The dirty work of most seo projects normally includes competitive link building. Finding links that your competition has that you do not have is a great way to beef up a client’s link profile and is an easy / actionable task to get the link building ball rolling. Taking a look at your competition’s links will provide you with a great to-do list of sources to go after that are very well qualified as similar websites to the one you are promoting are already listed there.

There are two tools that I use on almost every job. SEOmoz’s Competitive Link Research Tool & Raven’s Site Finder. These both handle very similar tasks in that they help you find web pages that link to your online competition. There are pros and cons to both that I will outline below.

First up: SEOmoz

Now this is not a review of SEOmoz’s pro web app. It’s only looking at their Competitive Link Research Tool that is only accessible with a pro account. Basically what this tool will do is allow you to enter your website address and the url’s for up to 5 of your competitors to find all of the common linking sites in their index that point to you or your competition.

The Pros:

• You can specify who your competition is.
• You can easily tell which links you already have via an icon in one of the columns so you don’t waste time researching a URL you are already listed on.
• Gives you a nice to-do list by researching the sites that you do not have links on but your competition does ordered by the MOZrank of the sub domain.

The Cons:

• Zero integration with their main tool. It would be nice if this tool and link building in general was more integrated with their web app.
• No sortable columns in the interface.
• Although they provide an export to CSV file there is no way to easily filter or manipulate the results page.

The Conclusion:

I love this tool and it is a great research tool if you know who your competitors are in general and you don’t mind a little Excel work to keep track of everything. I am sure (#crosses fingers) that the pro web app by SEOmoz will someday integrate a variant of this tool directly and the life of a link builder will get much better for mozzers everywhere

Next Up: Raven

The tool called “Site Finder” within the Raven interface allows you to type a keyword into a text field and run a report on it. It basically goes out and gathers back-link information on every website that is currently in the top 10 of the SERP for the given keyword. You will the get a long list of linking websites to any of the websites on page one for your given search term.

The Pros:

• Very tight integration with the rest of the web app. You can click a link that will add the url to your queue for links to get in another part of the application.
• Really good usability with sortable columns, the ability to hide records and lots of different metrics visible for each link source.
• This is a saved report so you can access it again later

The Cons:

• The branding! The link and tool is called “Site Finder” which I don’t think is a very descriptive name for what the tool actually does making it very easy to overlook from within the raven tools arsenal.
• No easy way to see if your website already has a link from a given source unless your website is already in the top 10 for the given SERP.
• There should be some kind of indication of when a source link is a nofollow link.

The Conclusion:

The Site Finder Tool by Raven is a very very powerful tool that I look forward to seeing them build upon in the future. It’s tight integration with the rest of the web app has greatly streamlined my work flow as well as cutting down on the number of times I need to open Excel during tasks like these. Always a bonus!

And the Winner is…

If I was forced to pick one link building tool to assist me with competitive link building and research I would have to go with Raven. Do not get me wrong I would rather go without food than give up my access to SEOmoz’s tools. But for pure improvement on the efficiency of this particular type of link building research I would have to say that the Raven tool takes the cake….for now

Gathering the Search Data

The first goal was to get a list of all keywords that resulted in more than 1 visit and did not include any “Brand” oriented keywords. I went straight to Google Analytics to the Keyword report page. I set up a couple of filters to not show key terms that included “Brand” oriented search terms as well as filtering out keywords that resulted in less than 2 visits. I didn’t want the brand name search terms because I knew they where having no issues ranking well for them. I then exported this list as CSV for use in Excel.

I then grabbed all of the keywords and pasted them into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I made sure that the tool was set to “Exact Match” to make sure our traffic estimates would be accurate for this purpose. This would give us a list of our search terms with an estimated monthly number of searches for each. I then exported to CSV.

The next step was to grab the current Google ranking for each of these terms. I ran the same seed list through a rank checker tool and once again exported the list to CSV.

Combining and Working with the Data Sets

We now sorted each of the CSV files by Keyword Name and combined all of the data into one table. We now have all of the base information needed to make some really informed decisions on what we should be focusing on. A couple more columns would be added to each called “Traffic if Rank 1″ and “Potential Visit Increase”. The “Traffic if Rank 1″ column would be the result of multiplying the monthly search data we got from the Google Adwords tool by .4 to give us a rough estimate of how much traffic would be gleamed if we got the term to rank one. The “Potential Visit Increase” would be the result of subtracting the “Visits” column from the Analytics export from the new “Traffic if Rank 1″ column. This shows us how many more visitors per month we could gain if we got the term to Rank 1.

