Nov
14
WordPress and Google - Social Network Marketing Meets SEO
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, Social Network Marketing, WordPress SEO
By now you all know that I am a strong proponent of WordPress, and using it along with quality content, is a recipe for success. The only problem that I have with WordPress is its self titled moniker, “just another WordPress weblog”. They are selling themselves short by sticking to the label: blogging platform. In reality WordPress is a very powerful content management system with powerful social network marketing tools and a solid SEO foundation, all things that Google loves. The key to success in Google is three-fold: quality content, inbound links and discussion. WordPress does all of those things, and does them well.
If you already have a website, the best game plan is to add a WordPress system as a directory using a quality keyword and having the directory as close to the root as possible. An example would be companyname.com/keyword/. If your domain already has your main keyword in it, don’t make the mistake of using it again as the name of your WordPress directory. In the unlikely event that you don’t already have a website for your business, then WordPress is a great stand-alone system to get going online. If you have a website, but it is under performing, flipping your site to a WordPress system will give you an incredible boost in the SERPS without taking forever for you to see results. Be clear about this one point though, if you choose WordPress as your content management system, you will have to create quality content on a regular basis.
Social Network Marketing as an SEO Tool
The concept of social network marketing as a powerful SEO tool died before it could become a reality when social networks bowed to Google and nofollowed their users outbound links. The fact is social networks that are related to business can still benefit a website through backlinks, but mainstream sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, etc. do not pass on link juice. This is an attempt by Google and other search engines to weed out spammers who use social networks to raise their inbound links through spam. On one hand I applaud this, but on the other I find it annoying since I have useful content, but can’t promote it on social networks. The bottom line is that the only way to succeed is to create content that your users will link to. You also need to open discussion on your site through comments. We offer plans that kick start commenting. Even though commenting is pretty anonymous, people still feel weird about being the first person to leave a comment or ask what they feel to be a stupid question. Get Found Now researches your content and asks the right questions that you answer promptly. Once the comments start flowing they snowball into a lot of organic activity that will naturally increase your rankings. It’s like your first high school dance,no one wants to be the first one to be on the dance floor. That is why we have come up with a service that gets the discussion going on your WordPress system. Owning The Discussion and Branding Through SEO is an article I wrote a while back that was inspired by Google’s CEO calling the Internet a cesspool. The thing is, he is right, there is so much spam and weak user generated content out there that it is hard for legitimate websites to compete. Again, it is all about content!
If you have any questions about how to go about writing engaging content, getting discussion rolling on your website, WordPress blog design, or social network marketing give me a call at 866-418-3843 or post a comment below.
WordPress comes equipped with a powerful toolset for social network marketing and SEO. By using specific plugins as well as features already inherent to WordPress, you can set your system up to dominate the SERPS. The first place to start is deciding on which content you want to display to the search engines. There are two place to start with that:
- Robots.txt File for WordPress SEO - the robots.txt file is where you notify the search engines where your sitemaps are as well as which pages, posts or directories that you don’t want the search engines to go. this holds true for all websites, not just WordPress sites. Leave a comment below if you have questions about robots.txt files.
- On Page Meta Robots Tags- there are meta tags available that will control spiders and how they INDEX and FOLLOW both the content on the page as well as the links that are on the page. The truth is this subject warrants an entire post, but for now I will give you a quick overview. I use a plugin called All In One SEO Pack that will control on page Meta Robots Tags for category page, tag pages, archives and all posts and pages. All of those things lead down a dangerous path of duplicate content. You have to choose which content you are going to show the spiders. I am running 2 tests right now. One that is excluding everything but the original post and tag pages, and another one that is showing just categories and the post. The key here is to limit the amount of content shown on tag pages or category pages to just the tile and the first 300 or so characters. Even though that is not how my site is set up, you can see it in action at dtidata.com/resourcecenter where the category test is taking place. I am launching a new site called seobyyou.com where I will be testing the tag theory. I will keep everyone up to date on how the test goes. The initial results are leaning to the tag pages being opened up because there is more potential for keyword benefits because there are so many more tags.The basic game plan for pages that you don’t want spidered is to use the NOINDEX FOLLOW argument in on page meta tags. All In One SEO Pack does that, but you also have to coordinate that activity with your sitemap tool. In other words you don’t want to put archive and category pages in your sitemap and then tell spiders not to index them. This also holds true for all types of websites, you just have to do it manually. Leave a comment below if you have any questions.
