WordPress SEO Fundamentals
During WordCamp Cape Town 2011 this blog went through a bit of hell when a plugin or 2 no longer wanted to play nicely with the rest of them. Thanks to weekly WordPress backups with the BackWPup plugin it was easily restored and brought back to life and is now faster than ever before.
For those of you who missed the WordPress SEO 101 talk your Web AddiCT did at #WCCT here are the slides entitled SEO Fundamentalism…
WordPress is the perfect platform to allow you to achieve excellent SEO results. It is only a tool though. Without SEO fundamentals in place you may not achieve the expected results no matter what plugin or tool you choose to use. This session will delve into the evolution of SEO from 1999 to present day and leave you with practical guidelines to apply to your WordPress blog before you’ve selected a theme, installed a plugin or published your first post.
All the presentations at WordCamp Cape Town were filmed and should be available online within the next few week so I’m not going to repeat everything just point you in the right direction based on resources that are currently available online that will help with WordPress SEO. The first few slides where in honour of the default WordPress theme, Kubrick, which most of us started with when you wrote your first blog post. Here is a history lesson on the Kubrick theme that changed the internet as we know it. Well worth reading in you have 5 minutes.
WordPress SEO Keyword Research Tools & Tips
- Google Keyword Suggestions
- Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Be sure to log into your Google Account as results differ when your logged in or not.
- Google (Hot) Trends – find what people are actually searching for and match your keyword strategy with those trends within your niche.
- “visitors found this page by searching for” niche – find keyword ideas from forums that show you what people who landed on a particular forum post via search engines were searching for.
- Wikipedia View Counter – As Wikipedia pages usually rank very very well viewing the Wikipedia stats pages will give you a good idea of how much traffic ranking for a certain keyword will result in.
- For WordPress SEO plugins or sage advice be sure to check out Yoast, Scribe and Viperchill’s Blogging Case Study.
I’ll save the rest for when the WordPress SEO video from WordCamp Cape Town will be published just don’t forget to treat WordPress SEO like shampoo. For a recap of the sessions check out memeburn’s articles about the developer and publisher tracks.