress themes, you might want to use WordPress themes, WordPress templates, premium WordPress themes, free WordPress themes, and similar variants.
Use keywords and phrases liberally but appropriately throughout the copy.
Use keywords and phrases in subheads and internal links.
Check your keyword density (3-5% is recommended in text). KeywordDensity.com is one of many sites that will perform this analysis.
General phrases are more important on home page; specifics more-so on internal pages.
Interactive content can hep produce inbound links.

And of course, be sure to provide interesting, useful, focused, relevant, and well-written content.

What clients want in a WordPress theme

Laurie McAndish King — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:14:44 +0000

Bradley and I were talking about how to help clients choose a WordPress theme, and thought I’d include this link to an article that discusses these considerations (in addition to solid code):

A beautiful home page
Multiple skins/colors (including holiday customization)
Custom widgets
jQuery capability (e.g. for slideshows)
An interactive contact page (nice idea, with example)
Ad integration
SEO

The article was written for theme developers, but the content is also useful for helping clients—especially those who are new to WordPress—through the process of choosing a theme.

Bradley and I also came up with these nice-to-have features (what designers want in a WordPress theme):

Horizontal navigation with built-in pull-down menus
Automatic thumbnail creation
A tabbed sidebar

What else? Please add your favorite features (or your clients’ favorites).

Top 5 basic plug-ins

Laurie McAndish King — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:53:27 +0000

Every site is different: some need event calendars, advanced image management, or flexible forms formatting. But some functionality is useful for just about every site. Here are the basic plug-ins I use for all the WordPress sites I develop:

Akismet: Does a great job of blocking comment and track-back spam.
All in One SEO Pack: Makes it easy to include SEO-friendly features in each post.
Tiny MCE Advanced: Provides editing flexibility with drag-and-drop icons. Also, stops removing
and
tags, and shows them in the html editor.
Maintenance Mode: Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front end.
WP Google Analytics: Lets you use Google Analytics to track your WordPress site statistics

Try Hubspot’s free website grader tool

Laurie McAndish King — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:52:07 +0000

Hubspot’s Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

I tried it on my one of my websites (for which I hadn’t done much SEO work) and got a pretty high score, plus a list of specific ideas for increasing my ranking.

“A website grade of 93/100 for www.travelwritersnews.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 93% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.”