Once you have identified what content you want to show the search engines and you have set up your road maps (sitemaps) and stop signs (robots.txt), you have given Google what it wants, an easy way to spider your site!
The next step is to incorporate into your sidebars links out to your recent comments, most popular posts and latest posts. You will have to tweak your files to insure that WordPress is not nofollowing your links from the sidebars into the recent comments, latest posts and most popular posts. The goal here is to show Google that there is discussion going on within your site. By answering comments quickly and giving good information, you will get inbound links, that is a fact.
If you have any questions or would like to set up a FREE no obligation report on your WordPress SEO, call 866-418-3843 or leave a comment below.
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26 Responses to “WordPress and Google - Social Network Marketing Meets SEO”
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Great article!
Now I know what that robots.txt file I kept seeing is for.
Thanks!
~Michel
The robots.txt file is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Keeping spiders out of directories as well as from crawling duplicate content is key to success in Google
Being an “SBI’er”, I am not to informed about the details of SEO. Now that SBI incorporates the ability to add a WP blog, I will do so and set it up as laid out in this post. Thanks!
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Good information. I like this. Will try to see whether the information provided herein is useful or not by the specific outcome after putting into use in real world practice. Thanks a lot.
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Nice post. Thanks for letting us know about the robot.txt file. I think many of newbies and average internet marketers would not know about this strategy and will definitely benefit from this.
Good read! Although the larger Social Networks such as Facebook, Myspace, Digg etc do not pass on link juice anymore, I’ve still noticed the benefit of having content indexed faster on google from adding links to those sites.
With various niched based social networks coming online these days(for example I created one on internet marketing), people might want to consider drilling down into their niche, finding a social network that focuses on that niche, and slapping up their content on those niche based social networks in addition to using Myspace, Facebook, etc. Although these new sites may not have established page rank and authority yet, over time some will.
Most of these smaller niche based social networking sites probably don’t even use the “no follow” attribute. Even if they do, in a sense your already prequalifying the potential inflow of traffic from the content your adding on the niche social sites back to your websites if your correctly matching your content up with the right social niche network.
Great blog by the way, very informative in terms of social network marketing, internet marketing & SEO information.
Thanks!
Jason C
Jason, thanks for the comment. I agree that social networks have a lot of potential to help a website’s placement and traffic. If anyone has a list of social networks that pass on link juice that would be useful.
Your Fire Storm site is great! What platform did you use?
Michael,
Sorry it took so long to get back to you. I’ve been busy doing some seo stuff for my social network and reading up on Facebook’s api… along with a million other things and so I’m finally getting a moment to briefly answer your question before I crawl into bed. :S
First let me just say thanks for the compliment concerning my site. It’s been a project I’ve been working on, among other things since ‘06… and if I had to go through it again… I wouldn’t… haha… WAY too much time ,energy and sleep lost.
The platform I used was originally based on PhpIzabi. However, I did a ridiculous amount of coding in custom modifications, custom ad ons and script integrations, etc. Out of the box, the script is know to have issues with large numbers of simultaneous users online… so I also removed alot of the bottlenecks. It also requires quite a bit of theme/ design element modifications in order for it to look good. There is talk of reviving the project, basically a new script… but for now… it’s just an idea people are tossing around as far as I know at least.
Zabi was an open source script that dates back before 2006, and around that time there was a fork in the project. So there was a Dot com site and a Dot Net. The Dot Net site has become a proverbial ghost town, since not much has been release since ‘07. The Dot com site still has somewhat of a following, and I’ve talk to one of the original developers on serveral occasions… really nice guy.
