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WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization

Book Description



In Detail


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 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

  1. WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization
  2. Credits
  3. Foreword
  4. About the Author
  5. About the Reviewers
  6. www.PacktPub.com
    1. Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more
      1. Why Subscribe?
      2. Free Access for Packt account holders
  7. Preface
    1. What this book covers
    2. What you need for this book
    3. Who this book is for
    4. Conventions
    5. Reader feedback
    6. Customer support
      1. Errata
      2. Piracy
      3. Questions
  8. 1. Getting Started: SEO Basics
    1. Introducing SEO
    2. Improving your rank on all search engines
    3. Exploring the changing nature of search engines
    4. Understanding a search engine's inner working
      1. Preparing the index
      2. Querying the index
    5. Exploring on-page search ranking factors
      1. Weighing search factors
      2. Understanding the search algorithm
      3. Ranking factor: body content
      4. Serious ranking power: title tags and meta tags
      5. Using heading tags (h1, h2, h3)
      6. Optimizing code quality and load speed
      7. Menus, internal navigation, and link structure
      8. Image filenames and alt tags
      9. Text attributes: bold, italics, and underline
      10. Ranking factor: high page count
      11. Fodder for search engines: fresh content
      12. Using the subtle power of outbound links
    6. Understanding off-page ranking factors
      1. Links are the power
      2. Creating natural links
      3. Avoiding over-optimization
    7. Converting visitors to customers: the third spoke of SEO
      1. Creating conversion-based websites
    8. Summary
  9. 2. Customizing WordPress Settings for SEO
    1. Setting goals for your business and website and getting inspiration
      1. Analyzing your audience
      2. Determining the goal of your website
      3. Following the leaders
      4. Gauging competition in the search market
    2. Knowing what WordPress already does for your SEO
      1. Understanding WordPress' economical architecture
      2. Building large sites quickly with WordPress
      3. Earning respect with search engines
      4. Leveraging WordPress' blogging capabilities
      5. Displaying RSS feeds
        1. Finding your RSS feed
        2. Promoting your RSS feed
      6. Automatically creating descriptive URLs with WordPress permalinks
      7. Creating reliable, text-based navigation
      8. Engaging visitors with built-in collaboration, contribution, and community building
        1. Employing user roles to get your team involved
        2. Improving ranking with user comments
      9. Using update services
    3. Understanding what WordPress doesn't do for your SEO
      1. Tackling duplicate content within WordPress
      2. Overcoming landing page customization limitations
      3. Understanding limitations on page-by-page navigation
    4. Summary
  10. 3. Researching and Working with Keywords
    1. Building your site's foundation with keyword research
    2. Understanding relevance and the effect of short-tail and long tail keywords
    3. Developing a powerful long tail search strategy
    4. Researching keyword search volume with online keyword tools
      1. Google's SKtool
      2. SEO Book's free keyword tool
      3. Google Insights
      4. Online keyword tool: Wordtracker's free keyword tool
    5. Identifying and developing your keywords
    6. Gathering keywords: Thinking about your customer's (imperfect) intent
      1. Generating keyword ideas with online tools
      2. Generating alternative keyword ideas with Google Sets
      3. Generating alternative keywords with SEOTools Keyword Suggestion Scraper and Google Suggest
      4. Building keyword lists with common qualifiers
      5. Analyzing customers' search behavior
      6. Building keyword lists with location names
        1. Learning how customers engage in local search
        2. Applying long tail theory to local search
      7. Following the people, following the money
    7. Tuning and honing your keyword list
      1. Prioritizing keywords
      2. Building first, second, and third tier Keywords
      3. Accounting for seasonal trends
      4. Spotting seasonal keyword patterns with Google Trends
      5. Tuning your list: Negative keywords
      6. Grouping keywords into families
    8. Finding new keywords
      1. Eyeing the competition
        1. Finding new keywords with Google Analytics
        2. Finding new keywords With Google AdWords
    9. Summary
  11. 4. Understanding Technical Optimization
    1. Choosing a keyword-rich domain name
      1. Buying/acquiring domain names
      2. Hyphens and extra characters in domain names
    2. Creating an effective permalink structure
      1. Highly customized permalinks
    3. Optimizing your Page/Post titles and title tags
      1. Page/Post titles processing in WordPress
      2. Crafting title tags
      3. Crafting Page/Post titles
      4. Configuring WordPress to generate meta descriptions
      5. Best practices for meta descriptions
      6. Crafting meta descriptions
