October 1st, 2010 @ admin
What do you own that’s so important to you that it has all the bells and whistles? Perhaps an iPhone with hard shell casing, Bose noise isolating earbuds, 3G anti-glare film set, and Photoshop mobile app. I wish I had that. My baby is my blog. Blog accessories called plug-ins make my blog the best it can be in search results, each addressing a killer function.
Most articles on this subject will list the top 10 plug-ins and why each one is helpful. I’m going to write this the other way around, starting with the need and then the solution. That way if you’re on a blog platform that does not offer plug-ins like Blogger or Moveable Type, you’ll still get monster value from this section.
1. Title and Description Control
The most important place for keywords is the page (or post) title. Title keywords not only help a page to rank, but help the user click the page as a search result. Similarly, a page’s meta description shows in its search result and if written well can help the user to click. Control the title and description text for each page and you’ve given yourself the best chance of traffic from search. One of the most well known WordPress plug-ins, the All in One SEO Pack, has fields for title and description in the edit mode of any page or post. That way you control the fate of your search result and not something pre-set by whoever developed your blog theme.
2. Let Google Find All Your Pages
To rank a page, Google has to know about the page and consider it relevant. As blog posts get older, they become more difficult for Google to find and consider important. Wouldn’t it be great if Google just had a list of all your pages and knew immediately when you created a new one? That’s the benefit of creating a sitemap (list of pages) and submitting it via Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. It takes less than a minute to build a sitemap with the Google XML sitemaps plugin, which notifies search engines each time it changes. That handles the problem of getting found.
Page relevance is managed by links. The more links to a page, the more important it is. Breadcrumbs offer the simplest way to create links to all pages from the main navigation. For example, the top of your blog post may have a breadcrumb that looks like this Home >> Weddings >> Beach Wedding Posts >> Cliffs Resort Wedding Post. It’s called breadcrumbs because each page has a link trail to all of the pages above it in the site’s architecture, allowing the user to navigate back to the main page if needed. Yoast Breadcrumbs can automatically create these links.
Another great way to link is with pagination. For example a homepage might have some links at the bottom guiding users to older posts with << Previous Page | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next Page >>. By making the older pages ALL accessbile right from the homepage, search engines consider them important. I use WordPress SEO Pager plugin to achieve automatic paging.
3. Keep users on your site
Once a searcher clicks on your link in Google, you have the difficult job of keeping them on your site and hiring you. Conversion of those searchers to new business becomes a critical part in the success of an SEO campaign. WP Greet Box looks at where the user came from and displays a dynamic message. For example if the user came from search you can have a message popup within the post that says “Glad you found me in Google. Make sure to visit my pricing page to get started.”
At the end of the post it’s great to follow up with related material to keep a user interested in your information or products. LinkWithin automatically calculates which posts are similar to the current one and shows links to them at the end of the post with a thumbnail as well. For a non-thumbnail version try Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Not only does it offer great information to your audience, but the linking helps Google understand your content more efficiently.
4. Engage Users Via Comments
Allowing comments on a blog post is an essential component of blogging by encouraging engagement. WordPress by default adds a nofollow tag to the link s created by your commenters to prevent people that comment just for SEO purposes. Following those links with the DoFollow will attract a lot more comments, but you may need Akismet to block the spam. The other thing I don’t like about comments is that they dilute the carefully created keyword density from my blog post. I mean that I spent good time using the right words in my blog post in order to rank well, and comments add to the overall post word count, and none of those words are quality ranking words. I just want you to be aware of it, even though I would never turn off comments.
If you want to take comments to the next level of engagement I can recommend Disqus threaded comment system that pulls from multiple sources (like social sites). Yoast has a Subscribe to Comments Plugin to keep users informed when new comments are made, and a Comment Redirect Plugin that can give a special message to a new commenter. I don’t see incredible application here for photographers, but I thought I would throw them in anyway.