At some point, I’ll probably end up writing a few blog posts about various social networking scripts available, once I’ve tried.. ones I like etc… and other social networking mumbo-jumbo. Currently I’m focused on getting in top ten of google for a few related keyword phrases. I’ve got live and yahoo taken care of… but google just takes time.
Your more than welcome to register on my site and check out the back end of things and create a profile to showcase your sites & services if you want. I added geo-targeting of ads capability, video pre-roll & post-roll ads… and some other things I have’t opened up quite yet like audio/video chat and I coded in a downloads section… so there are a few more bells and whistles to code in… but 99% finished and so I decided to open it up.
Wow Michael… I’m tired… haha… sorry if my sentences ran on forever… just wanted to get back to you, even though I can’t keep my eyes open. Say, if you do register..send me an internal email… maybe we can exchange ideas, collaborate on a few things or whatever.
Nice to meet you by the way. Take care and talk soon.
Jason Counts
Your blog was recommended to me by a friend as being an excellent way to get up to speed on seo. I can say that he certainly did me a big favor. I have been reading your posts for over an hour and can count the number of eureka moments I’ve had! Great job on the blog, I’m a definite fan.
Keith - thanks for the great review! If you have any questions just drop a comment, we try to answer all questions.
Great discussion, you’re right the social networks have certainly bowed to Google to no-follow outbound links to prevent spammers. Which sucks for people like us who try to add and deepen the overall topic of discussion rather than dominate it with our own agenda. Thanks for the great post.
I had a few questions about a statement in your article: “Be clear about this one point though, if you choose WordPress as your content management system, you will have to create quality content on a regular basis.”
Can you explain this further? Why is adding new content on a WordPress CMS website (not a blog) more critical than on a site created on some other platform? Is it because of the dynamic nature of WordPress pages? And how often is “on a regular basis?” Daily? Weekly? I realize that fresh content is an SEO factor for any site, but is there a workaround for this issue? I’ve read that WordPress 2.1 introduced an option to set any page as a static “front page.” I’ve also read about a Static Front Page Plugin. Will either of these alleviate the fresh content issue?
Nina, thanks for the question!
The reason that WordPress requires constant new content is because of the system itself. When you introduce a new WordPress site whether you set it up as a personal blog, a business blog or as I have done on getfoundnow.com, as a fully functional website, you are telling Google that it is a news source. If you choose the option “Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati” when you install WordPress it sets up XML-RPC through the ping service pingomatic. This is a tool used by news sites and why Google will give WordPress sites almost instant rankings.
The Pingomatic service will update search engines when you have posted new content. So, if you introduce a WordPress system into the search engines and submit content, you are setting up a precedent of content generation. If you stop creating content, then your WordPress placement will suffer.
The problem for people who install a WordPress system as their primary website and want to achieve high placement, the system must have a large amount of content. How much?
That depends on how many topics you want to rank for. There is a difference between keywords and topic reputation. A complete website is seen for the topics that are set up in the domain, URL’s, pages and initial posts. By using keywords within the posts, pages and URL’s you are creating a certain amount of density for the keywords. These keywords will contribute to your site’s topic reputation as long as they also appear within meta tags such as the title, page, post and site description. All of these things combine to give your site its topic reputation. By writing new content within these topics and obtaining inbound links with the keywords in the anchor text, you are building authority for your topics. This is going to give you your rankings in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
After your site has been released and the search engines have decided what your site is about and how much authority your site has for your topics, you will get your initial rankings. To make your placement higher and to introduce new long tail keywords as well as to firm up your existing placement, you must create content on a regular basis. How much depends upon how many topics you are going after. Note that I am not saying how many keywords you are trying to rank for, but how any topics. You can have as many as 5 keywords rank per topic. A home page can score well for at least 3 topics.
Using this formula, you can determine how many new articles you will need to create to maintain your existing placement and achieve new rankings.
