SEO & Social Media Marketing

How to set up a WordPress blog

Thinking about starting a WordPress blog? Don't do it until you read Thomas Petty's excellent, detailed guide Easy WordPress Blog Setup Instructions. 

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Best SEO browser extensions for Chrome

Image via Wikipedia

I've been a devout Mozilla Firefox users for years--until recently. Too often, Firefox has crashed or frozen, or it's been just too slowwwww.

So I've made the switch to Google Chrome (Mac), and after some adjustment, I'm glad I did. Chrome is noticeably zippier than Firefox, and it has plenty of extensions as well. Here are some of the SEO extensions I'm using and recommend:

* One of my initial problems with Chrome is that it doesn't display web page titles. Solution: A simple Chrome extension called Show Title Tag.

* Mozbar from SEOMoz is a handy extension for search marketers, but you won't get the full benefit of the bar unless you're an SEOMoz Pro subscriber (which I am).

* Chrome SEO provides a wealth of at-a-glance information about a web page, including pages indexed, backlinks, and traffic/rank.

* If you just want a quick look at a page's PageRank and Alexa score, install PageRank.  

Are there Chrome extensions for SEO you recommend? If so, I'd love to hear about them.  

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How to get more Twitter followers

Image via CrunchBase

I recently published an article for Small Business Computing, Top 10 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Following. Here's a quick summary of the first three tips: 

1. Optimize your Twitter bio and tweets with keywords

When feasible, and without forcing it, always add your important keywords to your tweets and Twitter bio. Also, in your tweets, include a link back to a relevant page on your site as well. If you just wrote a blog post about social media marketing, for instance, then include the phrase social media marketing in your tweet with a link back to your blog post on that topic. Doing this may help the blog post rank higher in Google and Bing search results for the phrase social media marketing--especially if your tweet gets retweeted a lot.

2. Don't just talk about yourself

Tweeting about yourself won't earn you many followers or encourage them to retweet your updates. Instead, share insights, provide tips, be funny or thought-provoking. 

3. Become a curator of interesting content

The more you tweet, the more followers you'll get. And one of the easiest ways to tweet is to share useful, interesting articles or blog posts you read online.

For the other seven tips, you can read the article on the Small Business Computing website. Do you have suggestions for how to grow Twitter followers? If so, please share them, and thanks. 

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3 Reasons to optimize your online newsroom for increased traffic and links

Is your online newsroom simply a vault of press releases? If so, here are 5 reasons to expand your online newsroom beyond press releases:

1. Get more traffic. Posting compelling, informative content, whether it's video, podcasts, or other format, can help increase traffic to your online newsroom.

2. Increase search engine rankings. By turning your newsroom into a dynamic information hub with link-worth content, you're more likely to earn valuable links from other sites. Search engines see those links as votes of confidence for your content, which means they're more likely to push up your content in their search results.

3. Become a thought leader. Don't just use your newsroom content to talk about you. Talk about your industry and the things your customers care about. Start meaningful conversations. Share your insights with the rest of the world, and it will help establish your company as thought leaders in its field.

For more thoughts, and tips on how to get started, see my blog post on The World is Your Oyster.

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25 SEO copywriting tips and content ideas you can implement today | SEO Copywriting

via www.seocopywriting.com

Heather Lloyd-Martin's SuccessWorks blog just posted a great refresher course on what is, and isn't, important for SEO copywriting success. It's a list of 25 SEO copywriting tips and ideas you'll want to keep handy.

When I come across stories like this, I copy and paste them into an e-mail to myself and put keywords in the subject heading. That way, the story becomes part of my searchable Gmail archive. Or I'll paste the article into a new Word file and add it to the SEO folder on my Mac's hard drive. Either way, the idea is to gather wisdom like this when you see it and make it easily available for reference later.

Search Marketing Expo East Recap no. 2: SEO Competitor Checklist

Continuing with sporadic recaps of the recent SMX Expo in New York:

In one session, Taylor Pratt, product marketing manager for Raven Tools, talked about how to do an SEO analysis of your competitors. Afterwards, Taylor posted a complete SEO Competitor Checklist on the Raven blog. You can also download the checklist as a PDF. 