5. Keyword and Link Scores
The right use of keywords in a post can make or break the chances of ranking well. I like to check my keyword usage to insure that Google interprets my post the same way I intended to write it. The paid Scribe SEO tool connects with WordPress to assess the SEO effectiveness of a blog post.
By default, search engines will index every page of your site, and give search credit to every page you link to. Normally you would need to add a noindex tag to the pages you don’t want to be found, and it is fairly technical to do it. Similarly a rel=nofollow tag can be added to links so that Google does not give credit to those links. I don’t let my archives, search, or login pages get searched by Google which offers duplicate versions of my content and can dilute the chances of ranking. I also don’t follow links to tag pages, categories, and login pages. Robots Meta allows even the technical novice to setup this advanced SEO practice simply by checking boxes.
6. Image Optimization
A typical webpage has only a couple images and tell Google a lot about a webpage. Google doesn’t have eyes (not yet anyway) so it reads an image by looking at the alternate text in the image code. Alt text like this “White frosted wedding cake for Zach and Amber at their Cliffs Resort wedding” describes the image and the post with great detail. Thus alt text keywords are weighted more heavily when ranking an image or page. SEO Friendly Images auto generates the alt text for you based on the image filename. If your filenames use quality keywords, this can be a shortcut to tagging all old images. To be honest I would rather take the time to hand select and tag images from my most important posts.
I’ve heard Faster Image Insert can be a great way to speed up the posting of images. Less time creating means more time optimizing.
7. URLs
The best URL goes against the default WordPress structure and uses a custom permalink structure with /%category%/%postname%/. The downside – changing a permalink strucutre updates all your URLs and anyone linking to you gets broken pages. A technical workaround is to add 301 redirects in an htaccess file, but I’ve heard Permalink Redirect Plugin automatically redirects the old URLs to the new URLs and also preserves their page rank.
8. Tracking SEO
Google Analytics offers industry-standard website statistics straight from Google about how much traffic a website receives, down to the exact keyword. It also can tell a site owner where traffic is coming from. For example, you would know that “Who is the best Sacramento photographer” sent you 5 visits last month from search and facebook.com sent you 100 visits. After creating a Google Analytics account simply plug your account ID into the Google Analytics for WordPress plug-in so it can start measuring your blog.
9. Security
Nothing can get you bumped from search results faster than site downtime or getting hacked. Keeping your WordPress install up to date helps prevent spammers from taking over your blog. I’ve heard that WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin gives you the latest version without the effort, and Pingdom has a paid service that notifies you when your site is down.
10. Social Sharing
It’s always fun to see your post Liked 20 times, or re-tweeted a bunch. Share icons distribute links to your post through social networks and increase a site’s chance of being seen. The more times you’re seen, the increased chance of being visited or even linked to by people who like what they see. There are several options for getting social and share icons at the bottom of each post. My favorites are Sociable, FaceBook Like Button Plugin for WordPress and TweetMeme Button.
July 14th, 2010 @ admin
This lesson focuses on getting keywords into your blog URLs, because the URL is the 2nd most important thing Google looks at for keywords when considering your rank.
WordPress Permalinks
If you have a WordPress blog, like I do, the first thing you want to do is under settings go into your permalinks and you want to change the default, which is just using numbers in your post URLs. Or change the default from this date structure which is putting a lot of folders and numbers in your URL, which is not helpful for search, and you want to use a custom structure.
When I type /%postname%/ percent slash in the custom field for permalink, that’s putting the keywords of your post title into the URL. You can also choose /%category%/%postname%/ and what that does is puts the keywords of the post after the category of the post into the URL. Either one of those would insure that you’re getting the headline of your post into the URL. So step 1 is setting up your permalink settings. Note: this changes the URLs of your existing posts, so anyone linking to them from outside your own blog will get broken links. Read my post PhotoBlog Permalink Redirect URLs Using htaccess on how to avoid this.
Then in an indidual post, the title of my post will automatically be put into the URL. You only want quality keywords in there. I remove unnecessary keyword that I’m not trying to rank for. Instead I focus on the 4-6 keywords (that I want to rank for) relating to each post. If you’re using well-named categories, that can be a benefit as well since the category keywords will show up in the URL.
