WordPress SEO Lessons Learned

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is super important these days. If you can’t be found on Google then you can’t be found; ’nuff said.

I am not an SEO by profession and I don’t sell myself as an SEO expert. I don’t do SEO unless it is part of my developing a web site. In that case, I optimize the site based on the keywords chosen by the customer. I don’t get into the business of choosing the right keywords and building link campaigns.

With that said, I have taken the time to learn about SEO in order to market my own services and business ventures. Plus I’m just plain curious and any good web designer should know how search engines work.

I’m not going to get into the details of WordPress SEO with this post, but I will point you to some resources and give some of the main concepts that I have learned.

Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about but try these google searches and see where Papasoft ends up. I’ll post the current organic rankings as of today and we’ll see how well I can keep it up.

Google the following keywords (Papasoft rankings on page 1 in parentheses):

• custom wordpress programming – (#1)
• wordpress programming – (#5)
• wordpress miami – (#2)
• wordpress south florida – (#5)
• wordpress seo miami – (#2, I didn’t expect that one, let’s see how I fare after this post!)
• miami web developer – (page 1)

I think that I am just lucky to have used some keywords that may not be that popular. However, that proves one point I would like to make: You can find opportunities to rank your site by finding keywords that are not over saturated. It also helps in some cases that I have included my geographic location on my site title because sometimes people search for developers near them.

So, how did I get ranked high for these keywords even though I’m not an SEO expert?  Here goes…

1. Write about what you know. Write about your product or service and be natural about it. In other words, produce quality content. (I have a lot to learn here.)
2. Determine the keywords you want to target. In other words, what would someone that you want to come to your site be typing into the search box?
3. As long as it makes sense, revise your content to incorporate your keywords. Focus on only 1 or 2 per post/page. The TITLE tag of your page (what shows up at the top of the browser) is the most important place to use those keywords and they’ll also show up in links within your site about that post.
4. Use quality WordPress plugins that allow you to manage the title tags of your posts and category pages. Check out my recommendations below.
5. Get legitimate inbound links to your site. It helps that my customers allow me to add a link in the footer of sites I have developed back to my site. That builds up my search engine cred. But more importantly, get sites that are already ranked in your subject area to link to you AND even better that use the keywords you are targeting in that link to you. (I need to do better at this most definitely.)
6. Track your progress. Use Google Analytics to review your stats and your referral sources and keywords that brought folks to your site. Run queries yourself to see where you end up in the results.

That’s a start from an SEO dummy who did a lot of self study.

Here are some resources that you may find helpful. Add more in the comments if you like.

• WordPress SEO – by Joost de Valk (pronounced Yoast and at Yoast.com, definitely check out the video prez also)
• WordPress SEO Plugins – check out this list by John Carcutt who developed this site for his talk at WordCamp Miami 2009. (The guy who is #1 to my #2 above for wordpress seo miami )