Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a crucial element to the internet and is the best way to insure that search engines find your Website. Yet, before you can write SEO, you need to set up your website to be optimized.
In the last Scream Binary: Wordpress vs. b2evolution, we showed you two free Software programs for your website and gave you a light overview that left you to deiced which free software platform to choose. If Wordpress was your choice, we are back with 10 essential plugins for a novice blogger, er… let’s stick with novice independent publisher. If you chose B2evolution, we still have a couple of tips, but we have found many of the essential Wordpress plugins are built in features on B2evolution.
So by this point you have a website and are itching to throw content up, but why and how? Sure, there are tons of themes to choose form, but for now, choose a basic theme that you like and we can build upon later. Before we know how we want our websites to look, we want to post a couple pieces of written work to help plot out the shape.
For now we will face one of the hardest truths to independent internet publishing, which is “In the beginning no one is listening to you!”
As a new site, you don’t have any binary cred. So before you start posting, you want to stack the deck in your favor every way you can. But, before we dive into a top 10 list of plugins essential to any novice independent publisher, lets take a look at a couple terms you will need to know before we upload our downloads and viral publish our way into Binary history.
SEO, Squat Exuberant Ostrich?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is on the tip of every Webslingers tongue. Every site on the Web needs to be optimized for search engines or web-surfers won’t find them. The problem arises as there are so many websites, how do you work out a way for someone to find one post out of the millions? The answer is SEO. With a SEO compliant website and the right keywords, readers will find your website every time.
Keywords
There is a lot of binary chatter on the web about keywords, almost as much as SEO. Hell, Google even has a Keyword Search Tool. What are Keywords and why are they important to your post? Well, Keywords are the words you use to best describe your post’s content. Like if I went to Google and typed in “Mediocre enlightenment from a social reject”, this post might be in the number one spot.*
But wait, how does Google find your keywords to show this post is a better choice of “Mediocre enlightenment from a social reject” than all the other post of “Mediocre enlightenment from a social reject” slop on the internet? Well if you have arachnophobia you might want to look away.
Google has Spiders
Every Search Engine uses programs called “Spiders” that crawl the web looking at information ( Spiders, web… get it? Yeah the internets are full of lame jokes like that one. Check out http://www.yourethemannowdog.com/ for more lame humor.). Which is also why Webslinger is a far better term for the internet’s elite than any other wild west reference.
In any event, the search engine spiders crawl over your web page to see what it is all about. Their first stop is your robots.txt file. Try and find your robots.txt file here: www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt (replace yourdomin with your domain name. Don’t have a Robots.txt? Let’s make one.
Make a Robots.txt
First step is go download the “KB’s Robots.txt plugin”. The Robots.txt is a pretty self explanatory plugin, and boy is it useful. Once loaded, you can view your website’s settings and look for the Robots.txt link in the settings list. In this link, you will get a text editor to update your newly created Robot.txt from your Wordpress dashboard.
A robots.txt is a memo from the MGT. of your site to the Search Engine spiders. It tells spiders where they can and can’t go on your site. Kids can’t chew gum in school, and with a Robots.txt, you get to be principal of your website. But you don’t want to be a fascist, you want the spiders to crawl all over your content.
One simple way to get a robots.txt is to look at one used by another site. Check out Our Robots.txt or use the one below.
User-agent: *
Disallow:Sitemap: http://www.yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml
If you do not use KB’s Robots.txt, use a basic word processor to copy, paste, and save the above as a simple .txt file, titled “Robots.txt”. Then upload the file, with your FTP, to your first directory of your website, or in the file named “Public_html”.
Then type “www.YourDomain.com/robots.txt” into your browser’s address bar to make sure you posted the file in the right place. If the page is not found or blank, move the robots.txt into a preceding folder and retry the link.
You might have noticed a couple things in the Robots.txt that I wanted to point out. For “User Agent” we used an Astrix. On search engines, the Astrix is a wild card, and used here, means your site is a smorgasbord board for any spider to access your site. Everything after Disallow is blank, so you don’t block any access. With the wild card Astrix and empty disallow, you are saying come one, come all, scour every bit of my greatest website of all.
Sitemap marks the Spot
You might have noticed the end line “Sitemap: http://www.yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml”. This is where your sitemap should be located. Sitemaps are files Search Engines use to find places on your website that it’s spiders might have over looked. But if the word Sitemap sounds a little technical, have no fear. B2evolution has a sitemap generator built in and Wordpress has an easy to use plugin for your code hurt brain.
2. Google XML Sitemaps Generator
The Google XML Sitemaps Generator is a great plug in to have. It makes your sitemap for you. Follow the easy instructions to upload and implement your plugin ( found in the Bonus Binary of this guide) and, Sam’s Your Uncle, you have a site map.
Now that you have both a robots.txt file and a site map, you are ready for the Search Engine Spiders to crawl all over your site. This is the biggest boon a blog has over a standard website. Standard websites are published once and then rarely updated. Blogs, alternatively, are updated all the time, with new post, edits, and all the fun jazz of independent web publishing. Therefore, spiders love blogs as there is always something new to scan and show Search Engine Users.
Pimp Da SEO
Yet despite a good Robots.txt and site map, the most important function of your website will be it’s compliance with the laws of SEO. Many web surfers will find your website through Search Engines, most likely Google, and you will want your site to be optimized for them to find you with ease.
There are a couple different SEO Packs for Wordpress, and here on American NonFiction, we use the Platinum SEO Pack to give our posts: Meta titles, Meta Descriptions, and Keywords. We have found Platinum SEO Pack is a better SEO solution than other SEO Plugins we have tried in the past. So you are sold on the Platinum SEO pack but wonder what Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Keywords do?