    4. A dying HTML element: meta keyword tags
    5. Optimizing your body content
      1. Best practices for optimizing body content
      2. Keyword density in body content
        1. Case Study: Keyword density test of master pages
    6. Optimizing heading tags
      1. Optimizing WordPress templates
    7. Improving rankings with optimized images
      1. Inserting images and optimizing image properties in WordPress
      2. Manipulating image sizes to speed up website load times
    8. The ultimate WordPress robots.txt file
    9. Optimizing with the XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress
    10. SEO power tool: Google Webmaster Central
    11. Summary
  12. 5. Creating Optimized and Engaging Content
    1. Engaging visitors with your content
    2. Writing effective titles and headlines
    3. Using WordPress tags
    4. Creating keyword-rich content
      1. Keeping it natural
    5. Avoiding automated content plugins
    6. Writing for your audience
      1. Thinking about a searcher's intent
      2. Providing quality information
    7. Writing to get results
    8. Developing your writing style
      1. Narrative styles
    9. Structuring your content using taxonomy and hierarchy
      1. Using WordPress categories
      2. Managing your categories with plugins
        1. Advanced Category Excluder
        2. Multi Column Category List plugin
        3. My Category Order
        4. Fold Category List
    10. Hiring a writer
      1. Where to hire content writers
    11. Summary
  13. 6. Link Building
    1. Understanding the importance of backlinks
      1. The mathematics and operation of PageRank
        1. The PageRank damping factor
        2. PageRank is shared among outbound links
      2. Distinguishing between dofollow versus nofollow links
      3. Understanding nofollow links
      4. Avoiding and identifying nofollow links
      5. The diminishing universe of followed links
      6. Making use of nofollow links
      7. PageRank: summary and conclusion
    2. Authority links: what they are and why you want them
    3. Link anchor text
    4. Site-wide links and footer links
    5. Repetitive links from common IP addresses
    6. How to measure your inbound links
      1. Measuring inbound links with Yahoo! Site Explorer
      2. Measuring inbound links with Google
      3. Measuring inbound links with online tools
      4. Measuring inbound links with paid tools
    7. Getting links through link directories
      1. Finding valuable link directories
    8. Building links with super directories: Yahoo! directory and DMOZ
    9. Building links with article submission sites and directories
      1. The best article directories
        1. Setting up accounts with Ezine Articles and Squidoo
        2. Ezine Articles
        3. Squidoo
    10. Link building by commenting on blogs and forums
      1. Blog commenting
      2. Comment for good, not for evil
      3. Forum commenting and signatures
    11. Building links through direct link requests
      1. Asking for links from the sites in your niche
      2. Telling webmasters why they should link to you
      3. Requesting links from vendors
      4. Reciprocal linking: is it dead?
    12. Building links by creating link bait
      1. Resource lists
      2. Sharing a humorous story or article
      3. Writing about current events
      4. Writing something controversial
      5. Interviewing an expert
      6. Giving something away
      7. Testing something
      8. Developing How-to Information
      9. Creating video content
      10. Creating quizzes
      11. Using a catchy title
      12. Examples of effective link bait
        1. NxE's 50 most influential bloggers
        2. Fast lane the slide
        3. The CMO's guide to the social media landscape
    13. Summary
  14. 7. Using Social Media
    1. What is a search engine?
    2. Going viral with social media
    3. Using LinkedIn to promote your business or website
    4. Microblogging with Twitter for business
      1. Employing Twitter for your business
      2. How to get people to follow you on Twitter
      3. Using Twitterfeed to automatically update your followers of new blog posts
      4. Top tips for using Twitter for business
      5. Using Twitter to promote your business
    5. Using social bookmarking sites to promote your business
      1. Getting started with social bookmarking
      2. Choosing a social bookmarking site
      3. Beginning with social bookmarking sites
      4. Promoting your website through social bookmarking sites
        1. Timing is important
        2. Your ranking matters
        3. Submit a catchy headline or title
        4. Remember to choose an appropriate social bookmarking site for your business
        5. Remember that social bookmarking websites are communities
    6. Leveraging Facebook for a business or blog
      1. Using Facebook to promote a new or existing business or blog
      2. Utilizing the full potential of Facebook
      3. Using a Facebook business page to promote your business or blog
      4. Using a Facebook group to promote your business or blog
      5. Choosing between a Facebook page and a Facebook group to promote your business or blog
      6. Sharing content and connecting with others on Facebook: useful features and applications
