Premise:
There are plenty of times when you’d want to tell somehow how they can improve the Search Engine rankings of their site quickly. I’ve found that with most lay-people, you have about one minute before their eyes gloss over.
So below is my attempt at giving someone the best tips for SEO that can be read in about a minute. Of course it isn’t all-encompassing, nor is it meant to be. But hell, it’s short.
The One-Minute SEO Plan:
SEO means ‘search engine optimization’. The goal is to get more targetted traffic to your website specifically through Search Engines.
There are two parts to SEO. These are 1) What is happening ON your site that the search engines can scan and see and that helps them determine what your website is about and 2) What and who are linking to your site on other parts of the internet. The Search Engines look the number of links to your site as a gauge of how popular your site is. Search Engines tend to like sites with many links from other popular websites.
Improving #1: Your On-Site Factors
Write interesting content you believe people would like to share and link to. Try to use the same words when you are writing that other people would use when they are searching for your article. If you aren’t sure what words other people use to search, you can us keyword research tools to help narrow it down.
Your page titles are especially important, so make sure the titles have a lot of the words that other people would use to search for a page like the one you are writing.
Add interesting and new content often. Make content that humans will like, and the search engines should follow.
Improving #2: Other Sites Linking to You
You want lots of sites to link to your site.
Think about organizations, clubs, or websites that may benefit from linking to you and then email them asking for a link. If you are part of a forum, you’ll want to add a link to your site in your signature. If you run multiple websites, you may want to link from each website to each of the other websites. If you have friends with websites, ask them to link to your website or you can trade links with each other.
There are many ways to get links to your site that you can come across online. So keep your eyes open and try to get lots of links.
Remember this with both on-page and off-page factors: Making a great website that people like is the best starting point for a site that does well in the search engines. So never sacrafice the user’s experience in favor of something for the search engines.
‘It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.’ -Frank Luntz
Last week they were running a deal at AppSumo that made the cost of user testing low enough that it would be silly not to try it. So I decided to give it a go and I learned a lot about how people use my websites as a result. I’m going to share the 5 most intriguing with you today.
As an SEO, I’m usually way more focused on just getting traffic than what happens to that traffic when it hits the site. But even rough ‘back-of-the-napkin’ math can convince the most skeptical that user testing is cheaper and more effective than trying to get more traffic to a poorly-designed site.
For that reason, I encourage everyone to try user testing on their own sites. Yes, this means you. Try it. You’ll be amazed what you find.
Without further ado, let’s dive in… [click to continue…]
I usually don’t do posts that include code, but this trick it just too cool.
The code below is for your .htaccess file. You would want to use this whenever you are working on a site and you want to redirect the site elsewhere while you are working on it.
So, in this case we duplicated the site on a subdomain while we worked on the main site. Then we put in these redirects to direct everyone looking for the home page & anyone who reached a 404 page to be redirected.
What’s great about this is that you can still work on your site as long as you know the right URL for the page you are looking for.
# TEMPORARY REDIRECT
redirect 302 /index.html http://youwantthemtogohere.com
ErrorDocument 404 http://youwantthemtogohere.com
Just replace what’s in your .htaccess with the code above and you’ll be fine.
Of course, this works in WordPress too, so worry not!
Affiliate Summit East, 2010
Affiliate Summit East is a conference for affiliate marketing. It took place in New York City over the last few days. My two business partners and I took some days off from our day jobs and headed to the conference to strike some deals and learn some tricks that we hoped would improve our business model. Since our business is only 4 months old (though profitable already!) we hoped that getting infused with some good networking and awesome speeches would improve our company’s trajectory.
The experience was a lot different than I had expected and I’ve come away with some lessons that may be helpful to young business owners and people new to conferences. So if you are a veteran conference-goer, you may disagree with my assumptions. For the rest of us, maybe you can learn from my mistakes.
First of all, I want to say that the trip was a ton of fun. The folks who put it on are brilliant and the quality of the conference isn’t in question at all. So kudos to all of the folks behind ASE. [click to continue…]
Today marks the launch of a refined and updated WordPress Consulting Service specially tailored to quickly and painlessly answer your questions. You can see more about that service here.
I’ve been doing phone consults with folks for a couple of years now, and have figured out what most people want is really down to earth advice delivered over the phone. It’s sort of like the helpdesk that WordPress doesn’t have.
So if there is something about your WordPress blog or website that has been bothering you and you really want to fix it, swing on over to the new WordPress Consulting page and let’s get your problem fixed.
Late last week I was approached by Seth Shoultes about a new plugin he made for E-Junkie. The plugin allows a wordpress user to quickly and easily add an E-Junkie shopping cart to their website. I thought the plugin was really cool and helpful and figured you guys might want to know about it.
Then Seth and I got to talking and it turns out he just released another really cool plugin to help manage (and take payments for) events. So many of my clients have looked for event plugins and I haven’t been able to suggest any until now. Check out that plugin here.
I hope these plugins help you out, and if you have any other plugin favorites please drop them in the comments!
As part of our 30 Days of WordPress Par-Tay, we are moving right along to the next question by Christina. Christina’s question about Child Themes is a great one, specifically with the recent flare-up of interest in proprietary themes in the WordPress Community.