Blogger URLs
Blogger accounts don’t give you full control over the URLs. But what it does do, is whatever your title of the post is, it’s going to take the first few words of that title and put it into the URL. As long as you’re using quality keywords into your post headlines those are going to make it up into the URL of the post.
Hope that helps, for more tips on blogging search engine optimization, look for my ebook Blog SEO Zen for photographers.
June 29th, 2010 @ admin
Google looks at keywords on your blog and the links pointing to your blog when considering it for a good rank in search engines. When someone searches for a wedding photographer, let’s say in San Diego, Google wants to find pages that are about “San Diego wedding photographer.” If you have a page that’s about wedding and portrait photography, or Los Angeles wedding photographer, you have less of a chance of ranking well because that is not what the user searched for. Specific pages are good. Assuming you have a page that’s only about “San Diego wedding photographer,” Google will consider you for rank against the hundreds of other pages on the same topic. The way to the top is by getting links to your blog. The site with the most quality links typically rank #1.
So what can you do to your blog to rank well? The first is getting that key phrase, in this case “San Diego wedding photographer,” in the right places on the page. I’m talking about page titles, URLs, the first paragraph of text, and text behind your images. Those are the main ones. Sometimes this is not an easy task. First you have to focus on one single phrase per page. Where most photographers go wrong is optimizing for too many things. So my best advice is this. Before you write each post, consider what you want to rank that post for. That is the phrase to use in the right locations. The trick is figuring out how to control the keywords in places like your title and URL. Some simple setup of your blog infrastructure can quickly and easily get the right system in place. For example if you have blog posts where the URLs are generic post numbers, or the date you posted it – your blog is not taking advantage of getting keywords in the URLs. If your blog posts add the blog name at the end of each title – you’re including a lot of extra keywords in your titles that dilute your ability to rank. My ebook called Blog SEO Zen for photographers talks about how to set up all of these things.
When you’re thinking about what to rank for, smaller terms are better. It will be easier to rank for Ritz Hotel wedding photos in San Diego since there are very few pages on that exact topic. Focus on locations, venues, or wedding-style with your keywords.
The next step is simply to get links to your blog so that your blog appears more popular than other sites that talk about the same thing you do. There’s tons of ways to get links. For example, I’m creating this post for a site that is not my own, and for doing this favor I get a link back to my site. Guest posts and articles are just about the best links you can get when your out there manually building links to your site. Other link generation ideas include getting yourself out there in photography communities, establishing social bookmarking accounts like Digg or Delicious, and submitting to key blog directories like Technorati. I suggest plenty more link locations in Blog SEO Zen.
Lastly I want to mention that a self-hosted blog with WordPress.org has the most SEO features. WordPress offers the ability to control your titles, URLs, plus search-specific plugins like the All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. I also use a paid program called Scribe (I’m an affiliate) which analyzes each post I write for SEO efficiency. WordPress should easily be able to outrank any blog on Typepad or Blogger.
I hope that helps you get started with blog optimization. The quickest way to get everything you need to know is in my ebook for photoblog SEO.
June 19th, 2010 @ admin
These WordPress plug-ins add to the blog’s SEO foundation by focusing on specific tasks. When you see what these fellas can do you’ll see why WordPress is so powerful. For help in getting setup read the ProPhotoBlogs post about WordPress Plug-ins.
This is the kind of can’t miss ranking information I deliver in Blog SEO Zen, a 35-page guide for photographers and vendors to getting a page 1 Google rank.
This plug-in adds fields for title and description to each page and post on a blog. It also has a default meta data screen where you can override the theme meta data and any mistakes the theme developer may have made. Both of these options are essential for telling Google what each page and post are about since both the title and the description show up in search results.
Configuration of the All in One SEO Pack is essential for success. First complete the fields for Home Title and Home Description. Later you’ll learn more about how to write a quality title and description for a blog site.