Now I ran a filter to only show rows that had a current Google Rank between 2 and 20. I then sorted the filtered list by the “Potential Visit Increase” column. The result is a list of terms that are on page one or two of a Google search result page in order based on how many more visits we could gain if we increased rankings for the term. I then read through the list hand picking out very relevant terms with high potential and pasted them into a separate list where I would organize them topically based on a couple of pages on the website.

Applying the Keywords

Now that I had a high value list of keywords to focus on I edited a few of the pages to update Title Tags, Alt tags, headings and copy with the focus key terms. Keeping it tasteful here is crucial. I didn’t want to cannibalize the content…just focus it a bit around my findings to give the pages the help they need to gain a few crucial rankings for the terms.

I then ran the website through SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer tool to look for any easy fixes and opportunities. A few inbound links where pointing to pages that don’t exist any more so 301 re-directs where created passing them to appropriate new pages to re-gain the link juice. I also found a couple of inbound links that I new I would be able to get better anchor text on. I requested these links be updated with the new focus key terms at the top of my list and called it a day.

Checking back a bit later I could see definite increases in traffic in their Analytic account overall especially around the focus keywords. There are definitely more thorough ways and deeper analysis that could have been done with more time. This particular strategy, however, was done very quickly while producing respectable results.

First of all try to think of a product or service to offer that has good perceived value to the public yet is something you could produce at only your cost or time. If you can’t think of something like that you can always purchase something to give away. Just look at it like a small price to pay for more followers, visibility and all of the other benefits that come along with running a Twitter contest.

Once you’ve decided on what the prize will be the next thing you should do is decide upon the type of contest you will use. One possible way would be to create a unique #hashtag that will be a part of your tweet that you will have people re-tweet to enter. For instance: “Retweet this to win free Snoop Dog Tickets on Jan 10th via @connectiveweb #connectiveSnoop”. You can then document the contestants by tracking your hashtag through a Twitter search or various widely available Social Media Marketing tracking services.

Make sure, obviously, to follow through. Get your list of participants into a spreadsheet then use a random number generator to select the winner. Once the winner has been selected be sure to Tweet about it on the date that you set. Happy Twitter Contests!

Why Create Custom Post Types and Fields?

Knowing that WordPress has systems in place that allow for the creation of custom post types and custom fields we endeavored to make it happen for this particular website. Custom post types would basically be adding a whole new type of post or page to the WordPress admin sidebar. In our particular instance we would want a new choice named “Talent”. Having this Menu option is a much more elegant solution than teaching a client to use “Posts” and categorize them as “Talent”.

Adding custom fields to this new custom post type would give us the ability to add additional fields in the add/edit “Talent” page. These new fields would be information such as age and height. Once this is set up in this way the end user would simply add a new “Talent” and then fill out the Talent title and main description as you would for any WordPress page or post and then add data in the areas of our new custom fields.

Displaying Custom Field Types

Now all that would need to be done would be to display the data entered into these new custom fields on the front end of the website. We would create a custom post type template by copying the “single.php” file, changing the name to “single-talent.php” and inserting our code into the new template to display the new custom fields. If a post is clicked on that is of the the new custom post type the new template will be defaulted to. In this particular instance we decided to show this information on the sidebar when viewing a talent detail page.

Custom Post Type and Custom Field Solutions

There are many ways to go about implementing a solution like this. You can hand code all of this. It is very easy to find tutorials on this around the web and as always the WordPress codex is a great resource. Custom coding this is a fantastic way to learn the ins and outs of WordPress development and ultimately will give you the most flexibility.

There are also a number of plugins available that streamline this process for you. Magic Fields is probably my favorite of them all. It is very easy to figure out and there is plenty of information on using it around. You still have to get your hands dirty a bit with this plugin although not nearly as much as doing the same thing from scratch.

Firebug

This was my very first Firefox add-on and it’s still my favorite. This plugin completely changed the way I built and tweaked websites. Firebug allows you to inspect and edit the HTML and CSS of the page your working on directly in your web browser all in real-time. No more fudging padding over one pixel at a time, uploading to your server, refreshing your page and hoping it worked. Simply work on the source code for a web page directly in Firebug until it’s perfect and then copy the code into the real file.

This doesn’t sound particularly useful as an SEO tool yet though right? Where it really comes into play is when you are working on your on page SEO. You can edit your XHTML structure or content directly in the browser and tweak the visible effects of, for instance, changing some text on a page to an <h1> tag. Once you are happy you can push your edits and not sweat the outcome.

