All In One SEO Pack – How To Use It

In my previous post I showed you how to install and configure the All In One SEO Pack WordPress plugin.

In this post I’ll show you how to use the plugin when you make a post, so that you can get the most optimization out of each post that you make.

Don’t let the long name of the plugin scare you, it’s really very easy to use the plugin once you’ve made your post.

So here is the video:

 

 

See, not so hard to use right?

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to fill out the comment section below.

Thanks for reading and see you soon

 

All In One SEO Pack Installation And Configuration

One of the most popular plugins for SEO purposes, that is free to download and use is the “All In One SEO Pack” plugin.

Some bloggers I’ve met actually look down their nose at this plugin thinking they have something better, but if you set this plugin up properly and use it correctly, there is no better plugin for SEO purposes.

So in order to give an easy to follow instruction for the setup of the plugin, I’ve made a short video to go over the installation and configuration of this “All In One SEO Pack” plugin.

Install this plugin on your WordPress blog (not the free wordpress.com blogs) and after proper configuration/usage you will have a well search engine optimized post!

So here is the video:

 

Look for another post soon, with the instructions on how to use this plugin to optimize a post that you make.

Hope this helps!

Will Google Help you?

If you’re trying to get your website ranked better, you should be aware that Google offers you the webmasters tools page that will offer you some training as well as advice on what to do to help your site rank better in their search engine. While Google isn’t the only search engine around, the thought is that if you can rank well in Google, you’ll also do well in the other major search engines.

Many webmasters are aware of this tool and very often have more questions than Google is providing answers for! So one of them wrote in to Google’s Matt Cutts and asked him about their non-responsiveness to webmaster’s questions.

Here is the official reply from the big G:

 

So as you can see, they don’t have the resources to answer everyone’s questions – not surprising when you think about it.

If you are a webmaster and have questions about SEO, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help!

Cheers!

SEO – Google’s Author Rank

I found an interesting article on SEO-News.com that I thought you would be interested in reading. It was written by Lauren Hobson.

As the obvious objective in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to get your site properly setup to be recognized and ranked well in the search engines, this article is perfect for helping you get better rankings in the search engines while utilizing a new tool that Google is offering authors!

Here’s a quick excerpt:

If your small business has a website, you’re an author. At least in the eyes of Google you are an author, and recent updates to Google’s Author Rank mean you can now claim and get credit for the content that you own (or “authored”) on your website, blog, article sites, and social media.

Here’s how Google explains its updated Author Rank system: “Assuming that a given agent has a high reputational score, representing an established reputation for authoring valuable content, then additional content authored and signed by that agent will be promoted relative to unsigned content or content from less reputable agents in search results.”

What does that mean? It means that if the content on a page is tied to an author who has a strong Author Rank in Google, that page’s search position will be higher than if it was not tied to an author, or if it was tied to an author with a lower Author Rank …

 
If you’d like to read the whole article, you can find it here: http://www.seo-news.com/googles-author-rank-credit-where-credit-is-due/

Enjoy and I hope this helps you with your seo research.

 

Is There Such A Thing As Too Much SEO?

It is obviously not easy to write good, SEO-compliant content for a website and still have a standard of content which will impress your readers, and this often shows in the more amateurish attempts at writing a website. One mistake a lot of people make is in thinking that the more they use a keyword, the better it will be for their website. This often results in the writer frequently using the keyword once every other sentence or a similar density. Their reasoning is understandable. If some SEO is good, then a lot of SEO will surely be excellent?

However, SEO is not just about use of keywords. It is more accurate to say that SEO is about the relevant, appropriate and substantial use of keywords within good content. It is true that Google sets rankings based on keyword density, but the search engines don’t just look for “a lot of keywords”. If they find a suspiciously high keyword volume they are actually likely to downrank you, and if your website is barely readable on account of the excess of keywords then you are unlikely to get the back links that will also be used for higher rankings.

It is this balance that you need to achieve, and it is not a matter of too much or too little SEO. SEO encompasses a number of different elements which should all be present if you want to make the right impact on the search engines – or at least, you should include as many elements as you can without negatively affecting the readability of your website.

Can You Use SEO And Write Well?

It becomes immediately obvious to someone who has a fair understanding of the principles of SEO that the use of it can present a problem. The more you use the right keywords, the likelier it is that Google will pick your site up and give it a good ranking. However, the more you use the right keywords, the less room there is for all the other things you want to say, and the less freedom to say things exactly how you would like to. It is a difficult balance to maintain, then, if you want to be SEO compliant and still write something that will be worth reading.

This is where you have to decide how you are going to maintain that balance. It is certainly not impossible to write well and be SEO compliant, you just need to find where you will place the keywords and make sure that the text around them is appropriately well-written. If you have a target of 500 words and want a keyword density of about 20-25 – an acceptable level and one which will get Google’s attention – then you need to make sure the other 475 are persuasive and coherent.

