traffic

Sep 5, 2012

SEO Plugins for WordPress – Yoast

One of the best SEO plugins for WordPress

SEO plugins for WordPressI’ve been using SEO plugins for WordPress sites for a few years now. So far I have focused on the All in One SEO plugin and XML Sitemaps plugin for search engine optimisation. They have helped me to get my clients’ blogs in on the first page and sometimes top billing for certain keywords in Google. Recently they have been flying up the Alexa league table. But now I’ve swopped them out for a new Plugin – WordPress SEO by Yoast.

Why have you changed the SEO plugin?

Well, having played with it for a few weeks I found it to be a more elegant solution to getting your SEO right on your blog. It integrates into your dashboard in such a way that it becomes an indespensible guide for making sure your SEO is as good as it gets.

Benefits of SEO WordPress Plugins by Yoast

  1. Target keyword allows you to check that the keyword you want to rank for is in all the relevant places – title, URL, description, content etc.
  2. Gives a visible representation of how your page or post will appear in a Google search. I really like this as it gives you a feel of what it’s like to be in your visitor’s shoes when they find you in Google. It helps you to make your entry more compelling and relevant.
  3. Checks you have the right amount of characters in your title, description and your Slug!. This is important as truncated text (text that get’s cut off because there are too many characters) in either of these can confuse your visitor and put them off making that vital click.
  4. It’s free. Having looked at various reviews of SEO plugins for WordPress this one is considered to be as comprehensive and effective as others you have to put your hand in your pocket for! The only plugin I pay for at the moment is Commentluv. I may look at purchasing a more powerful SEO plugin in future but results so far show this is having a positive effect on blogs it has been installed on.
  5. One plugin for the price of two. SEO plugins for WordPress can do various tasks for you. The beauty of this one by Yoast is that includes XML sitemaps so you can dispense with your other SEO plugins and those that generate XML sitemaps – that helps declutter things so your site runs a bit faster too.
  6. It gives you step by step indicators to get the following factors right for your SEO:
      Keyword density
      Readability
      Use of stop words in keyword phrase
      Keyword in first paragraph
      Alt descriptions on images include keyword
      Sub-heading tags include keyword
      Word count over recommended 300 words
      Outbound links
  7. It also covers the fact that you might have spent many hours getting your SEO right with another plugin. Those carefully crafted titles and meta descriptions can be imported easily with this plugin.
  8. And lastly it has comprehensive settings to make your blog SEO tailored to your requirements.

    9. Look no further at other SEO plugins for WordPress. This one is as good as it gets for free.

    What’s your opinion?

    By Andy Britnell Blog Optimisation, WordPress Plugins 32 Comments Tags: , , , ,

May 26, 2011

Social media traffic

Google search ranking and social media profilesIf you look closely at your your website or blog traffic figures you will notice that social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, deliver much more loyal, targeted and engaged visitors. That is they spend more time on your site, search deeper and are more likely to comment on your blog or buy from you. I call them ‘sticky’ visitors as they don’t bounce away from your website easily.

For my site and other sites I look after they make up to 25 – 30% of all monthly traffic.

The other aspect is that if you have a presence on social media sites you get an extra tick in the box from the search engines. The search robots recognise that your blog or website is associated with a high ranking site and you get kudos because of that.

Although you may feel that writing yet another online profile is tedious, they do help you to dominate the first few pages of Google when someone searches for your name. There are four other ‘Andy Britnells’ who have a good presence on the web. My website, blog, Twitter and Google account profiles are on the first two pages and I have the majority of entries on the first 6 pages. (Click on the image above and then click again to see first page on Google in more detail)

I will need to work on my Facebook and LinkedIn profile if I want a clean sheet. Not that simple when you have a racing driver and two managing directors of largish companies competing for the space.

How do you rank for your name on Google and what do you do to keep your profile high on the search engines?

By Andy Britnell Social Media 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Google Search Robots – Friend or Foe?

Mar 1, 2011

Google Search Robots – Friend or Foe?