Start using this add-on immediately. Get Firebug

SenSEO

This plug-in is fantastic. It will analyze the page your on checking the most important on-page-SEO-criteria and calculating a grade of how good your site fulfills these criteria. It will point out issues like your page title not including your keywords or there not being alt text on an image.

It’s also great for inspecting other peoples work. It’s “Show Components” function is great for being able to easily see a pages SEO tactics. You can type in a keyword and it will highlight all it’s iterations in the view helping you spot opportunities or deficiencies on a web page.

Get SenSEO

SeoQuake

This plug-in is my tool of choice for getting a quick feel for the competitive landscape for a particular keyword. After you install this plug-in go to Google and run a quick search on a key phrase of your choice. You will notice that there is now a ton of extra information per search result such as PageRank, in bound link count and delicious bookmark count just to name a few. You will also notice a few things at the top of the search results. You can re-sort your search results by any of the parameters shown! This is a really great feature to get an idea about what you are up against and if it would be even possible to compete.

The best part is the “Save to File” function. This will export your search results page to a CSV file. The benefits of getting this kind of data into a spreadsheet has wide spread implications. One example would be to use this while link building. Being able to get data for a “Directory” type search into a spreadsheet where you can then filter and sort out the best possible pages to go after for a link building campaign is invaluable.

Get SeoQuake

Web Developer Toolbar

The Web Developer Extension adds a menu and toolbar to Firefox that gives you many tools to analyze and manipulate information on a web page. Quick access to view source, validation and outlining of page elements and headlines are a few of its core features. It also allows you to toggle on and off the JavaScript and CSS on a page. Disabling the styling and hiding images gives you a great view when looking over the structure of a page and seeing a website as a search engine would see a site. I use this often to show clients what their website looks like to a search spider to show that their flash menu or image only site isn’t cutting it.

Get the Web Developer Extension

SEOmoz Toolbar

Last but not least is the SEO Toolbar for Firefox made by my heroes at SEOmoz. It will quickly show you metrics such as page and domain authority without having to leave the page you are on. This is powered by their awesome Linkscape engine. There is also an extremely handy toggle for highlighting “Nofollow” links on a page. If you are wondering about getting a link from a page you no longer have to view source or Firebug a link to determine if it is a Nofollow link or not.

The toolbar becomes even more feature filled if you become a pro member of SEOmoz. At that point you get to see mozRank, mozTrust and link metrics in the toolbar. Becoming a pro member of SEOmoz isn’t a cheap purchase but if you take SEO seriously and are looking for an amazing array of tools I would highly recommend their service to anyone.

Get the SEOmoz Toolbar

If you haven’t already discovered the addicting world of Firefox add-ons then the 5 listed above is a terrific place to start.

I do not intend to imply that artistic input has no place in conversion rate optimization. As a matter of fact having professionally designed landing pages that resonate with your website visitors is probably the most important thing. I mean to say that making the decision on what headline copy to use, which color scheme to implement, how to arrange your page elements and what images would tip the scales on turning a visitor into a customer can and should be decided by your website visitors themselves.

What the Heck is CRO!?!

“Conversion Rate” is the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators. If 1 visitor out of 10 fills out the form on the page and 9 of them leave the site or go to a different page without filling out the desired form then you have a conversion rate of 10% for that particular goal. Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is the practice of Optimizing a web page to increase the chances of this conversion and therefor increasing the conversion rate.

There are many elements and factors on a landing page that can be scrutinized when trying to improve your conversion rates. Here are a few examples of web page elements that can be looked at:

• The headline text
• An image on the page
• Color of a submit button
• The layout and order of the elements

Would more people fill out the form if your headline said “Subscribe to Email” instead of “Receive My Newsletter”? If there was a different image on the page would people be more likely to fill out the form? Maybe if the form was at the top of the page instead of after all the copy you could convert more? These are just a few of some very basic items that can be optimized for better conversion rates.

Where to Start Conversion Rate Optimization

A great place to start your CRO efforts would be with the Google Website Optimizer Tool. This tool allows you to conduct multi-variate testing and provides a wide array of statistics while doing so. You could run a simple test to alternate the display of two images on your landing page with them alternating to every other visitor. You would then let the test run until there is enough conversions and data to determine which of the two headlines has the greatest success rate. Then you would simply make the better of the two variants the one that displays to everyone.