WordPress home pages. To answer your second question Nina, I have created a new response to keep things organized. I am going to be upgrading this blog and soon the comments will be in a thread for easier reference.
There are multiple ways of having a different home page on WordPress. While it is true that you can choose a static page within WordPress as a home page, use the home page plugin, or better yet, create a file called home.php which will serve as your site’s home page. For websites that don’t have a lot of new posts, the home.php system is the way to go. You can create static content that tells the search engines what your site is about, while also adding dynamic elements into the file to keep the page fresh within the search engines.
Here is an example of a home.php system working on a WordPress system that doesn’t get fresh content. Law of Attraction Formula is a friends website that has gotten rankings, but because there is no fresh content, the Page Rank doesn’t rise. We were able to achieve initial results by showing Google a solid foundation of content and topics. On other sites that produce at least one or two new articles a week, we have had a lot more success with Page Rank and rankings. The bottom line is that if you use WordPress, you need to figure on writing at least 5 pages with your main topics. Then you will need to make your categories line up with your topics. Then you need around 10 to 15 posts that link to the pages and fall under the appropriate topics (categories). On sites that don’t have a lot of new content, I recommend that you DO NOT allow Google to spider either tag or category pages.
Thanks for your prompt and very thorough answers, Michael. I work for a nonprofit that is currently developing a business plan for offering our small business clients affordable website development services by offering various WordPress template packages as a CMS website. My concern is that many of these sites will be for artists who may have new images of their work to add on fairly regular basis, but will have neither the time or desire to write “articles” or text about their work or relevant topics one or two times a week as you had stated is ideal for better rankings. Will this limit their ability to rank well for their targeted keywords? Also, I’ve read several lists of essential plug-ins for WP.
Some of them include: MobilePress, Nice Search, Viper’s Video Quicktags, Kimili’s Flash Embed, RSS Footer, SEO Slugs, SEO Friendly Images, All-in-One SEO Pack that you mentioned, No Self Pings, Subscribe to Comments, WP Super Cache, WP CSS Drop-down Menu, My Page Order, Grunion contact form, etc…
What would your recommend as must-have plug-ins for a WP CMS website?
Nina,
To be honest I use as little plugins as I can. The main reason is that WordPress upgrades all the time and they don’t factor in plugins when they launch a release. What happens is you activate a plugin and the screen goes white. Then you have to delete the plugin out of the directory and wait until they come up with an upgrade.
All In One SEO pack is a must have. If you don’t have control over your server settings than WP Super Cache is nice to have. I have Apache and MySQL set up to best cache and utilize system RAM, but a lot of people use hosting like GoDaddy and absolutely need WP Cache tools and Google Gears. I use manual drop down menus like the drop downs on DTI Data Resource Center which came with that theme.
As far as using WP as a multi-user CMS, are you thinking WordPress MU? I have set up a few of those and it is pretty good for a virtual server environment. If you have a dedicated server, then I would set up WP 2.7 along with a database wizard to create sites. A lot depends on how you are planning to do the URL’s are the new sites going to be on their own domain or as a sub domain or sub folder? I say this over and over again; but it all starts with your hosting.
Finally, your artists can use gallery type plugins or even album themes that would present their work, but being able to tag the pictures and better yet describing them in a caption would go a long way with the search engines. If there was a way to set up some foundation content that would be best. Also you can choose to open up either tags or categories to the search engines. This might be the way to go, using tags in the site map and having the tag pages set up with some default content would eliminate the need to have them constantly creating content. It all boils down to the tag pages themselves.
Hi, Michael.