I've already started using the checklist in analyzing my clients' competitors. There are so many things to consider in a competitive analysis: How well or poorly competitors are using keywords in their title tags; how many backlinks do competitors have; how are they using anchor text; and so on. Raven's checklist brings order to what could be (and sometimes is) a chaotic process.

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Search Marketing Expo SMX East Recap: Best SEO Tools

The Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East was two weeks ago in New York, and I'm just getting caught up on the work I missed by attending.

I picked up loads of tips and strategies from the conference, which I'll share in a series of posts. Today: the best tools for SEO and SEM, as recommended by conference panelists.

SEOBook’s Keyword List Generator (free) helps you expand your keyword list quickly.

SpyFu offers SEO and PPC keyword ‘spy’ tools and their own keyword research tool. The free service offers limited features. Monthly subscription to the full service is $70 or $470 per year.

SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool shows you sites how difficult or easy it will be to rank highly in search engines for a given keyword phrase. The tool is only available to Pro users, who pay $99 per month and up.

SEMRush gives you keyword performance info for organics and AdWords ads. Limited free features;  otherwise the service is $50 a month and up.

VOOT (Video Online Optimization Tracker) is currently an invitation-only beta tool that tracks and trends your YouTube video performance and engagement data.

Visuwords is a graphical online dictionary, kind of like Google's wonder wheel, for research variations of keywords.

WordStream has free features that let you group keywords and discover clusters of niche keywords for your business.

Free SEO tool worth trying: SEO Blogger from Wordtracker

There are so many SEO tools out there, it can be a bit overwhelming. So from time to time, I'll report on tools I've tried and recommend.

Here's one worth giving a try, especially if you blog: Wordtracker's SEO Blogger. SEO Blogger is a free Firefox plug-in. After you download it, you click the little 'w' icon in the bottom right corner of your browser window to launch SEO Blogger.

Using the tool, you enter a word that's relevant to your blog post--in this case, words like SEO, blogger, SEO tools, etc. are appropriate. Wordtracker searches its database to give you the search volume for each word. You can click to add any keywords or phrases it finds to a list. As you write, the tool will tell you how many times you've used your selected keywords, along with the percentage of times you've used the keywords compared to all words in your post.

You could even use this tool for other content you write aside from blogs. For example, if you're writing a press release, you might copy your press release text from Word and paste it into a new post window on your blog service (such as WordPress or TypePad).

Next time: Zemanta.

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SEO best practices -- or rather, worst practices

Does your Web site use pull-down boxes for navigation? Is your home page a 'splash page' without any real content? Uh oh. You've just committed two of the 29 Worst SEO Practices and Most Common Failures, according to Stephan Spencer in Search Engine Land. 

Spencer offers a checklist of the 29 SEO no-nos, followed by helpful explanations. Like most of Spencer's other articles I've seen, this is essential reading for anyone practicing SEO. He's promising a follow-up article that covers SEO best practices, too.

Related post: Busting the 'Flash is Bad' and Other SEO Myths

Is SEO killing the clever headline?

The headline to David Carr's New York Times article yesterday: "Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Headline."

As Carr explains, the headline was intentionally written to make a point about the current state of article headlines on the Web. Apparently 'Taylor Momsen' is a hot search engine keyword phrase, says Carr, and many headlines are written today in order to get the article to rank highly in search engine queries.

Carr's piece raises an excellent question. Are we sacrificing the clever, witty, or even meaningful headline on the altar of SEO? Or worse, are we too tempted to write headlines that are full of hot search engine keywords but aren't entirely relevant to the articles that follow? 

It's difficult to write a headline that quickly explains what the article is about; is clever or witty; and that contains hot, relevant keyword phrases. Some publications, such as The New Yorker, stick to the clever and witty headline in the print version of the article and then write more descriptive, SEO-friendly headlines for the Web version of the story, which makes sense. 

The bigger question is: Are journalism and SEO on a collision course? Can the two coexist peaceably? I believe they can, as long as SEO is kept in perspective.

For example, I often use the Wordtracker Keyword Questions tool to see which questions search engine users are most frequently typing, relative to a particular topic. If I have something I believe may be useful or interesting to say relative to the most searched-on phrase, then I'll write about that and use the phrase in my headline.

I wouldn't concoct an article on that topic, however, just to get some SEO traction out of it. If people come to your site from Google, Bing or Yahoo! searches and your content is worthless, you've wasted your time and theirs.