Well, with the ability to change your Meta titles, or the text at the top of your browser, you can add description of the post. I.E. You run a literary website and post original fiction. Without a SEO Pack, the top of your browser would look like “Title of Piece – Domain Name”, which isn’t much help to search engines. With a SEO pack, you can make the title look like this “Fiction- Title of piece- domain name”, which tells Search Engine the work is Fiction.
Meta description follows the same logic, where you get to tell the search engine what your post is all about in a slightly longer form, aside from what is already printed in your post.
And Keywords are words that are key to your post’s content or words people use in a search.
Just like your words, your images need to be friendly to Search Engines as well.
The SEO Friendly Images does just that. Like your post, this plugin adds Meta title and description to your images and wets the search engine’s appetite. Remember to tailor your keywords.
On both American NonFiction and Screaming Binary, the keywords I use are tailored to the individual post or images used. The intention is to give searchers the gold at the end of their quest. As with this post, If a novice internet publisher were looking for a place to set up his Wordpress plugins then he could do worse than hopping on to this post.
Yet, with all the popularity of keywords, in recent months, we witnessed Google change the way it’s system works. They have taken action against the devious SEO inclined minds on the internet. Basically, Google wants their readers to walk away from the computer and feel Google has found them the information they want.
Because so many people had abused the system by exploiting the rules, Google searches had become unreliable. To react Google has changed the game board, but if you are playing by the rules and trying to get your readers quality content, then you should have no problems.
5. Ad-minister
Ever go to a website and notice how the ad pictures change each time you look at a post. If you reload this page, you will see our Clickable Covers, along both sides of the page, change each time the page is loaded. We do this with the magic of the Ad-minister plug in.
Remember like the images above, the images you use in Ad-minister will need the title and meta descriptions to be SEO compliant. Other great options include the ability to put extra weight on different images and effect how often they show. It’s pretty, it’s sweet, it’s pretty sweet.
The preset of Wordpress is for Wordpress not to follow comments. Which means there is no longer any reason for other bloggers to comment on your website. If you are just starting out, you will want to change this rule and add the Nofollow Case by Case plugin. This will allow you to chose to follow a commentator’s link or not on a case by case basis. You want to give people every reason to post on your site and let the spiders follow their links.
7. WP_Stats
So you are jumping around the internet, loading all these plugins onto your website, but how do you know if it will be effective? With Wp_Stats you will know just how effective your website is.
While I think the numbers are little high and I believe the plugin counts spider visits as well as people visits, the WP_stats plug in, is a fun plug in to watch and keeps a constant reminder of your progress on your dashboard. Again, b2evolution has a stats program built in that blows this one away. But in any event, make these numbers go up and your numbers from other stat programs will rise as well.
Get Social with Plug ins
From the people who find your site and like it enough to keep up to date with what you are doing, you will want to have a social networking site for your website. Both Myspace and Facebook offer profiles or pages for your website, where fans can get to know one another. There are a ton of social networking sites on the web and some of them can be hard to know about.
8. Add This
The Add This plugin places a small widget on the bottom of every post you write. In the widget is a link to every social marketing site of importance and each link will take you to a place where you can post a link to your site from a blog, note, or one of the many different options available at each site. Once you have the plugin loaded, check out all the links in this handy gadget and use each link as a checklist to grow your collection of social networking sites.
Twitterfeed.com and Commentwitter
Though it is arguable, Twitter has a higher current popularity than Myspace and Faacebook. It’s all the rage and just last week I saw a piece on about the site in the nightly news. Seems everyone and their mother has a Twitter account and your Website should be no different.
Get a twitter account. Then go to Twitterfeed.com to get your website’s Rss feed to post on your Twitter account. This will let your Twitter friends know when your site publishes a post.
Then get the Comment Twitter plug in and your Twitter followers will also be updated when readers post comments on your website. Which will hopefully inspire others to comment or at least click the link from your twitter account.
10. Thank Me Later
Now that someone has checked out your website, left a comment on your website, and triggered a post in twitter, shouldn’t you thank them for the interest?
Of course you should and the thank me plug in helps you do just that. Once you have the plug in installed, you have the option to write a personalized letter and personal is the key word here. You are thanking someone for checking out your awesome site. You can also set when the letter is sent.
I like to delay my letters a day, so American NonFiction is not too far from their mind, so they haven’t forgotten us, but not too fresh, so they go “Oh yeah”. Remember, your object is to thank them and get them to come back. Always get them to come back.
Get Ready To Post
There you have it. With all of the 10 essential plug ins for novice internet publishers and the tips from this guide, you are ready to get posting. But don’t post yet, we still have one more article to go before we get you up, running, and blogging like a super star.
Yet take a moment to rejoice, we have set up your website with the principals of SEO. You now have the best way for Search Engine Spiders to crawl over our websites. You have the SEO plugins to make the Spiders love our content. You have a way to place advertisements, to prep for when you get sponsors. And You have a big list of social networking sites and ways to keep in contact with your readers. You are locked, loaded, and ready to learn how to SEO our Posts.
Next time, Webslinger, next time.
Bonus Binary
Wordpress Sitemap plugin set it right for macimum SEO benefits
Blogger’s Guide to SEO
CopyBlogger read to improve writing.
* The actual keyword phrase for this post is “SEO Webpage Plugins” because if you want to find plugins to make your website SEO complaint and get the word out there, I can’t think of a better post. Notice how the keyword is three words, your best keywords will be more than one phrase because how many times have you ever searched the web with only one word?
Tags: DIY, Scream Binary, WEB
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