Learn WP for Your Business Sites
SEO Copy Writing
SEO Copywriting is important for your websites to rank higher in SERPs (search engine result pages?
Using WordPress for your website already gives you great built-in SEO advantages, but if you can do your copywriting with SEO in mind, I mean “do better SEO copywriting”, your traffic may rank much better and you may get better target traffic and leads from your visitors and better sales or popularity for your websites.
Do you think you can do copywriting for your websites? Maybe not until you read this great copywriting e-Book, grab a copy for yourself before the discounts are gone. Click to get one: SEO Copywriting e-Book. You may buy it and download it and read it and be ready to write great contents for your readers and search engines for your websites. You may also get paid well by doing great SEO copywriting for others. Yes, great SEO copywriters now are in great need, expecially for our professionals clients such law firms, real estate agents, financial investment advisers and clinics.
I got my copy, did you get yours? the SEO Copywriting eBook by Ian Lurie (he’s been doing online marketing for 13 years….that’s before Google was even BORN).
SEO still lives and dies based on good copywriting. If you’re going to move up in the rankings and stay there, you have to know how to write customer- and search engine-friendly content. But you’re a writer. You shouldn’t have to learn about SEO, keyword mining, pagerank and the robots meta tag. You just want to write quality copy that search engines will like. That’s why I wrote The Unscary, Real World Guide to SEO Copywriting. In it, you’ll find: Plain language and understandable explanations about why and how search engines review your writing. The six rules for successful SEO copywriting. Guidelines for writing headlines that will attract both search engines and readers. Rules for writing good link text. How to create highly relevant ‘clusters’ of content on your site. Not a single use of the word ‘algorithm’. The book’s short, sweet and to the point: 30 pages, 6 rules for better SEO copywriting. .
Setting Up Permalinks for Better SEO
The default URL settings for WordPress pages or posts are not quite user friendly or SEO friendly. http://wp89.com/learn/setting-permalinks-seo makes more sense than http://wp89.com/learn/?p=230 ( where I can never figure out what 230 refers to.). Search engines can also make more sense out of the URL with key words too.
Here’s the video tutorial showing you how to setup more meaningful URL for your WordPress pages or posts.
Matt Cutts:WordPress Hero
We have been search for WordPress heroes (top WordPress users), but forgot Matt Cutts, who himself may not realize that he is one of the WordPress heroes.
Why? First of all, his speech on WordPress at the WordCamp San Francisco and the great SEO results with WordPress inspired and encouraged a lot of people (business website owners, Web developers, SEO experts )including me and many of my clients to switch to WordPress from other platforms. At that WordCamp, he confirmed my early observation was right. Matt notes “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” at his slide 12 of the 50 at “SEO for Bloggers”
Second of all, his only Website is running WordPress with an Alexa ranking 4,193 (as of this writing)
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It proves that WordPress can handle pretty heavy traffic with ease. (Alexa says 50% of sites are slower )
If you are serious about SEO with WordPress, you should watch this video over and over again:
These points should be noted
Plugins recommended by Matt Cutts:
- Akismet
- Cookies in Comments
- WP Super Cache
- Enforce www. Preference
- Feedburner Feedsmith
Avoid Backlink Obsession (BO): Sometimes fewer links are better than more. (check out slide 18)
Don’t forget image search, videos, etc. ( this point encourages us to think of add some more images for our posts and create more video tutorials for Youtube or other video sites.)
Find some more tips by yourself at his page: “Matt Cutts on WordPress“.
Why WordPress?
Why A Business Use WordPress?
Here we list some top reasons why a business site would use WordPress as the publishing platform?
- It is so easy to use! If you can type, you can add new contents to the WordPress Website. For bloggers and marketing professionals, they can focus on writing great contents that are most interesting to their readers or customers. It is so easy to upload a photo or image, or create an online album, or embed a video (from Youtube or other video sharing services) to go with the articles.
- It is powerful and extensible. There are so many free or affordable WordPress plugins to give your business websites the features you need. You can also pay an experienced WordPress developers to add the functions you need when you cannot find the plugins you need and the their services are so affordable compared to others. You can run an online store using WordPress platform; you can get paid via Paypal, Google Checkout or other payment gateway for your online or offline services (for membership websites providing internal contents, or the tuition of your music schools, private preschool or after schools.)
- WordPress Themes and Template System can give your business site great new looks and interface while keeping your existing contents. There are so many free WordPress themes for those doesn’t anything about Web design to choose from. For those with special needs, it is so easy to hire a WordPress designer to create the themes according to exactly what you want.
- For SEO (search engine optimization), WordPress is the best Web Publish platform that major search engines (such as Google, Bing and Yahoo) love. Just imagine why Matt Cutts, the most famous Google search expert, use only WordPress for his own website ( http://mattcutts.com/blog/ ). Besides the WordPress built-in SEO friendly Website structure and features, you can get lots of free SEO plugins to help you optimize your pages and posts for search engines.
- WordPress is the best Web development platform with short turn over; it is great for business sites with limited Web development budgets. So many Web developers are turning to WordPress to develop turn-key business websites because it is a very efficient development framework based on PHP & MySQL, the most used Web technology for the most of the websites in the world ( right! ASP, .Net or Java are not as popular as PHP & MySQL). This development framework is proved to have the least learning curve too.
- this list is growing on and on…
The list above is only the beginning, please submit your reasons to use WordPress for your Web sites in the comments, and you will be surprised how many WordPress users are willing to share their excitement and success with WordPress.
Top 10 SEO Plugins for WordPress
Although WordPress publishing platform is already pretty SEO friendly with lots of built-in features:
- auto RSS generation ( for off-page SEO)
- permanent link setup via “wp-admin/options-permalink.php”
- search engine pinging via “wp-admin/options-privacy.php” and “Update Services” at the bottom of wp-admin/options-writing.php (notifying search engine indexer via http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ )
We may use some good SEO plugins to improve our WordPress site SEO. We may just install 5 or 6 of the top 10 WordPress SEO plugins to really optimize our sites. The following is the top 10 in no particular order
- SEO Ultimate (downloaded 211,981 times , 4 of 5 stars based on 76 ratings)
- WordPress SEO by Yoast ( download 214,556 times, 4 of 5 stars based on 459 ratings) special feature: Google search result snippet previews, let your editors improve your SEO!
- Greg’s High Performance SEO ( although downloaded only 90,299 times, it got almost 5 of 5 stars based on 23 ratings)Special about this plugin: it provides built-in support for titles and keywords left behind by alternative SEO and other legacy plugins such as:
- All in One SEO Pack
- Autometa
- HeadMeta
- Headspace
- Platinum SEO
- Related Posts
- SEO Title Tags
- SEO Ultimate
- wpSEO
- Platinum SEO Pack(downloaded over half a million: 535,551 times! 4 of 5 stars based on 88 ratings). The features I love: Automatic 301 redirects for any permalink changes (Platinum SEO plugin will take care of issuing a 301 redirect to the new location.This is a new essential feature, not present in All in one SEO, the author said); Lets you override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page.
- Google XML Sitemaps( We will list more top SEO plugins next our next article. Stay tuned.)
We will also create some video tutorials on WordPress SEO, the best publishing platform that can get your site to rank higher in the search results.