June 19th, 2010 // One Comment
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.
Tags: all in one seo pack, analytics, plug-ins, sitemap, wordpress
Wedding Photographers Guide to Blog Optimization
1 year ago
[...] 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 [...]