You are going to be super excited to hear that Wordpress Landing Page Theme has launched.

My favorite thing about the theme is that it sits on top of The Thesis Theme, so you get all of the good parts of Thesis and the best parts of having a landing page.

If you want to learn a bit more, I’d take a peek at these links:

1. Best Thesis Theme Deal You’ll Find Anywhere.
2. Wordpress Landing Page Theme… Blog Post Called “We’ve Soft Launched”
3. Another Great Thesis Discount

So go check out the Theme.  It’s free!

Are you trying to get your hands on The Thesis Theme for Wordpress?  Does the DIYThemes company that makes the Thesis Theme really get you going?  Do you want your blog to look as good as the blog by Chris Pearson?

If so, you need The Thesis Theme for Wordpress.

There are two different ways to get The Thesis Theme.

1. The Dumb Way: Buy the Thesis Theme and get nothing for free.
2. The Smart Way: Buy the Thesis Theme from here and get lots for free.

No, but seriously, if you have been waiting for Thesis Theme Coupons, Discounts, or Freebies, then for God’s sake don’t wait a minute longer.

Note:  You can now grab the DIYTHEMES coupon code from Retailmenot!

1. Problogger on Linkbait
   
2. Jim on Linkbait
3. Cornwall SEO on Linkbait
4. Smashing Magazine on Linkbait
5. Search Engine Journal on Linkbaiting

So once you get an idea of how to linkbait, you’ll want to start with the smaller social bookmarking sites like Mixx, Phinn, Plugg, and all of those niche little guys.

Then when you’ve got a couple of homeruns under your belt, enter into the Digg, Delicious, etc world and start really grabbing some links.

-Brad

photo credit: Phil Romans

-Take any niche you are trying to capture.  For instance, let’s say you want to get some long tail keywords in the “Acoustic Guitar with Steel Strings in Georgia” realm…

-Then what you would do is do some searches for “Guitars”, “Acoustic Guitars”, or “Georgia Guitars” or some sort of broad search that is going to come up with some pretty good results for polished sites…

-Write up the webmasters of the sites you find and see if you blog about them, or write about them, or help them out in some way, if they would link to you.

-Rinse, wash, repeat.  And make sure not to do it so fast that it is impersonal.

Then I started seeing “Ultimate Tag Warrior” on lists of Top 10 Best SEO Plugins for Wordpress over and over and over. So I decided to do a little test and see how Tags worked.

In my experience, there are a few clear benefits to using Tags on a blog (and likely regular websites also). They are:

1. I don’t know if anyone actually uses technorati to do anything other than egosurfing, but if they did, using tags would get your site listed in websites like this that syndicate content based on tags.
2. Tags help you to get a bunch more pages. It’s also really easy to optimize your site for a whole number of terms just by making them a tag. For instance, take a look at my tag page on “SEO” here. The title tag, meta-description, H1 tag, and everything is optimized for SEO. My Wordpress install automatically optimizes my tag pages for the tag I’m using and makes them each a unique landing page. So yesterday when I started using the term Engagement Optimization I also created a tag page just by making Engagement Optimization a tag on the EO post. So in markets that aren’t all that competitive, you can pick up some serious long-tail searches by being abundant with your use of tags.
3. Tags are better for User Experience. People just like tag clouds and all of that. Tag Clouds give a better impression of your subject matter than simply a list of categories.
4. Tags are future-proofing. Who knows what the next big Web 2.0 thing is going to be. Digg, Delicious, Stumble-Upon, all of these sites weren’t anything a couple of years ago. Maybe the next thing will be based on tags, and having already tagged all of your posts will give you a competitive edge.

Do you have any experiences with tagging that you would like to share? Check out our comments section.

Also, if you want help integrating Ultimate Tag Warrior into your blog, and want to have UTW hacked to boost the SEO value of your tags, I’d be happy to help with that. Just contact me here.

So this naturally got me asking, “What’s Engagement Optimization?”

The bad news is, I don’t have a great answer for ya.  It seems that the closest thing that came up on Google was “Septic Engagement Optimization” which had something to do with sewers.

The good news is, this is exactly the phrase that I’ve been looking for the explain what SEO should be about.  “Engagement Optimization”  (EO?) is a wonderful term to encompass the process of courting your traffic.  Let’s face it- the reason you are doing Search Engine Optimization is to get traffic.  But just getting the traffic to show up at your site isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of this gig.  In the end, your job is to lead people to take an action.  Hell, we can likely narrow the definition even more than that… the purpose of an SEO could be said to be…

An SEO makes solutions for searchers available more quickly, easily, and comfortably.

When you think of SEO this way, it makes the idea of Engagement Optimization all that much more interesting.  Engagement Optimization might lead you to ask questions like this about the sites you promote:

• What pieces of this site serve no purpose and detract from the user’s experience?
• Does my writing suck so bad I should hire someone to improve the user’s experience
• Who would be engaged by this site that I’m not marketing to?
• Does this site actually offer what I’m optimizing for?

I’m going to let this idea linger for a while before trying to answer any of these questions for myself… but for those of you know are into domaining, you’ll be dissapointed to know that I just snagged www.engagementoptimization.com.  It’s a good day!

-Brad 

How to Cheat Yahoo Answers:

Your answer (and your link) will get a more prominent position on the page if it is chosen as the best answer.  Most answers rarely get any votes.  So you can go in and vote your answer to be the best and usually 1 vote will win for you.

Thanks, Brad

1. Scoreboard Media - A broader perspective on developing an audience.  Awesome.
   
2. Tropical SEO - Andy Hagans.. very bright guy with some good thoughts on leveraging Social Media
3. SEO by the Sea - More technical than the others, but also very good.
4. Blue Hat SEO - Some nutty ideas (that work) with a great post about how you can make $100/day if you put in the work

Have a great Sunday…

-Brad