Tag Archive for 'SEO'

Google Analyticator – WordPress Plugin

Hot Plugin, Cool FeaturesTypically, when Fresh Start Creative installs a new WordPress blogsite, we also set up a new Google Analytics account to track valuable user statistics for the site. Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. With this information, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web. Learn more about it here.

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. The plugin eliminates the need to edit your template code and provides a comprehensive set of options to customize how it works with your site. It supports all of the tracking mechanisms that Google Analytics supports such as external link tracking, tracking without counting administrative users, and other advanced tracking methods.

Google Analyticator supports the following features:

  • Standard Google Analytics tracking support
  • An admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches—right on your WordPress Dashboard
  • External link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
  • Support for hiding Administrator visits without affecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
  • Support for any advanced tracking code Google provides
  • Allows code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
  • Complete control over options; disable any feature if needed

Learn more at the Google Analyticator home page, or on the WordPress.com Plugin page

Feed Stats for WordPress – WordPress Plugin

Hot Plugin, Cool FeaturesEvery WordPress installation that Fresh Start Creative does incorporates an RSS feed. The feed provides users with an easy option to subscribe to your content and be automatically notified when you post updates and new content. We also set up a free Feedburner account for our clients and link their feeds to the service.

FeedBurner’s services allow publishers who already have a feed to improve their understanding of—and relationship with—their audience. Passing your feed through FeedBurner lets you realize a whole new set of benefits. You can learn more about  about RSS feeds and he Feedburner services here.

Feed Stats for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to view your FeedBurner feed stats right from the “Feed Stats” page in the “Dashboard” section of WordPress.

Currently, this plugin allows you to view the following types of statistics:

  • Subscribers
  • Hits
  • Reach (see the FAQ section for more information about this)
  • Item Clickthroughs
  • Item Views

Learn more at the Feed Stats for WordPress home page, or on the WordPress.com Plugin page

Excerpt Editor – WordPress Plugin

Hot Plugin, Cool FeaturesExcerpt Editor provides a convenient place for creating and editing all summary excerpts on your site. It can also add custom excerpts for pages (not possible without a plugin).

Features:

  • auto-creating excerpts when publishing new Posts and Pages
  • displaying customisable excerpts from the content for posts without an excerpt
  • replacing the content for all archive and tags pages with excerpts (eliminates content duplication for SEO).

This last item is one of it’s most valuable functions. When search engines are looking at your site to index the content, some of your content can appear to show as duplicated—once in the original post, and then again on archives pages where they are listed together with other articles (archive pages are anyplace on your site where posts show up in a running list… like the Blog page, category pages, and search results pages).

Many search engines are designed to view anything that’s duplicate content as an attempt to game the system. The rationale being that the site may be purposefully stacking the deck by repeating important content in he hopes that it will be ranked higher. Given that possibility, the search engines will then depreciate the ranking in response.

By using the Excerpt Editors setting to automatically excerpt the first 70 to 130 words on all archive pages, it guarantees that the copy is only presented in full ONCE on the actual post page. On the archive pages, the excerpted copy is appended with a helpful “continue reading link” so that the human users can easily hop directly to the post page to read the entire article.

Learn more at the Excerpt Editor home page, or on the WordPress.com Plugin page


All in One SEO Pack – WordPress Plugin

Hot Plugin, Cool FeaturesAll in One SEO Pack provides a simple, one-stop location where you can add important “Meta” content for Search Engines to help categorize and rank your content for their search results pages. With it, you can add keywords; a brief description; and a more specific, detailed title for your pages and posts—all of which are visible only to the search engines, not the human visitors to your site. The more specific information you can provide for the search engines, the better chance they will have at matching your content with a users search terms.

While the search engines will scour all your normal content—intended for human readers—to index keywords on their own, using the All in One SEO plugin will allow you to give them something extra…intended just for the search engines.

The keywords are the words or phrases that are most likely to be used by people when they initiate a search. When you are compiling a keyword list, think first in terms of the specific words/phrases that are technically correct for your industry—for those people who are “in the know” and will likely search using those terms.

Then you want to step out of your professional shoes and try to think about how they lay-person will look for you. If they aren’t familiar with the jargon, what words/phrases might they use? You want to cast a wider net here and think creatively.

eg: If I was looking for galoshes and didn’t know the term, might I try the phrase “boots with buckles”? So then both boot and buckle are good terms to add (you want to keep terms SINGULAR, as that will satisfy both singular and plural for the search engine).

Think Like an Engine

Suppose you write an article about Search Engine Optimization… for your readers, you might write a friendly title like “Search Engine Magnetism” and soften your copy with anecdotal material for your non-technical audience, rather than a lot of techy-jargon. In the SEO section of your post, you can then write a second title that is much more specific and detailed like “Writing Keyword-Rich Copy that is Optimized for Search Engines” only seen by the search engines. Then you could add the more technical terms that would cause your poor readers to go pale in the keywords section. And finally, you could write a short, keyword-rich description to help the engines and the readers choose YOUR entry over the others on the results page.

Taking a little time and care to add this SEO content to you page will boost your chances of having your page be found by the people you intended it for. Without it, the anecdotal copy and the fun title might send you to results listed with magnetism, magnets and other things you hadn’t intended.

Here some info from the developers website of the most important on-page ranking factors, and how they are addressed by this WordPress SEO plugin.

  • Titles: The text that you see in your browser’s window bar is the most important thing *on* your page. All in One SEO lets you add detailed titles that always come before the main blog title on a page-by-page basis So it’s seen first and ranks with more specificity. Leave the post title as it is but change the meta title.
  • Descriptions: Once your pages rank in search engines your description (aside of course from your title) makes a potential visitor want to click through, or not. It’s meta descriptions, believed dead by many people, that decide over your site’s fate. If you don’t want to invest the time and write a description for every post at least let them be auto-generated. This vastly better than the usual “Share This … Posted on … under …” description that is often used.

    The meta-description serves two purposes… It can be rich with some of your most important keyword terms and phrases, thereby reinforcing your results with the search engines. But more importantly, this will be the short descriptive paragraph that the search engine will display on a results page for the reader to review.

    This is how your audience will be able to determine that YOURS is the site they are looking for from among the list of other similar results. Make it short and concise. While it can be any length you’d like, Google will only display the first 150 characters in the search results listing. And if the reader doesn’t find what they are looking for in that, they may not click on your link.

  • Keywords: Adding keyword lets you use specific detailed language that may not show up in the article, but is still relevant. All in One SEO Pack can also generate them from your categories (this was the old way of tagging your posts in wordpress) or from Ultimate Tag Warrior or, starting with WordPress 2.3, the built-in tagging system. Using your categories is optional, the rest is auto-detected and used if there. WP 2.3.x tags are the preferred keyword source.

Learn more on the WordPress.com Plugin page