With Multi Variant Testing you can set up as many variables as you like and Google will track all of them to help you determine what works best. It can be as simple as standard A/B split testing or as complex as having many variables rotating while only performing the test to 75% of your visitors leaving 25% of the people out of the process.

There is always room for improvement to increase landing page conversion rates. This is one of the few internet marketing efforts that can be easily translated to your bottom line. More conversions = more sales. An increase of 5% in your conversion rate is 5% more subscribers, 5% more purchasers or 5% more people wanting to interact with you. Utilizing readily available tools like Google Website Optimizer is a perfect way to take the guessing out of what works and what doesn’t.

If you have any success stories regarding CRO feel free to leave a comment below or use the following link to learn more about professional conversion rate optimization services.

Instead, channel your energies into producing material that is helpful, interesting and worthy of ranking high with your readers and other “critters” that crawl your site. Put out as much high quality content as you can – and do it often. Even without the basics of best practices in search engine optimization, it’s a general rule of common sense that if your content has legitimate usefulness to its existence and readership, then the windfall of your target market will follow – and they’ll want to.

If your content is really well thought out, and you’re now looking for a nudge towards higher rankings and increased find-ability there is much you can do to give your content as much potential as you can. The following notes will outline some basic on site SEO tips and techniques.

Covering The Basics: An SEO Primer

An SEO project should start with solid research. Study the page, take notes, do some research on how people look for a web page like this and then do some competitive analysis. Churn this information until you have a solid plan in mind for what keywords you want to focus on. Based on the outcome of the information digestion, the following can be adjusted:

• Tweak the URL or web page address to reflect the nature of the page and your target key phrase.
• Title tag makeover: This is the heading for each search result in Google and is also the text a user sees when they bookmark your page. It has to look good.
• Meta Description gets some love: This is the code that sums up the web page to a search engine. It’s the text that appears directly below the Title Tag on search result pages cluing end users into the point of the page. It needs to make people want to click.

Rolling our sleeves up, and digging into the page, images and structure – oh my!

Now we can dig a little deeper into the visible headers on the page (think of this as the title to your page of content, like a chapter heading in a book). Headers should concisely sum up what a user is about to read while grabbing their attention. Tastefully sprinkling keywords into headers can help solidify the message of the page. Search engines give more importance to the text between header tags than the copy on the rest of the web page.

Are there images on the page? If yes, make sure that all of the proper alt tags are set. This allows you to describe the image in text form so screen readers and search engines alike can deduce the point of the image.

Now take a look at the keyword density of the page. Making sure that terms are used in the copy of the page that correlates to the queries that a user would type to find a page like this is very important. This can be overdone – I have written a post on the tasteful and not-so tasteful use of keyword density here.

Take a look at interlinking as well. For example, do you have content on a different page that relates well to a part of this page? Would it be useful for the reader to see? Link to it. Interlinking between pages on your site with carefully planned anchor text reinforces your website as an authoritative resource.

Under the hood of your website, Or turning your site into an SEO Optimized Machine

Look under the hood to see if the code is up to snuff. Are the headers done correctly and are they wrapping the correct content? How does the code to content ratio look? Did the last developer utilize antiquated techniques?

While you are in there, install some tracking code so you can benchmark and monitor how things are coming along. Any system can be used but Google Analytics is free and certainly provides enough data to work with…and by “enough” I mean way more than you could ever want.

Make sure that human and non-human sitemaps are present. Not only is a sitemap a viable navigational tool, it also ensures that there is access to every page from every other page on your website. This is a sitemap that a user can navigate to and see providing a list of all pages on the website. For the search engine spiders, we build an XML sitemap. This type of sitemap is built and formatted specifically for search engines to digest your content easily so they know how to index you and how often to come back looking for more content.

While making 100% sure that you do not degrade the quality of the content (even a smidge), there is much that can be done using these basic on site seo tips to make your award winning content more visible.

There has been a lot of buzz about Google Instant around the SEO community about what all of this means for people in the business. It’s prediction algorithm is not only showing results based on relevancy and page rank but also on individual search history patterns. This ultimately means that no two people will be seeing the same search results for any particular keyword or phrase. Whether this means that peoples jobs are in jeopardy or if it will result in no real change is beyond my intuition.

