Book description
Getting your WordPress site well positioned on Google and Bing is a fine art that this guide covers brilliantly. From SEO basics to white-hat tips and tricks, you’ll learn to give your site the competitive edge.
- Discover everything you need to get your WordPress site to the top of the search engines
- Learn everything from keyword research and link building to customer conversions in this complete guide
- Packed with real-word examples to help get your site get noticed by the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Bing
- This easy-to-read guide takes you step-by-step through the process of building a search engine-friendly WordPress site
In Detail
WordPress is a powerful platform for creating feature-rich and attractive websites and blogs; but with a little extra tweaking and effort your WordPress site can dominate the search engines and bring thousands of new customers to your blog or business.
WordPress3.0 Search Engine Optimization will show you the secrets that professional SEO companies use to take websites to the top of search results and proliferate their business. You'll be able to take your WordPress blog/site to the next level, as well as brush aside even the stiffest competition with this book in hand.
We'll begin with a typical WordPress installation and with a variety of simple techniques, turn it into a powerful website that search engines will reward with high rankings.
We'll go further: with advanced plug-ins we'll connect your WordPress site to popular social media sites and expand the reach of your site to bring more visitors. You'll learn about dozens of free online tools to accomplish everything from keyword research to monitoring your ranking progress.
WordPress is a great start for building search-friendly sites. However, with the tools in this book, you'll get your website/blog noticed by numerous new users/customers or your target audience.
A complete guide to dominating the search engines with your WordPress site
Table of contents
-
WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization
- Table of Contents
- WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization
- Credits
- Foreword
- About the Author
- About the Reviewers
- www.PacktPub.com
- Preface
-
1. Getting Started: SEO Basics
- Introducing SEO
- Improving your rank on all search engines
- Exploring the changing nature of search engines
- Understanding a search engine's inner working
-
Exploring on-page search ranking factors
- Weighing search factors
- Understanding the search algorithm
- Ranking factor: body content
- Serious ranking power: title tags and meta tags
- Using heading tags (h1, h2, h3)
- Optimizing code quality and load speed
- Menus, internal navigation, and link structure
- Image filenames and alt tags
- Text attributes: bold, italics, and underline
- Ranking factor: high page count
- Fodder for search engines: fresh content
- Using the subtle power of outbound links
- Understanding off-page ranking factors
- Converting visitors to customers: the third spoke of SEO
- Summary
-
2. Customizing WordPress Settings for SEO
- Setting goals for your business and website and getting inspiration
-
Knowing what WordPress already does for your SEO
- Understanding WordPress' economical architecture
- Building large sites quickly with WordPress
- Earning respect with search engines
- Leveraging WordPress' blogging capabilities
- Displaying RSS feeds
- Automatically creating descriptive URLs with WordPress permalinks
- Creating reliable, text-based navigation
- Engaging visitors with built-in collaboration, contribution, and community building
- Using update services
- Understanding what WordPress doesn't do for your SEO
- Summary
-
3. Researching and Working with Keywords
- Building your site's foundation with keyword research
- Understanding relevance and the effect of short-tail and long tail keywords
- Developing a powerful long tail search strategy
- Researching keyword search volume with online keyword tools
- Identifying and developing your keywords
-
Gathering keywords: Thinking about your customer's (imperfect) intent
- Generating keyword ideas with online tools
- Generating alternative keyword ideas with Google Sets
- Generating alternative keywords with SEOTools Keyword Suggestion Scraper and Google Suggest
- Building keyword lists with common qualifiers
- Analyzing customers' search behavior
- Building keyword lists with location names
- Learning how customers engage in local search
- Following the people, following the money
- Tuning and honing your keyword list
- Finding new keywords
- Summary
-
4. Understanding Technical Optimization
- Choosing a keyword-rich domain name
- Creating an effective permalink structure
- Optimizing your Page/Post titles and title tags
- A dying HTML element: meta keyword tags
- Optimizing your body content
- Optimizing heading tags
- Improving rankings with optimized images
- The ultimate WordPress robots.txt file
- Optimizing with the XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress
- SEO power tool: Google Webmaster Central
- Summary
-
5. Creating Optimized and Engaging Content
- Engaging visitors with your content
- Writing effective titles and headlines
- Using WordPress tags
- Creating keyword-rich content
- Avoiding automated content plugins
- Writing for your audience
- Writing to get results
- Developing your writing style
- Structuring your content using taxonomy and hierarchy
- Hiring a writer
- Summary
-
6. Link Building
- Understanding the importance of backlinks
- Authority links: what they are and why you want them
- Link anchor text
- Site-wide links and footer links
- Repetitive links from common IP addresses
- How to measure your inbound links
- Getting links through link directories
- Building links with super directories: Yahoo! directory and DMOZ
- Building links with article submission sites and directories
- Link building by commenting on blogs and forums
- Building links through direct link requests
- Building links by creating link bait
- Summary
-
7. Using Social Media
- What is a search engine?
- Going viral with social media
- Using LinkedIn to promote your business or website
- Microblogging with Twitter for business
- Using social bookmarking sites to promote your business
-
Leveraging Facebook for a business or blog
- Using Facebook to promote a new or existing business or blog
- Utilizing the full potential of Facebook
- Using a Facebook business page to promote your business or blog
- Using a Facebook group to promote your business or blog
- Choosing between a Facebook page and a Facebook group to promote your business or blog
- Sharing content and connecting with others on Facebook: useful features and applications
- Building a Facebook landing page
- Automating Facebook updates with FacePress II
- Going viral with the Share on Facebook plugin (and several others)
- Automating twitter posts with Tweet This
- Promoting your business or blog with YouTube
- Summary
- 8. Avoiding the Black Hat Techniques
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9. Avoiding SEO Mistakes
- Pursuing the wrong keywords
- Poor internal anchor text
- Flash, JavaScript, image links, and other non-readable content
- Poor site architecture
- Over-optimizing to improve ranking
- Jumping the gun
- Using free hosted domains
- Forgetting verification tools
- Ignoring local directory listings
- Paying for clicks when you rank organically
- Leaving stray pages in Google's index
- Failing to produce fresh new content
- Summary
- 10. Testing Your Site and Monitoring Your Progress
-
A. WordPress SEO Plugins
- All in One SEO Pack
- Dagon Design Form Mailer
- Duplicate Post
- Broken Link Checker
- Automatic SEO Links
- Google XML Sitemaps
- HeadSpace2 SEO
- Robots Meta
- SEO Blogroll
- SEO Smart Links
- Open in New Window
- Dean's Permalinks Migration
- SEO Friendly Images
- I Love Social Bookmarking
- WP Super Cache
- SEO slugs
- Future Posts Calendar
- Smart 404
- WPtouch
- Contact Form 7
- Smart YouTube
- WP e-Commerce
- Wickett Twitter Widget
- Share and Follow
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
- Facebook like button
- Quick AdSense
- B. Other SEO Resources
- Index
Product information
- Title: WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization
- Author(s):
- Release date: April 2011
- Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
- ISBN: 9781847199003
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