Christina asks:
Some premium WordPress themes use child themes, and some just seem to be stand-alone themes. What’s the advantage of buying a child theme like Lifestyle versus something that isn’t built on a proprietary parent theme?
Without getting into the politics of the debate about proprietary themes, let’s take a look at what a Child Theme is and why advantages and disadvantages there are with using Child Themes.
What is a Child Theme?
A child theme is basically a way to re-skin a theme so it looks different.
A lot of times you’ll really like a theme except for one or two things, and creating a child theme (in its most basic implementation) would allow you the change the things about your theme that you don’t like in an upgrade-proof manner. If you are a developer, this is a great child theme intro.
For normal non-developers, let’s take a look at the benefits of using Child Themes. [click to continue…]
In deciding what direction to take WordPress Landing Pages and how to help the folks out that are members of that community, I try to stay on top of developments in the online marketing world. But there is so much hype and crap out there that sifting through it can be very tough. However, I’ve finally found a resource I think is truly amazing, professional, and free. It’s called Marketing Experiments.
Here is the Marketing Experiments Resources page that has enough data and research to keep you busy for years. Enjoy.
Best, Brad
PS: If you are a member of WordPress Landing Page, you may be interested in our new blog post about making a cool graphic header like we use on the front page of WPLPT.
Next up in our 30 Days of WordPress world series, we have Kai asking about using WordPress for an ecommerce store.
Kai’s Question
I’m curious about using WordPress as an e-commerce store. Are there e-commerce plugins out there other than WP e-Commerce? Outside of SEO and analytics, what areas do you recommend focusing on for deploying a WordPress e-commerce store? Do you have any recommendations for WordPress store themes free or paid?
I saw this post on Hackernews. Thanks!
My Answer to Kai
The last time I had to work on an ecommerce solution for WordPress was a few years ago, so I my experience may be a bit outdated.
What I found at that time was that most of the e-com solutions available for WordPress were bandaids on a big gaping wound… they worked for a little while, but I wouldn’t leave them unattended for long.
It appears that there are some new entries into the growing market of people using WordPress for e-com. A plugin called Shopp looks promising, but I don’t have any experience with it so I can’t say for sure.
So what would I do if I were going to create an e-commerce store but loved WordPress? I’d let e-commerce software handle the heavy lifting but use WordPress as a front-end. [click to continue…]
For the 3rd answer in my 30 Days of WordPress extravaganza, we are taking a look at Robert’s question about customizing your WordPress installation package at the time of installation.
Robert Asks
How can I customize the blogs created by WordPress 3.0 so that when they install they have the theme, plugins and settings all the way I want them so I don’t have to change each new blog by hand?
The Answer:
I’m sure there are millions of ways to do this, but what I would suggest doing is making a file and database combo that is an exact snapshot of the customized site you want to create. Then, after you install WordPress, you can import the database of the customized site and upload the edited theme files (or whatever files you want.) Literally ANY change you want to make to WordPress can be held in a files/database combination. [click to continue…]
Wondering how to speed up your WordPress-powered website? As part of our 30 Days of WordPress fiesta, we are taking a look at Somone’s question about how to speed up her site.
From Somone:
Once a self-hosted WordPress site gets a decent amount of traffic, the use of plugins and other scripts that run to show images, thumbnails, style sheets, etc can be very memory, cache and processor intensive for a shared server arrangement and an affordable annual fee.
I find my site running quite slowly at the moment and am trying to work out if it is my layout, the different plugins, the number of images…causing the problem. What would you recommend somebody do when their WordPress site is listed by Alexa as ’slow compared to others’?
Answer: How to Speed up Your WordPress Site
I’ve had to learn a lot about speeding up WordPress because of a new coupon site that I’ve been working on. The site presented some challenges that made it run much slower than it should, so I’ve had to do a lot to make it speed up. Hopefully my work will help you, Somone, to speed up your site a bit.
So, in order of importance, here are my suggestions for speeding up your site:
1. Grab a benchmark
Get a benchmark of where you stand right now, so you can see if (and by how much) your efforts have improved your results. My favorite site to use to get a benchmark is Pingdom Tools. It will also give you an idea of how long each item is taking to download, and this can be very helpful is deciding if that big image or two is really worth the extra download time. [click to continue…]
As the kick-off question for my 30 Days of WordPress Questions, Christina asked a couple of questions. One of them jumped out at me right away and that’s the question I’ll be answering first.
Christina Asked:
I’ve stayed away from WordPress because in the past, the CMS didn’t seem to measure up to corporate or ecommerce requirements — a WordPress site always looked like a blog. I’m looking at ecommerce sites built on WordPress, and am impressed by the functionality. But what about building things like password protected membership directories? Say a school or a church wanted to be able to offer a directory to its members, so folks can call for homework assignments or to iron out who’s bringing the coffee cake to the rec hall after church on Sunday? Are there plug-ins for this? I see plug-ins for newsletters, for email subscriptions, etc.
My Answer
The question breaks down into 2 parts. The first one is Christina mentioning that she’s getting more impressed with the Themes and plugins that are coming available to make WordPress more of a full-fledged CMS. I totally agree and am glad she mentioned it.
The main question seems to be about creating a Membership Site for WordPress that allows you to have a password-pretected member’s-only area. I’ve had a lot of experience with Membership sites since WordPress Landing Page is run as a membership site. [click to continue…]