Search Engine Optimization with Google Instant

What I do see with the advent of this new functionality is a really powerful keyword research tool. It provides a lot of insight into what predictions Google is trying to make as well as being an incredible tool for doing keyword research. Here is an example of how you can do keyword research with Google Instant:

I took the term “horse photography workshops” as my example search. I typed this key phrase out one letter at a time in Google while taking note of relevant keyword suggestions and the top two URL’s it was suggesting along the way. This is a really fantastic way of coming up with a batch of keywords and key phrases based around your primary keywords. Also seeing what the top websites are showing in the search results along the way and keeping track of what domains are showing up multiple times in the process is a great way to find the websites to look into for competitive research.

Where I would take this a step further is to have multiple people go through this same exercise (including your client) to compare and add to the list that’s been saved. Theoretically this should produce some variance in the results. It would also give you some results from people that are in the field from the website that you are optimizing and possibly a larger seed list to work off from. All of this information can then be used for your on-site search engine optimization, link building and even pay per click marketing.

The Final Keyword List

Here is my final keyword and URL list compiled from this exercise:

As you can see this made a nice little keyword batch list as well as providing some insight into who the main competitors are for this key phrase. There are obviously more sophisticated ways of handling this type of research including other tools Google has readily available. I do feel, however, that this is a great technique to use for quickly putting something like this together.

Have any other interesting ways to use Google Instant? If so leave a comment below.

Facebook Advertising has opened up a new world of possibilities. The reporting data you can see for demographics is amazing and the fact that you can create ad copy AND an image specific for a certain type of profile has really made it a contender for me if someone wants to walk the path of pay per click marketing.

Targeting with Facebook Ads

The real power of Facebook advertising is realized when you go through the motions of selecting who will see your ads. With Google Adwords you can target people who are searching for your specified keywords within a certain distance from a geographic location. This is very powerful to keep costs down as well as to make sure that people within your target areas are the only ones who see your advertisement.

With Facebook Ads you take the same ad delivery filters much further. Here are all of the additional parameters for reach and targeting you can set when creating a Facebook ad:

• Location
• Age
• Sex
• “Interested In?”
• Relationship Status
• Language
• Likes and Interest

The ability to target like this is extremely powerful especially when you start thinking about how to tailor your ad for peoples specific likes and interest.

Google Adwords vs Facebook Ads: The big difference

The main difference between Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising is the reasons behind why a user would see your ad in the first place.

Google Adwords will display your ad if a user is searching for a key-phrase that is a close match to the keywords specified in your campaign. There are many more parameters involved such as bid price, the score Google gives your ad and the relevance of your Ad text compared to the search terms.

Facebook Ads will show automatically if the bid is high enough and targeting parameters match closely to a users profile information. There is no search involved with Facebook Ads. It is a match of your ads with the data Facebook has on file for a user.

Arguments can be made for both delivery methodologies. On the one hand a Google user is seeing your Ad because they just did a search for a web page just like the one your ad is made for. While a Facebook user is seeing your ad simply because their profile is a match to what you deem as the perfect type of user to see your ad.

Facebook Ad Targeting Examples

Here are a few possible examples of the amazing targeting capabilities of Facebook Ads.

• Create an ad that you only show to women between the age of 18 and 50 where their relationship status is set to “engaged”. You could then make an alternative ad displaying to only men with the same relationship status.
• Create an ad that only shows between 6pm and 11pm to men who have an interest in video games.
• Create an ad that only shows to people who live in a certain city between the ages of 25-30 and have “liked” one of your Facebook Fan Pages.
• Only show an ad on someones birthday.

The possibilities are endless and a really solid strategy for advertising targeting can quickly be formulated for just about any business type you could imagine.

The Skinny

There are times to use both of these solutions in my opinion. In my opinion if you really feel that your customers are heavy Facebook users then trying out Facebook Advertising is worth a try. Facebook is one of the most heavily used websites in the world and from time to time even passes the mighty Google in daily visits. It may not be right for everyone but I’m sure any business owner can picture the power of this ad delivery method when they put some thought into it.

If you have any questions or comments about Facebook ads feel free to drop a comment below. If you would like some help in setting up Facebook Advertising you can get in touch on Facebook or contact me here >>

Old School SEO

The old rules of thumb to get a website to the top of the search engines would be to maximize on-page seo and accrue the quantity of authoritative in-bound links. If you covered your bases with keyword rich and relevant content, a properly structured website and had amassed the right kind of links from high page ranking sources you could guarantee that Jim and Sally would both see your website as #1 for a particular keyword. It’s now much different than that. That top spot and the order of the pages listed on a search engine results page can and will vary from user to user depending on many more personalized variables. From an end user point of view the logic in this is beautiful. Your search results are tailored to YOU and your history of internet usage.