Thanks once again for your prompt and thorough response. We are in the early stages of developing this service for our clients, so, we’re still in the process of working out details. However, as far as I know, I don’t think we will be using WordPress MU. The sites will be hosted on a dedicated server as their own domains designed for single users as opposed to sub domains and sub folders. We will be offering a set number of themes/templates from which they can choose based on the type of “package” they want and/or can afford. Our objective is to make developing and managing a site as easy and as affordable as possible for our small business clients. Honestly, I don’t think the majority of our clients are technically savvy enough to upload their own plug-ins and themes so we would set up the packages with a set number of plug-ins, and if they want additional features/plug-ins those would be additional. Your suggestions on making the sites more search engine friendly w/out having to add a lot of fresh content were extremely helpful. BTW, I’ve been very impressed with your knowledge. Should we need some add’l consulting once we get things rolling, do you offer hourly consulting services?
Nina,
You have a great plan. That is the best way to set up a silo type group of websites. there are ways to automatically have plugins set up in the packages you will be offering. Feel free to give me a call if you have any questions. I offer free support that covers most consultation type services. The only time I charge fees is if I am actively designing or marketing. I do my best to spread good will because I have found that is the best way to obtain inbound links!
In your project it all starts with the server and how you have it set up. Do you have a hosting company yet? I use Rackspace and they have my configurations on file that insure the highest level of communication between your sites and search engines and directories. I also use custom MySql settings that get the most out of your servers RAM. These can be applied to any Linux server operating system so let me know the type of hosting you have and I can get you the settings. My number is 866-418-3843 and you can call me anytime!
One of the ways I am using to generate content is Twitter. Even though there is no real link juice value, your users would benefit from a content standpoint. Facebook and myspace widgets also can be helpful in content creation. They are also easy to use and even the most basic webmasters can do it.
Both my wife Victoria and I have a soft spot for artists. She was directing an art gallery when I met her (I used to design computerized dimming systems for art galleries) and she used to manage artists as well. We would be glad to help in any way.
The bottom line is that the only way to succeed is to create content that your users will link to. So true and real. There are so many spinners, duplicates, small potato changes that you need a light beam to navigate.
Hi, Michael.
One last question (promise!)Our web developer/partner has some WordPress themes that he has custom coded into various packages,including some with Kimili Flash Embeds (I’m not sure which WP themes he uses as his base), but I was curious: do you have any experience with some WP themes that work well as portfolio CMS sites? (From an aesthetic standpoint I, personally, like Linquist, egallery and f8, but I have no experience with any of them.)Thanks, again!
Dereck,
You said it man. The Internet is a cesspool as the CEO of Google stated a couple of months ago (see my article What Google Wants - Branding With SEO). It is hard to navigate around the web in search of real content. The fact that blogs are placing so well in Google SERPS is a big problem. One of these days Google is going to realize that they are not as relevant as they once were.
Case in Point:
I was looking for movie times at a new theatre called Cobbs Grove. I did a search for Cobb’s movie theatre in Google and a bunch of blogspot blog placed higher than the actual Cobb website. It isn’t that their SEO is all that bad either, they just lack fresh and updated content. I agree that new content is an indicator that a site has benefits for a searcher, but not to the point where an actual business places lower than a ridiculous blogspot blog serving AdSense!
Nina,
I am using a lot of Revolution Two themes by Brian Gardner that might fit the bill for you. My top priority is always SEO, but for portfolio sites that won’t have a lot of content, you need as much topic reputation as you can get within the theme itself. I would look into custom category or page templates that you could stuff keywords into and have a system that takes info provided by the site owner at sign-up and distributes it into the theme template. A word jumbler script could also be used that would move around paragraphs and phrases to create some uniqueness. Take a look at revolutiontwo.com and their themes. I base all of mine on their work. The new theme that is going up here over the holidays (if I can manage to actually spend an hour on my own damn site) will be based on their code blue design. As with any WP theme, you have to SEO it, I have yet to find a theme that does everything right out of the box!
Thanks, Michael.
I looked at Revolutiontwo.com and I liked their Black Canvas theme among others. I’ll pass along all of your great advice to our web developer. Thanks again and happy holidays!
Nina,
NP, revolution themes are the absolute best. They can be easily modified and have a great look and feel.
Happy holidays to you and yours!