Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Going Mobile with WordPress and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

These are my notes from the January 30, 2012, Oklahoma City WordPress User’s group meet-up at The Div in Edmond. WordPress is a free, open-source content management system used by tons of folks worldwide to create websites. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

http://yesdancan.com is the website Dan Lovejoy built by hand (not with WordPress) to get a job – and he got a job!
– build websites with iThemesBuilder and focused a lot on SEO issues

Other web links for other attendees tonight:
http://www.northideas.com
http://extremevirtualsupport.com
http://www.tandswebdesign.com
http://www.edmondbootcamp.com
http://jfdoes.com
http://social-ism.biz
http://thereproject.com
http://thomasperezphotography.com
http://ignitedmediadesign.com
http://www.alertinternational.com
http://newlookmedia.com
http://www.gfellerstudio.com
http://www.heliumscraper.com (.net webpage screenscraper)

(if I missed your link and you attended please share it via a comment or Twitter)

“It’s tough to be a professional photographer today, because everyone is a photographer”

I shared a presentation on “Go Mobile with WordPress.” My links are on wfryer.me/wp

I also recorded my audio from this presentation using Cinch on my iPad

Now hearing from Dan Lovejoy on SEO and WordPress

Lots of important things to remember when writing for the web
– also important to write SEO (search engine optimized) content
– CRO = conversion rate optimization

Writing SEO copy is hard
– writing natural copy is hard
– writing conversation optimized copy is hard

SEO is optimizing your page or site for specific keywords
– standard line from web masters: if you just build it and write a lot of content on it, you’ll attract the traffic
– “being a content thought leader is a higher calling than SEO”
– there is a scientific process of optimizing specific pages for specific keywords

Avoid using a period in your phrase, but you can use a semicolon, comma, and m-dash or n-dash
– when you define SEO targets you generally want to use phrases rather than keywords
– “the longer the tail” you have using the Google Adwords tool, you can try to find keywords people aren’t ranking for but there is traffic
– you want to look for keywords in the 3 – 7% density (as of now) otherwise you can get ‘thumped’ by Google (Googe either puts a penalty on your page rank or de-indexes you)
– SEO has changed a lot even since November 2011 when I stopped doing this professionally

If you are already in the top six of Google search pages, you’re good
– people are drilling down in Google searches more now (we used to say you need to be on the top 3 pages)
– it is better to be 11 rather than 9…

David Christopher was Google SEO-guru at OPUBCO who taught Dan a LOT

My question about Bing: It looks like optimizing for Google does the same thing for Bing search

WordPress is a GREAT tool for SEO
– all the tools are available
– we use All-In-One SEO WordPress plugin

Post tips:
– make sure post titles contain keywords
– make sure post title propagates to your page title
– write a click-optimized custom page description for each (human readable URLs are very important to Google)
– the META KEYWORDS field doesn’t matter

Watch out for duplicate content, it won’t ‘kill you’ like it used to, but it can dilute the power of your inbound links

Key: cross-posting is bad for SEO, it can dilute the power of your inbound links
– if using Posterous site, set it up to be NO INDEX (change robots tags to tell Google not to look at the site)

Post titles should use an H1 tag on the title
– don’t use multiple H1 tags!
– if your theme doesn’t do this, you need to get a new theme or change it
– make sure you use semantic markup (H2, H3, etc) for internal headings
– use only absolutely necessary plug-ins (page speed matters)

Google indexes keywords that are higher on a page

Good SEO Blogs:
http://www.seomoz.org
http://www.stompernet.com

Google tracks how good your inbound links, Google knows what your PPC (pay per clicks) are, your keyword density, your interlinking….
– that is how Google knows about how long people stay on your site
– human reviewers also go to sites for Google (mainly checking for spam and garbage on your site)

Comment from attendee: Google doesn’t put a real person on a site unless it has more than 100,000 inbound links, they don’t care about sites with 10K or 20K links

Any time you have a person creating a real link, that is ‘white hat SEO’
– there is a sea of garbage that people create, that stuff is way down on Google results…

JC Pennys got ‘slapped’ really hard by using ‘black hat SEO’ methods

I HAD TO GO PICK UP MY SON FROM SCOUTS AT THIS POINT, SO I COULDN’T STAY FOR MORE… GREAT STUFF FROM DAN!

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