This has become somewhat maddening for webmasters though. Any webmaster who states that they can guarantee a #1 spot for a particular search term is completely full of shit or not yet educated on these findings. It’s impossible as each users search results are becoming more and more personalized to them. Even the practice of keyword monitoring needs to be scrutinized. This makes it tricky to prove the value of search engine optimization work. I picture webmasters world wide shaking in their shorts wondering how they can justify their price tags now without being able to honestly say that they got a site to rank 4 for EVERYONE with a particular key-phrase.

Spreading your Digital Footprint

I still believe in all of the best practices for search engine optimization. I still believe in building back links. These all still matter. There are just more things now to consider when trying to grow your search engine presence. You need to blog. You have to make a Facebook fan page. It’s necessary to Tweet, to make videos for YouTube, put your images on Flicker, create slides for SlideShare….on and on (#yawn).

Whats happening now is this. Someone makes a new web page. They will then go blog about it, post it to their Facebook page, Tweet back to the blog post, put up some images on Flicker about it and make a quick video for YouTube about it. Basically taking that one piece of content and spreading it out to as many of the social media channels as possible.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this practice. In fact someone really standing behind a new product, service or post that they’ve created and wanting to promote it in this way makes total sense. It’s not an exorbitantly priced TV commercial, a no-metrics-possible direct mail piece or a radio spot that people tend to not be patient through anyway. It’s all free (except for time of course) and will more effectively reach your target audience than the old school way of marketing.

The Social Gray Hat

Unfortunately, just like the days of keyword stuffing, people are sometimes taking a less than honest approach to harnessing this technique. They will write complete crap quickly then auto-magically spread their digital mess everywhere. Rinse and repeat. This is digital littering in my opinion. It’s still better if you want to create a buzz or get some attention with social media to….dun dun dun…have something that people would actually like!

A good rule of thumb in my opinion is if you have to spend more time spreading your word across all these channels than it would take to produce another piece of equally important content then you should examine carefully how you should spend your time. Market your one piece of content EVERYWHERE or have two equally worthy pieces to spread about selectively.

Have any experience side stepping digital litter? Or any questions or comments about modern search engine optimization practices? Leave a comment below!

Future Proofing your NextGEN Edits

The author of NextGEN has an extremely powerful and flexible template solution implemented for allowing the modification of core plugin files while making sure that any of these edits will not be overwritten in future plugin or WordPress updates. This all happens by way of making use of a priority driven template system. When NextGEN spits out it’s required PHP and CSS it first looks in your theme directory for templates before it goes to it’s default location for this info within the plugin files. This allows you to create your own templates that will not be stored in the plugin directory that gets overwritten every time you update the plugin. Brilliant!

NextGEN gallery templates by themselves are pretty well thought out in how they work in every step of the user experience. It is a rare day, however, when there wouldn’t be just one thing you would like to change about it that isn’t possible from NextGEN’s vast administration section in WordPress. A few common requests would be to add the photo alt text below each thumbnail on the gallery view pages, or to stylize the thumbnails with some creative backgrounds. The following will explain how to do just that.

Warning – this is not for the faint of heart and it will be assumed that some basic knowledge of FTP, HTML, CSS and PHP is had. It is however fairly easy once you know your way around to do just about anything you could imagine. This is where I feel the true power of NextGEN comes into the spotlight.

Changing the Look of NextGEN Galleries

If you take a look with Firebug on a gallery page created by NextGEN you will notice that the code is spit out with as many CSS tags as you would need for about any layout or look desired. The intial worry that I had about adding my own custom CSS to the plugin files was it being overwritten during an upgrade. I was pleasantly surprised to learn about how to prevent this. Just follow the following steps to make your own CSS template:

• Go to /wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/css and make a copy of the nggallery.css file
• Place a copy of your nggallery.css file in your themes folder: /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/nggallery.css
• Succeed!

NextGEN will look to see if this file exists in your theme folder before it reads the CSS in your plugin folder. Make as many changes as you want to this copied CSS file and it will not get overwritten during an upgrade. For instance you could replace the .ngg-gallery-thumbnail class with something like this:

.ngg-gallery-thumbnail {
-moz-border-radius:10px 10px 10px 10px;
background:none repeat scroll 0 0 #CCCCCC;
float:left;
margin:15px;
padding:5px;
text-align:left;
width:200px;
}

It isn’t beautiful…but you get the idea.