Next, make edits to the title formats for other pages. This insures that nothing appears in the page title except for the page name. For example, it is essential to remove the blog title from the end of posts because that clutters post titles with non-essential keywords.
Lastly, take notice of new fields now available within each blog post for Title and Description. These are the link and summary text that will appear in search results, thus very important to complete for each post.
For help in getting setup, read my post All In One SEO Pack Configuration for WordPress PhotoBlogs.
This plug-in is not needed for blogs running the Thesis theme, which has all of the SEO fields built right into it already.
Google XML Sitemaps
A proper sitemap can help posts rank within hours, especially after submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools which we talk about later in the book. Sitemaps make Google’s job easier to find and index content on the web and potentially return it in search results. The default settings for Google XML Sitemaps are adequate.
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics requires a plug-in to get web stats out of the blog. After installing the plug-in, simply add your Analytics ID that you received during the registration process of your Google Analytics account.
Scribe
Scribe is more than a plug-in, it’s an SEO wizard. After writing a blog post, click Analyze to see how the post measures up against SEO best practices.
It’s a paid subscription service for which I am an affiliate, but I recommend you at least try it for a month. With Scribe you’ll:
Social bookmarks can help increase links to your blog. The AddtoAny plugin helps readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious.
Automatically create links within each blog post to other related posts you’ve written. The internal linking of connecting similar content together is helpful for search engines and users.
“Discuss” offers advanced, threaded commenting that adds searchable content for your posts.
WordPress Efficient Related Posts Plugin
The Efficient Posts plug-in by Aaron Campbell inserts related content at the end of blog posts and/or pages. Its an easy way to integrate links to your content to tell Google that your other posts are important, as well as keep users on your site after they’ve finished reading. I set the plug-in to show 3 related posts for my blog, which you can see at the end of this page.
June 18th, 2010 @ admin
Photoblog themes on WordPress are relatively all equal when it comes to their ability to rank in search engines (SEO). Thesis is the only true theme that has all the bells and whistles, but the average photographer can use any standard WordPress theme along with the All in One SEO Pack plug-in to achieve acceptable search engine optimization.
The features offered by a self-hosted WordPress blog deliver search results heads and shoulders above all other blog platforms, like Blogger or Typepad. In this post I outline WordPress themes that I am affiliated with because I think they provide the best functionality and design for photography-based businesses or photoblogs.
PortfolioSitez
Great themes, customization options, customer service, and support. The best part is they will handle the technical setup and hosting for you for minimal cost.
ProPhotoBlogs
Get $10 off your purchase with code ZPRE3014. Great themes and impeccable online tutorials like Installing WordPress and Importing a Blog Into WordPress. Setup and installation options available.
Photocrati
Get 15 styles in one super theme, plus access to a member area. This theme requires you to install WordPress and acquire hosting elsewhere.
Thesis
Thesis boasts the strongest SEO of any theme. It has about 50 custom search related fields you can tweak for optimal performance. Most notably it allows:
I use the custom SEO features of Thesis everyday on my Photographers SEO Blog. Matt Cutts, outspoken search guru at Google, also uses Thesis.
This site uses a theme from Templatic, because I wanted a theme that was designed well around my Blog SEO Zen eBook. I didn’t need something that was built with photography in mind.
Sarah Arrow at Blogmistress offers a standard package at £99 for a selfhosted WordPress blog and domain name. You will have three themes to choose from and we’ll upload your company logo.
Patrick Allmond at Focus created a special hosting plan for readers of this site. His WordPress hosting costs $20 a month with a one time fee of $240 to migrate over your existing HTML based website to WordPress.
Blog SEO Zen for photographers and vendors offers everything you need to optimize your photoblog or photography-based business blog to rank higher in search. Get recommendations for all the best SEO features, framework, and plugins for your blog. Learn how Google works in non-technical terms and how to take advantage of text placement, image optimization, and building links. Come away with an easy to implement strategy for ranking your photoblog homepage for competitive phrases, and blog posts for niche phrases that can drive huge amounts of qualified searchers to your site. This solid 35-page ebook provides everything you need as a photographer or vendor to understand and exploit search.