        1. Joining groups
        2. Increasing your circle of friends
        3. Updating your status often
        4. Posting wall comments
        5. Using the Birthday Reminder application
        6. Adding an RSS feed to your page or profile
        7. Using Facebook Ads
        8. Linking your external website to Facebook
    7. Building a Facebook landing page
      1. Step 1: Add the static Facebook master language application
      2. Step 2: Configure your new company Profile tab
      3. Step 3: Make your landing page your default home page
      4. Step 4: Add great content to your landing page
    8. Automating Facebook updates with FacePress II
    9. Going viral with the Share on Facebook plugin (and several others)
    10. Automating twitter posts with Tweet This
    11. Promoting your business or blog with YouTube
      1. Using YouTube as a hosting and delivery platform
      2. Using video delivery alternatives to embedded YouTube video
      3. Employing YouTube as a search engine
      4. Promoting products and services on YouTube
    12. Summary
  15. 8. Avoiding the Black Hat Techniques
    1. Typical black hat techniques
      1. Hidden text on web pages
      2. Spider detection, cloaking, redirection, and doorway pages
      3. Linking to bad neighborhoods and link farms
    2. Google Webmaster Guidelines
      1. Google Webmaster Guidelines in a nutshell
      2. When Google detects violations of its guidelines
    3. Diagnosing a Google ranking ban, penalty, or filter
      1. Understanding a Google ban
        1. Diagnosing a total or partial ban
      2. PageRank adjustment/PageRank penalty
        1. Diagnosing a PageRank penalty
      3. The -950 ranking penalty
        1. How to diagnose a -950 ranking penalty
      4. The -30/-40 ranking penalty
        1. Diagnosing a -30/-40 penalty
      5. False positives that aren't penalties
    4. Clearing a Google penalty
      1. Abandoning your existing domain and starting over
      2. Requesting reconsideration following a Google penalty
    5. Avoiding black hat techniques and purveyors who promote them
      1. The standard black hat scam: Link exchange
      2. The standard black hat scam: Website submission service
      3. The standard black hat scam: Offshore link building
      4. The standard black hat scam: Autoblogging
    6. Summary
  16. 9. Avoiding SEO Mistakes
    1. Pursuing the wrong keywords
    2. Poor internal anchor text
    3. Flash, JavaScript, image links, and other non-readable content
    4. Poor site architecture
      1. Expert site architecture with manual links and PageRank sculpting
    5. Over-optimizing to improve ranking
      1. Over-optimizing of on-page factors: Guidelines
      2. Over-optimizing of inbound links: Guidelines
    6. Jumping the gun
    7. Using free hosted domains
    8. Forgetting verification tools
    9. Ignoring local directory listings
      1. Always assigning as many categories as possible
      2. Getting reviews
      3. Uploading pictures
      4. Completing all optional fields
      5. Making multiple entries for multiple locations
      6. Writing a compelling business description with keywords
    10. Paying for clicks when you rank organically
    11. Leaving stray pages in Google's index
    12. Failing to produce fresh new content
    13. Summary
  17. 10. Testing Your Site and Monitoring Your Progress
    1. Google Analytics
      1. Setting up Google Analytics for your website
      2. Using Google Analytics
    2. Google Webmaster Tools
    3. Checking your website's code with an HTML Validator
    4. Checking your inbound link count with Yahoo! Site Explorer
    5. Monitoring ranking positions and movement with Rank Tracker
    6. Monitoring backlinks with majestic SEO
    7. Summary
  18. A. WordPress SEO Plugins
    1. All in One SEO Pack
      1. Dagon Design Form Mailer
      2. Duplicate Post
      3. Broken Link Checker
      4. Automatic SEO Links
      5. Google XML Sitemaps
      6. HeadSpace2 SEO
      7. Robots Meta
      8. SEO Blogroll
      9. SEO Smart Links
      10. Open in New Window
      11. Dean's Permalinks Migration
      12. SEO Friendly Images
      13. I Love Social Bookmarking
      14. WP Super Cache
      15. SEO slugs
      16. Future Posts Calendar
      17. Smart 404
      18. WPtouch
      19. Contact Form 7
      20. Smart YouTube
      21. WP e-Commerce
      22. Wickett Twitter Widget
      23. Share and Follow
      24. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
      25. Facebook like button
      26. Quick AdSense
  19. B. Other SEO Resources
    1. Online forums
      1. Warrior Forum
      2. Digital Point forum
      3. The Keyword Academy
      4. SEO Chat forums
      5. SEO.com forums
    2. Google Webmaster Tools
      1. Google AdSense
      2. Google AdWords
      3. Google Alerts
      4. Google Merchant Center
      5. Google Checkout
    3. Other helpful SEO tools
      1. Copyscape
      2. Pingdom Site Speed Checker
      3. HubSpot's Website Grader
      4. Flippa
      5. SEOmoz
      6. Search Engine Journal
      7. Search Engine Roundtable
      8. Blogging Labs
      9. ProBlogger
      10. WebProNews
      11. David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors
      12. My Blog Guest
      13. Keyword Strategy