Adding Additional Data to NextGEN Galleries

Now lets say you want to change something about the same gallery view besides what is possible with CSS. Maybe besides just having row after row of images you would also like to see the photo alt text below each. This is all very easy and will be handled in about the same way the CSS modifications where implemented. Take the following steps to accomplish this:

• Make a copy of the file called gallery.php located here: /wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/view
• Make a new folder called nggallery in your theme folder: /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/nggallery
• Place your copy of the file called gallery.php here

You can now alter this gallery template file without having to touch the plugin files themselves.

To add the alt text below the thumbnails just add this code just above the closing “ngg=gallery-thumbnail” DIV tag:

<?php echo $image->alttext ?>

Although my specific examples are not too amazing the process would be the same for any type of NextGEN modification you could dream up. Enjoy!

Alright so maybe I lied a little. I didn’t say WHAT search engine or for how long right? Twitter has a handy feature called a hashtag that lets you do just this. Utilizing this to promote your new product, web page or blog post can get you that coveted #1 spot (at least until someone else tweets using the same hashtag).

What is a Hashtag?

A hashtag is a short concatenated word or phrase prefixed with the hash symbol. These hashtags when used in a tweet and clicked by a user will force a twitter search for the term. The resulting search result page will be a list of all tweets that contain the hashtag listed from most recent to oldest. Here is an example tweet using a hashtag:

My new Thesis based website design: http://bit.ly/aUyhiD Starting to tinker with all that 1.8 has to offer. #thesiswp

A couple things happen as a result of using this hashtag:

• Anyone who reads this tweet and clicks on the now hyper linked hash tag will be re-directed to a search result page for it. You can see this here.
• Your tweet will be at the very top of this search result page until someone else tweets with the same hashtag.

Twitter users add hashtags to their tweets as a way to be added to a search result page that people check to see whats new on that particular topic. Most Twitter users have a list of saved searches they use to check in on topics that interest them. People can hold open forum style conversations in this way without having to follow or be followed by the users in the conversation.

How can I use Hashtags to Market my Website Content?

This is where the real power of Twitter as a business marketing tool comes into play. Let’s say you wrote a new blog post on Widgets. You could take the following steps to make sure that your tweet promoting this new post reaches the most number of readers as well as the most relevant:

• Go to Twitter and use its handy search function to find tweets on Widgets.
• You may recognize some of the users in the search results as experts in the field of Widget making. Follow their tweets back to their profile and see what hashtags they commonly use.
• Click on their hashtags to see if there is an active conversation that relates to your blog post about Widgets. Do the people using that particular hashtag seem like the ideal audience for your blog post?
• If so add the hashtag to your tweet promoting your post.

Now when any user checks that search result page they will see your tweet at the very top!

This system is a perfect way to place your tweets, links and message in front of the exact type of user you would deem ideal for your content. You can also use as many hashtags as 140 characters will permit.You may find that there are a few popular tags people use when talking about your Widgets. Its possible they use #widgets to talk about Widgets in general and #acmewidgets to talk about Widgets made by the ACME corporation. Go ahead and use both if it makes sense.

Using hashtags can expand the reach of your tweets far beyond the wall of those who follow you. It is also a great way to increase the number of followers you have as it will be exposing your words to people interested in the topics that you love to write about.

If you have any questions or interesting stories on the use of hashtags and Twitter feel free to leave a comment below. If you would like some help with integrating Social Media Marketing strategies with your website or business feel free to Contact Me here.

Pretend it’s for Print

It all starts with the quality of your content. Treat the piece that your writing as if it’s not easily changed after you’ve put it out there. Publishing content on the web has made us all a bit lazy with this. Knowing that we can just go back to fix or tidy up after the fact puts a little less pressure on us to produce perfect content. Remember that people are taking time out of their lives to focus their attention on you. Make it worthwhile.

A Dash of SEO with that Please

After you’re happy with the content take a once over for the search engines. Don’t bastardize it. But if you want to get the most long term exposure for your content try to align your web page’s message with your website’s search engine optimization strategy.

You could adjust:

• Your page title and meta description. Remember that these are the only two elements that search engine users see on search results pages. Try to have it read like a newspaper headline.
• The name of your post. If you can have good keywords here by all means do so.
• The permalink. Adjust your URL to be relevant to your content, keep it void of unnecessary words like “and, the, or” and include keywords.
• Your on-page headlines and actual copy. Skim through all of this for keyword opportunities that will ADD to the quality of your piece.

Just make sure that you are covering your bases seo-wise. If you set up your page properly you will give your writing every chance possible to be picked up by search engines down the road.

