SEO Targeted Wordpress Themes

The first and most crucial thing to consider for a Wordpress blog is the theme. Not only because of the importance of the visitors first impression, but also because of how a website’s code can influence the way Google can read you. There are many themes out there, created by people of all kinds. Part of them are designers, others are programmers. Not all of the people that put these themes together took into account the significance of being “friendly” to search engines. The code has to be clean, logical and focused around the content. It is very important that your Wordpress theme be CSS/XHTML validated. Although a great many “SEO Wordpress themes” out there meet this basic requirement, a lot of them don’t (You can always run yours through the W3C Validator if you want to make sure your blog validates). Some themes also have content optimizing tool possibilities, such as the ability to give SEO friendly page titles and much more. There are websites that also give “SEO grades” to their themes, so make sure you don’t pick a theme with a grade lower than 85

SEO Plugins for WordPress

There are many SEO plugins for Wordpress that can enhance your blog’s compatibility to search engines. The most common is the “All in SEO pack” Wordpress plugin. This plugin creates an extension within your Wordpress platform that lets you insert Meta tags into each post. This plugin also avoids duplicate content issues typical to Wordpress and creates titles templates, so you won’t have to optimize your posts titles manually. Simple Tags is another Wordpress plugin that enables you to manage the tags all over your blog.

We can’t really discuss blogs marketing without also mentioning SMO (Social Media Optimization). The Sociable plugin (and there are many other plugins) is a tool that gives your readers the possibility to submit your post to many social communities, social websites and bookmarking sites. Creating a social presence for your blog in the social community is a vital component to any blog. After all we don’t want to get into that debate of if you build them a field they will come right?

Analyze Your Wordpress Traffic!

Finding out how your visitors reached you is a great way of knowing what you’ve done right and what you’re doing that maybe isn’t doing so well. If you can’t do that then you’re going to be more or less flying in the dark. Wassup lets you analyze traffic and users’ behavior on the site. If you’re hosting Wordpress yourself then install Google Analytics or something paid like Clicky.

To sum things up, Design, Content and the Analysis of your blog or site is very important. However, there are marketing aspects that you have to pay attention to. Make sure your blog has social media links and presence, download several SEO plugins and check your theme SEO grade. And the most important advice is – always optimize your blog in order to stay fresh and on top.

Alright so after a little bit of coercion and reminding people that contracts were up for renegotiation soon (aren’t they always?), I’ve got people writing and landing posts on my desk for review. After reading them, I keep asking myself the same questions:

- Is it any good?

- Will anyone benefit from this post?

- Are they just trying to get me off their backs by giving me this?

- Why did I get myself into this…

So after reading a few good posts and a few just okay posts and keeping in mind that I don’t want to discourage people from writing by asking them “Do you really think I’m going to posts this?” I’ve come up with a set of three standards that my writers (and myself of course) have to apply when writing and editing these wonderful pieces of informative literature that will one day appear on the Compucall Blog:

1. Would you post this on your own personal blog?

2. If this post were written by someone else in the industry, would you digg, sphinn or bookmark it?

3. Since your name will be under the title of the post, would you want this to show up first in the search results if someone Googled your name?

So that’s that, let’s see where it takes us shall we.

So low and behold, we finally have the website almost ready and I casually mention the opportunity to blog and interact at a general employee meeting and guess what (insert generic cricket sounds here).

Alright, maybe people are busy and it’s slipped their mind. So bring it back up at the next meeting, explain the benefits of blogging and then going to other blogs and starting to talk to others with your link pointing to our blog or to your blog profile and starting lasting industry relationships that will grow your knowledge and create great connections for the next SMX or SES. People nod. One person sends me a blog post, another contributes title for a blog post and that’s it. Remember there are 20 people here who are more than qualified to chip in.

This should be fun.