It also helps if you know how to use the keywords to make their use appear natural. If your keyword phrase for an article is “affordable TV repair”, then a sentence like “Affordable TV repair is not always easy to find” flows much better than if you just try to crowbar it in mid-sentence.

Black Hat SEO – A Bad Idea Disguised As A Cunning Plan

Since the development of Search Engine Optimisation as a concept, there has been a fairly obvious temptation for some people to try to rig the system in their favor by using the principles of SEO in a less-than-honest way. Because the idea of SEO is they keywords create cash, the idea that has occurred to a lot of people can best be summed up in the following sentence: “If they want keyword volume, we’ll give them keyword volume”. This tends to occur in the shape of website text that contains nothing but keywords.

Of course, this means that the website will be scarcely readable, if it is readable at all, but the trick is usually applied by webmasters who don’t really care if you actually read what is on the site. Usually they will use it as a landing page that immediately redirects you to the site they want you to read. It will happen instantly and you will not see the landing page, but it will have done its job. For the reader it may be little more than an inconvenience, but for other people operating in the same niche, it is cheating.

The main reason that tricks like this are a bad idea has only a small amount to do with the fact that it is cheating. In actual fact, it is incredibly limited as an SEO tool because Google and other search engines check for such tricks and will relegate any such site in their rankings – so not only is it dishonest, it is also ineffective, which is what will really stick in the craw of the people doing it.

Heavenly SEO Practices: Site Maps

Reduced down to its simplest form, a sitemap is just a list of URLs. For something so completely basic, it’s incredible to find how very important sitemaps can be when it comes to successful SEO.

To add pages to search engine results, engines send out what is known as a ‘bot’ or a ‘spider’. This non-human bot will search the internet for pages, and whatever it finds will eventually be indexed – that is, included in a search engine results pages. Yet there are literally millions of websites on the internet, and sometimes waiting for a search engine bot to crawl your page and index it – well, it can literally take weeks.

This is where the sitemap comes in. The sitemap is a “heads up”, basically calling the search engine’s attention to all of your website’s content.

When your website is complete, you will need to build your sitemap (or ideally, build it as you go along). This can be done using a simple Notepad .txt file, with a list of URLs of each page of your site, written on a separate line and then uploaded to your server. Alternatively, if you are using WordPress self-hosted, you can install a plugin called “XML Google Sitemaps” – which automatically generates and updates your sitemap as you go along.

The plugin will generate a URL (Universal Resource Locator) – usually www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, or alternatively use your .txt file, upload it and obtain the URL yourself. You should then take the URL of your sitemap, and submit it to all of the major search engines, using a tool such as Google Webmaster Tools. When submitted, the engine will know to send a bot to crawl the pages you’ve submitted – and will usually do so in a matter of days. Sitemaps really can make indexing that easy, and are therefore an absolute must when getting your site properly setup for SEO.

Why Is SEO Important?

Think back to the days before the internet, when everyone looked for business listings in the Yellow Pages or a similar hard copy directory. Now, imagine you’re trying to find a plumber. You go to the “P” page, flick through, and only see three plumbers listed.

It’d be a massive advantage for the three plumbers, wouldn’t it? To effectively be all that potential customers see. Well, that’s the power of SEO.

When someone uses a search engine, they type in a set of words to bring up results that are relevant to them. Once the applicable websites appear on the results page, they are rated in terms of ‘relevancy’. Any website which has correctly used search engine optimization will be judged by Google to be ‘relevant’. So if you have correctly used SEO, your website will appear somewhere near the top of the search engine results page – hopefully in the top three.

Why is that so important? Well, studies have shown that the vast majority of those using search engines only click on websites listed in the top three results of any search engine results page. This is where it compares to being only one of three businesses listed in an old-style paper directory like the Yellow Pages. Master SEO, and your website will appear in high in search results, in the slots (one to three) that users click. That naturally leads on to more people visiting your website, and that in turn means more business, more customers, and ultimately more money.

What Is SEO?

“SEO” stands for “search engine optimization”, and as the name would suggest, it’s all about utilizing your website so that search engines can find it easily.

When someone searches for a website, they will key a few choice words in to their chosen search engine. For example, if they’re looking for a restaurant in New York, they’ll probably type something like: “good new york restaurant” or even just “new york restaurant”. SEO is all about making sure your website appears at the top of the search results for any given phrase like this.

Obviously the phrase is dependent on your niche, what you’re selling or what services you offer – but good SEO practices are about reducing your site down to those key words that people type into Google. There would be no point, in the example, for a great New York restaurant to have their website online but not have it come up under search results for “new york restaurant”.

However, with hundreds of thousands of websites online, there are literally thousands of pages that could turn up results for (again, using the example) “new york restaurant”. SEO is the method used to beat all the other websites, and get yourself as high in the search results as possible. As most users will tend to visit a website from the top three search results and completely neglect the rest, the efficacy of your SEO really can make or break the success of your website. And if your business in general is dependent on your website, then SEO can be the difference between success or failure in the business world.