Remember Email Marketing?

If you’ve built an email list over the years then send out a quick campaign about the article. I wouldn’t suggest that you copy all of your post content into the email. I would use the email as a teaser. Give the email recipients reason to visit your website and read it there. My reasoning for this is that there are many more viral opportunities if the content is digested on your website vs in the email itself. Be sure to give enough useful information in the email itself though. This way if they don’t click through they wont feel their time has been wasted.

Feed the Birds

After you’ve done this go share your post on your favorite Social Media Channels like Facebook and Twitter. Be careful not to sound too sales-like here. People can get easily turned off by this. Offer the link back to your post in a way that is enticing yet not pushy. Saying things like “The most brilliant post on widgets EVER!” will get you no-where fast. If anyone comments on it try your best to respond and get a conversation going.

Make it Easy to Share

Be sure that you give your readers every chance possible to share your content with their tribe. This is where the real potential of Social Media Marketing begins to shine. Someone sharing your post with all of their community has just exponentially increased your articles reach. It’s free marketing! Most content management systems have ways to add this functionality to your posts and if you aren’t using a CMS it’s not hard to hand code. Take a look at the bottom of this post for an example and feel free to try it out .

There are many more venues for reaching out than what I’ve described above including Pay Per Click Advertising, Article Distribution Marketing and Direct Mail to name a few. Following the steps above is a sound strategy and a good starting point for giving your work the help it needs to be seen.

If you would like to talk about marketing your content feel free to contact me.

Shore up your theme coding

To start with we need to make sure that the theme or template itself is coded correctly. For example only one <h1> tag per page (this should be page or post titles) with the logo no greater than an <h3> except on home page. Use CSS over Tables for design layout whenever possible. Basically code the website correctly if this is from scratch or if the website is a pre-built theme then double check their code.

Following this is a list of plugins and steps for making sure that on-site seo is completely optimal. Most of this is just plugin installation and basic website set up. So all of this should take no more than a few hours to set up. There is a lot more “off-site” automation we can do as well but this will just be all of the on-site stuff.

Permalink Structure

Adjustment of Permalink structure to include keywords. Example:

Old non-seo-friendly URL
http:// www.mysite. com /?p=123

New seo-friendly URL:
http:// www.mysite. com /mysite-features

Go to permalinks and use %postname% for a custom structure.

Title & Description Optimization

The use of the plugin HeadSpace to optimize titles and all meta information. This also allows us to specify the “read more” anchor text to something more seo friendly. The “read more” links appear all over WordPress sites.

Old read more example:
“To properly use widgets on your site your going to want to start with..read more >>“

Improved read more example:
“To properly use widgets on your site your going to want to start with..learn more about widgets “

Image Optimization

Set up plugin to automatically add post/page titles to the alt text for images if non are present.

Use the SEO Friendly Images plugin to accomplish this.

Breadcrumb Navigation

If there is no breadcrumb navigation present then use the Yoast Breadcrumb Plugin.

Duplicate Content

Because of the structure of WordPress taxonomy and category structure you can have 3 or 4 different URL’s with the exact same content which puts sites at risk of duplicate content penalties.

Meta Robots Plugin: This allows you to set “no-follow” attributes so that these views are available to users but will not be indexed by search engines.

Pagination

The default pagination for WordPress uses a “next/previous” methodology. This is fine for users but not for SEO. Here is a fix for this that will increase access to all of the pages

Related Posts

Here is a plugin that will display related posts.

It allows you to give “weight” to different variables to display “X” number of related posts at the bottom of a page/post. This is good for readers as well as for search engines.

SEO Slugs

Install this seo slug plugin.

What this does is remove common words like ‘a’ and ‘the’ etc from the URL.

Before:
/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings

After:
/immediately-higher-rankings

301 redirects

Install this 301 redirect plugin.

This will automatically create 301 entries anytime a permalink is changed. This will ensure zero 404 errors.

XML sitemaps

Install this XML sitemap plugin:

This will auto generate and update an XML sitemap anytime a page/post is created or modified and ping ALL of the major search engines.

Front end sitemap

Install a sitemap plugin that will automatically stay updated and make sure that there is a link to it somewhere in the template (probably footer link is best).

There are a bunch of these. I am not sure yet which one is best. Here is one that I have tried though:

Really Simple SiteMap

While there is much more that can be done, this covers the basics to optimize our WordPress sites. If you would like some help with Professional Search Engine Optimization you can contact me now to get started.