Blog On-Page SEO – Goodbye SEOPressor – Hello WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast – a free plugin worth taking a serous look at! I’m going to summarize some of my observations here and one of these days another blogger is going to take exception. I’m looking forward to taht day!
Here are some observations:
- Bloggers, in general, don’t pay much attention to Generating Traffic after they press Publish.
- The Top Bloggers Have a Routine they follow after they press Publish to generate Traffic
- There are things you can do to generate traffic before you write , while you write and after you write each post.
- There is a difference between niche marketers and bloggers talking to a niche audience. (Niche Marketers spend MOST of their time on SEO for a key word phrase. Bloggers spend most of their time on the next post to help their target audience.)
Now it’s time to get personal.
I’ve read several articles about how most websites (blogs included) do NOT get much traffic from a handful of keywords. I talked about this in the post Content is King
Bill Tancer in his highly respected article on “Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search” found that sites were being found using thousands of little keywords (long tail phrases) instead of the “top ten” hitters. Here is a quote that says it well: “If search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.” There are often hundreds or even thousands of phrases that are common to a particular niche.
When I looked at my Google Analytics and wrote about Looking at Your Google Analytics– I confirmed that FOR ME. I do NOT get traffic from Google organic search. I get it from comments I have posted in Facebook, comment sharing sites I am working and sending emails to my list.
So Where Does WordPress SEO by Yoast and SEOPressor Coming Into This?
I believe that when you write you might as well optimize for a long tailed key word. You will get some traffic from it over time and who know you might roll the dice and come up with a winner.
There is a well known list of things you need to do in order to optimize your page and make the maximum impact you can with Google. You need your keywords in the title, the first paragraph, in an H1, an H2, and an H3 tag, etc. You can do this manually, but it is much easier to use software like WordPress SEO by Yoast.
I have been using SEOPressor, but now I’m switching to WordPress SEO by Yoast. Here are the reasons:
- WordPress SEO by Yoast seems to a better job of telling me what to do to fix my page.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast handles things like the XML Site Map that your should have to help the spiders crawl your site.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast pints Google and Bing automatically. You can add Yahoo if you want.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast grades the readability of my site which SEOPressor does not.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast is FREE and I like to be able to recommend free quality software when possible.
I’m going to show a couple of screen shots to show how WordPress SEO works.
Notice that this is a plugin, so you need to install it and activate it just like any other plugin. It does have some setup options, but I’m not going into those here. The defaults are good enough.
ENTER YOUR KEYWORDS
Down below your edit screen you will see the WordPress by Yoast section.. It looks like this.
There are several interesting things here.
First the BLUE LINK is what your post will look like when it is found by Google. You want to make sure that this is appealing to your target audience.
Second, you need to tell the plugin what keyword it should test for. Note that as I typed in my keyword “WordPress SEO by yo” , the software gave me some options to choose from. ONe of those might be better than the one I had chosen. Once I have entered the keyword(s). I tell WordPress by Yoast to grade my post. There is also a section where you enter the Title your want Google to use (usually the same as your post title) and the short description you want Google to use. The BLUE link will update as you type to show you what you will see in Google when your post ranks for your keyword.
SAVE as DRAFT and CLICK CHECK
There is a little CHECK link over by the PUBLISH Button. Save your post as a DRAFT and click the CHECK link. If you don’t save your current copy as a draft your last saved draft will be scored. That is not what you want. You will see a general score care like this.
GENERAL SCORE CARD
However there is much more.
CLICK PAGE ANALYSIS TAB TP SEE DETAILED SUGGESTIONS
We want to get rid of as many read flags and orange tags as we can.
BOTTOM LINE
I recommend that you focus each blog post on a long tailed keyword and you do On-Page SEO so that the page “could” be found by Google or Bing. Every now and then you will hit a winner.
A Quick Overview of WordPress SEO by Yoast and How It Fits Into Blogging
Until next time, you have a Great Day!
↓ ↓ If this post gave you some ideas – Go ahead & comment below. ↓ ↓
Hale Pringle – Hale Yes!
Skype hale.pringle
Email: HaleYes@HalePringle.com
P.S. If you are working to move your business online and it all seems overwhelming, I can help! Take a look at http://HalePringle.com, or sign up for the free coaching call. You can email me or give me a Skype call. I’ll give you the benefit of my years of experience and many thousands of dollars in training and searching the rabbit hole called Internet Marketing and Network Marketing. I can help you with Lead Generation, the feeling of overwhelm, blogging, and even career change. Add that to the finest mentoring on the Internet (Ann Sieg’s Team and Inner Circle) and you have a Winner!
Hale, Thanks so much for this very clear post. And my husband, who LOVES SEO thanks you too! 🙂
Great post. Very informative and descriptive. I have downloaded the plugin on one of blogs. Excited to see what happens. I battled a bit with the setting up.
Retha Groenewald recently posted..Jesus comments on fasting
This is a good review of a plug-in that should help anyone that wants to help the search spiders as much as possible. You raise an excellent point when you use the word ‘could’ in relation to being found via a generic search term.
Arch,
Thanks for commenting on my blog. That fact that you commented on three in a row has not escaped my attention. I’ll probably remember your name for quite a while.
I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.
Dr. Hale
Hey great website! Does running a blog such as this require
a great deal of work? I have absolutely no knowledge of programming but I had
been hoping to start my own blog soon. Anyway, should you
have any recommendations or tips for new blog owners please share.
I understand this is off subject nevertheless I just wanted to ask.
Thanks a lot!
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