June 17th, 2010 @ admin
Blog posts have the ability to provide more traffic through search engines than a homepage because of the long-tail affect. Long-tail in SEO refers to having a lot of little traffic sources that add up to a significant amount. My sites typically see 10-20% of their traffic from big phrases and the remaining from hundreds of smaller keywords. That’s proof that blog posts are worth knowing how to rank.
Optimizing blog posts for long-tail keywords is a simpler task than competing for a major phrase. While everyone else battles it out, you can scoop up all the little terms that provide very highly qualified leads. For example someone searching for Ritz Hotel wedding photographer in San Diego is much closer to a purchase decision than someone searching San Diego photographer. Plus there aren’t many pages on the web for a phrase that specific, making it much easier to rank.
I put together a 9 minute Quicktime video (.mov) to help identify the top places in WordPress blogs to use keywords in a blog post. There are 5 main places Google will check your post for a possible rank and it’s not meta keywords, keyword tags or categories! A small investment in this video not only improves your chances of ranking every blog post you create (dozens or hundreds of pages) but saves you significant time by not focusing on what search engines ignore.
June 12th, 2010 @ admin
Photoblogs can increase the chances of ranking blog posts in search engines simply by integrating keywords into the URL structure of the blog. URLs are the second most important thing on blog posts (#1 being the title) that search engines look at to figure out if your post is worthy of a rank.
WordPress makes it easy to get additional keywords into your blog post URLs by editing the permalink structure. Permalink just means the permanent link or URL location for a blog page/post. Here are some of the ways a blog will generate the permalink structure for a blog post:
Default myblog.com/?p=123
Day and name myblog.com/2010/05/23/post-name.html
Month and name myblog.com/2010/05/post-name.html
No post keywords are used in the default slug (the end of the URL), and numbers meaningless to search are used in the paths of the other two. Ideally the URL would include quality keywords in the path and the slug.
To change this in WordPress go to Settings > Permalinks and select the radio button for custom structure. Enter one of these:
/%category%/%postname%/
/%postname%/
The first one puts the post’s first category name into the URL path and the second one doesn’t. For example if your post was in a blog category called weddings, the URL would look like this:
myblog.com/weddings/my-great-wedding-post.html
Categories are a cool way to integrate keywords into the URL without having to think about it.
The only problem with changing the permalink structure is that all the URLs in the blog change. Links within your blog should continue to work, but anything linking to your old locations (like from other sites) will be broken. Thus, all the link building efforts you established to your photoblog appear to not work when Google finds them and you don’t get credit for the link.
To avoid broken links you need to upload a file, called an .htaccess file, to your FTP server telling it the old URL and the new URL for each post on your blog.
In the htaccess file you will specify the old and new URLs like so:
Redirect 301 /oldpost.html http://www.myblog.com/newpost.html Redirect 301 /oldpost2.html http://www.myblog.com/newppost2.html
At the bottom of the file you may need to add some general WordPress code that looks like this. You only need to add this if the only thing on your domain name is the blog, and the blog is NOT an extension of your main website (like mysite.com/blog).
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
Hint: the easiest way to get the old URLs for all of your posts is via the sitemap file in Google Webmaster Tools.
You might want to experiment with the file before trying to add 500 redirects. If all you did was replace myblog.com in my example with your real blog URL, then you should be able to /oldpost.html and it will redirect you to /newpost.html. Nothing would be there, but at least you would know your htaccess file is working correctly.
Thanks to WebWeaver’s article for helping me to figure this stuff out for my own blog. I hope the information above gives some direction, but I won’t be answering any questions or providing support for blog redirect files.
8/27/10 Update
If you install the W3 Super Cache plugin from Joost, you can access the htaccess file directly within the plugin. Then just add some lines at the top for the pages you want to redirect:
Redirect 301 /old-url-path/ http://website.com/new-url-path/
It may also be worth checking out the Redirection Plugin. I have not attempted (yet) but hear it can automate the process.