Google search algorithm and content farmsGoogle have recently changed their search algorithm, PageRank, which helps them to rank pages on the internet. Their search robots are sent out with specific criteria to search for and if you hit the right buttons you’ll get ranked highly. If you don’t, you’re toast.

This time they are targeting the content farm sites and sites without original content – that means sites which strip out your quality content and post it on their site so they have lots of content with no effort. They now have a content farm filter (crap catcher might be a better name!) which detects duplication of material.

(By the way, you might want to set up Google Alerts to track your name and main keywords as, when content farms strip images from your site, they often link back to the image on your server. That means that they use your bandwidth to serve the image to their readers. Not only do they steal your content but they also syphon the juice from your site).

It has always annoyed me that, for many search terms I use for my sites, my best keywords will bring up garbage sites at the top of the list. Not because they are worth reading but because they are fooling the search programme and getting ranked by cheating. Judy’s site about working from home has been particularly difficult to rank. The key word ‘work from home’ is very competitive. However she is now at page 3 on Google so some trash has been removed. There’s still some dross left behind though!

I am pleased to see Google doing something about it and many people have found that their content-rich blog is starting to get more visits and gain more visibility and credibility amongst the global surfing community.

So is this really a win-win-win situation?

A win for bloggers because their content will be seen by more poeple interested in what they are saying, a win for surfers because they are going to find funky stuff that was buried under a mound of steaming sites, and a win for Google in that its searches will become more relevant and people will use it more.

Unfortunately there is a downside as hundreds of legitimate sites have been tripped up by the new criteria, some losing half their traffic overnight. This Guardian article cites research done by Sistrix which shows that the British Medical Journal and Technorati are amongst 300 sites that have suffered due to the new search algorithm.

Cult of Mac are a hardworking team who write original content and aggregate news about Apple and Mac stuff. They have been hit by content farm filtering quite badly and have given examples of others in their post Cult of Mac Has Been Hit By Google’s War On Content Farms.

So Google have some tweaking to do to make it a win for some people. But at least they are attempting to reach their vision of serving legitimate, relevant and awesome content to the internet surfing community.

By Andy Britnell Blog Traffic 12 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Jan 28, 2011

If you want Google to love you .. love Google

If you want Google to love you ... Love GoogleIf you have ever taken a close look at your web statistics, the hits you get from the Google search engine far outweigh the ones you get from the likes of Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Ask and Search. You could say they have cornered the market and are now the engine of choice for browsing the web.

If most of the search engine traffic comes from Google it makes sense to be friends with them so your blog or website gets more visibility. Let’s take a look at what you need to do to cuddle up to this giant and get it to notice you.

How do I ‘love’ Google?

Good point, well made. The more use you make of Google the more it is going to recognise and find your website or blog online. Using their website tools means that you have more links on Google real estate which gives you a lift up in the listings. You might not get a massive surge of traffic immediately but you are fertilising the soil so that your traffic is more likely to grow.

So what do I do?

If you haven’t got a Google account set one up now. Complete your Google profile and add the links to your website, blog and social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Myspace etc – you have got online profiles on some or all of these, haven’t you?)

The more you populate cyberspace with your unique name (business and/or personal) the more presence you have when someone searches for it via Google. If you search for Andy Britnell I pretty much dominate the first 6 pages (It’s a shame that there’s a racing driver with the same name which breaks up the perfect situation of having every entry in the first 6 pages but I am working on that).

Top Tip: If you have a common name, why not make it unique by adding an initial or second name. It might seem a bit weird at first but people will probably remember John Matt Smith and find you more easily that way. Plain John Smith will get lost in the crowd – sorry John, no offence.

That is a start and some of you will probably now be thinking about which other social media (SM) sites you can add a profile to with a link to your blog or website. If you hit the share button on this or the featured posts above you will find a list of most of the SM sites you could be listed on.

I’ll be doing another post on how you can give and receive even more love from Google by using their website tools.

Thanks to Marcin Wichary for the image

By Andy Britnell Blog Traffic, Social Media 11 Comments Tags: , , , ,