One of the most discussed areas things people talk about (after social media nowadays probably) is search engine optimization or SEO. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress and so it is important for us to discuss SEO in regards to WordPress.

WordPress does a great job with SEO from a standalone perspective, but there are a lot of other things, such as plugins that can make it better. Using just WordPress you can add meta tags, insert keywords, optimize images for SEO via titles and captions, and change the permalinks structure of the website to use full titles as the URL.

But there are some limitations, which could be for simplicity sake and to not confuse new users, or it is because for most people it simply isn’t necessary.

Luckily for power users and fanatics about SEO WordPress has a huge set of available plugins, both free and for pay that can enhance your websites search engine ranking.

Check out these 4 plugins to start on your search engine ranking journey!

All-in-One SEO
This is considered THE SEO plugin for most people. The plugin sits on the post and page editor and provides users with options for title, description, keywords, and more allowing you to customize what shows up in the Title (rather than just using the default title). An extremely handy plugin and best of all it is free, so there is no reason to not have this installed and working for your blog.

WP Google Analytics
Site metrics aren’t normally talked about when talking directly about SEO plugins, but having a Google Analytics plugin that allows you to track where your traffic is coming from and from which keywords is a great way to refine your strategy and thinking about SEO. Seeing the real results will help motivate you to continue your SEO campaign. There are a few plugins to help with Google Analytics setup so make sure you search the plugins on WordPress.org to help you out.

Google Sitemap XML
This plugin allows you to generate a .xml sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools to help Google crawl your site when it visits. An easy one time thing the plugin serves the purpose great and is a must have for a new or established site.

WP Auto Tagger

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of those things that is either really hard for you to grasp or very easy. The good news is there are a ton of people out there that are willing to help you with your SEO plan. The bad news is there are a lot of people out there that can claim to help you with your SEO plan.

When you hire a contractor, whether online or not, it is best to check their references. Ask them to give you past work from clients or from themselves and to give a short bio about themselves so you can get to know them a little bit.

Hiring a contractor can be a great experience, or it can be a constant struggle and fight to get the work done as it was promised and a complete waste of time. In order to make sure you receive the former experience, rather than the latter, there are a few things you can keep a look out for.

Pay Rate
If one contractor who is bidding on your project is extremely low, they probably aren’t going to be of high quality. I know that this may seem like common sense to a lot of people, but it gets over looked. You will see a trend of where the average is on a project for good work (when 10 people are $300 and 1 is $50, I don’t think the $50 is going to do as good of a job for you). Also, don’t take the highest bidder, either get them to come down in price with the rest of them or pick the best out of the following criteria.

Experience
How long has the contractor been active on the website you are using? If they have been their for 3-4 years compared to someone who signed up yesterday, I am going to go with the person that has the better reputation and experience on the website.

Reviews
Most websites like Elance.com or Odesk.com allow users to post reviews and feedback from completed assignments. Read through the reviews thoroughly and create a list of information about each contractor so you can keep their offers straight. Also see how much earnings that have made from working on the site. Someone with $30,000 vs $100 is going to have a lot more experience and better reputation.

Make sure you do not jump at the first SEO consultant that comes your way, do your research and find the right person for your job.

Photo Credit: Host Wisely

Search Engine Optimization, SEO for short is actually really easy when you get the hang of it, all it takes is a bit of practice and work and your website will be up and ready to go SEO wise.

One of the most important things for SEO purposes is your top level domain or TLD. This is the extension on the end of your website such as .com, .net, .us, or .info. Those TLD are important because for some reason it takes a lot more work to get lesser known TLD in the rankings of search sites like Google. It is possible, but the success rate is much higher for .com, .net, and .org URLs.

Basic Design Tricks
Some of the best things you can do are centered around the design of your website. This includes using a CSS stylesheet instead of (old) HTML color and size tags. This will help clean up your website code and make it easier to index the content. ANother thing you can do is make sure that your navigation uses text links instead of image and javascript links. Doing this helps because it makes the navigation of the site easier to follow for the search bot, making all your pages indexable, instead of just the easiest ones to get to.

Do not use a splash page on your website (unless it is under construction). The splash page never has as much content as a good homepage does, so make sure you get rid of that splash page, yesterday (now).

Content Tricks
I wouldn’t really call this a trick, but write really good content. Pretty simple, right? Well, not always. Writing good content for SEO purposes can be really difficult, but once you learn how to write in a great style as an overall writer, learning to write for SEO is very easy. Basically search engines love keywords, they are what people are searching for. So for example if I have a website that is about “chocolate covered pancakes” that is what I want someone to type in to Google when they are searching. So I will make sure my website domain has chocolate covered pancakes in it, my title does, and most of all, my content. I will have sentences that contain those keywords that I want my site to rank for. So I will write about things like “chocolate pancake recipes” and other phrases like that to help my ranking within the search engines.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a group of techniques to make any sort of content on your website appear higher on search engines such as Google or Bing, meaning more towards the first page of search results.  There are many different ways to achieve higher search engine rankings.  First off, the text of your webpage as well as your title will both bring your page into the search engine database.  Using a keyword or phrase multiple times on that webpage will easily boost the ranking of said page.  Usually, about an overall 4-6% keyword phrase density is recommended in the text of the page to receive maximum results of this technique.

Linking is another very popular SEO technique that is easy, yet effective.  All three types of links (inbound, outbound, and internal) can help boost your page rankings.  Links from sites that also specialize in the same keywords, as well as links from .gov and .edu websites are especially beneficial as far as links of the inbound type are concerned.  Your internal links’ anchor text can also make a huge difference.  Instead of using the word “here” as many webmasters tend to do, try using your keyword instead, as it can really make a difference, especially down the road.

While many argue that meta tags are one of the most important factors in SEO, they are still secondary to content.  Remember, content is king!  Sure, meta tags can help you out initially, but keeping your pages updated with fresh content and proper keyword density will help you out much more in the long run.  Unique content that is updated frequently, combined with the proper meta tags, will be able to outs higher ranking sites that never have their content updated, no matter how well the meta tags are done for the previously higher ranked website.

Finally, file names as well as URLs are also fairly important.  Using key words in both of these will also easily boost your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).  This might seem like common sense, but think about how many broken links you encounter when browsing, or how many pages are simply named “1” or “2”, and think about how search engines index websites.  They go through every page and file, and record what it’s called.  If a page is called “2” it won’t be entered for the keyword that it is aimed at, same with broken links.  So, remember to name your pages and files appropriately, and to double check all of your links.