June 12th, 2010 @ admin
Photoblogs must have the All in One SEO Pack for improved ranking ability. It’s absolutely essential plugin for WordPress blogs to help you control titles and descriptions for all your pages. Titles are the most important on page factor for ranking in a search engine. And descriptions are what shows underneath the clickable link in a search engine, and that’s going to help users click through on your link if it shows in search results.
For more about optimizing your blog if you’re a photographer, make sure to pickup a copy of my Blog SEO Zen ebook.
The first thing you want to do when you’re in WordPress is find and install the plugin. So click add new plugin.
Search for All in One SEO Pack.
Click Install.
And it should successfully install the plugin for you.
Then you want to activate the plugin. After you’ve activated the plugin, there will be a link in your left navigation under settings for All in One SEO. Click that to get to the configuration page.
Make sure you enable the plugin, then enter a a title and description for your homepage. Keywords in the title help your rank position, and the meta description helps get users to click your search result (better conversion).
You don’t want to the blog title to appear inthe title of your posts or the title of your pages or the title of your categories. The reason is that the keywords in your titles are the most important part in getting you ranked, and you want that to be very focused on the page that’s being displayed. You don’t want to add additional words that are general to your blog at the end of those titles.
If you just display your category title on category pages, the title of your page might be just weddings and nothing else, if you’re on your weddings category. So you might put something like the above the end of your category pages in order to get in some extra keywords. Note: this applies to all category pages so you need it to be fairly general.
Now that your homepage is updated, the only other place you’ll use the All in One SEO pack is in your individual posts. When you add a new post, you’ll see at the bottom some new fields for All in One SEO pack. For every new post you create you want to enter a title and description. The title is what will display in search results and the keywords in this title help to get you ranked. And the description is what shows in search results and what that says will compel people to click the link, so those are very important features. Enter the All in One SEO Pack title and description for every post you create.
June 11th, 2010 @ admin
Here is page 1 right of out my ebook Blog SEO Zen.
Let’s begin with how a page ends up in the top 10 for a specific search on Google. “Google” and “search engines” are used interchangeably because Google captures an overwhelming 72% of searches and a page ranking in Google should also rank well in other engines.
A user searches a phrase such as “San Diego wedding photographer” or “Ritz Hotel San Diego wedding.” Google finds pages that talk about that topic. It knows that pages are about that topic by reading code of the page (including title, URL, text) and reading the text of links that point to the page. If you link to my page and the link says ebook, then Google thinks my site is about ebook because your link said so. Thus a pre-requisite for ranking well is to use phrases (and links where possible) on your page similar to phrases that users are typing into Google search queries.
For a competitive phrase like San Diego wedding photographer, Google has a lot of pages on that topic to choose from. How does it decide which to rank in the top 10? A small part of it is how well the phrase is used in key positions on the page like the title, URL, first paragraph, and alternate text of images. Since everyone does this and it can easily be manipulated by the site owner, Google turns to an outside source for the majority of its ranking process. The quantity and quality of links pointing to a page tell Google how important everyone else thinks the page is. If 100 sites link to page A and 10 sites link to page B, then page A must be more important and should be ranked higher. In essence, each link is kind of like a user review for a blog site, and more incoming links push it to the top.
For specific phrases like “Ritz Hotel San Diego wedding,” there are fewer pages about this exact topic. Google has fewer pages to compare links for, so the number of links needed is also fewer. Perhaps no links are needed to that specific page if many links are already established to other places on the website. In this case you have already established link equity (trust) with Google and new posts can rank without needing links that point directly to them (but it would help).
Don’t freak. I’m here to teach you how to find phrases, where to use them, and how to get links. It’s all good.
The blog platform like WordPress, Blogger, or Typepad play a huge role in the ability for a blog to rank well in search. Next lesson: read my post on Recommended Photography Blog WordPress Themes.
