Here’s some notes from the session at WordCampUK on SEO for WordPress, presented by Nick Garner of Betfair. Will tidy up later with more links and stuff.
- you can’t hold your website users’ hands the whole time. SEO can make it easier for them to find what they want
- What have you got that others don’t? What do you want on your site? Structure your content for search engines, use analytics and get social with links
- Using WordPress with the right plugins helps
- Content – useful and entertaining? Can the people writing your content actually write well? Need for enthusiasm. Would you read your content?
- Jon Bounds tweets – “ I’d love a discussion about whether or not it’s all a bit vulgar, rather than how to do it.”
- Who do you want to visit your site? Motivation: PR, money making or ego? Picture your reader and write for them
- Think like a librarian when structuring content: correct titles, categorisation, avoid duplication
- When building sites, get metadata in first, then the content. Don’t bury under piles of javascript & navigation stuff
- The cost of some sites using ‘traditional’ CMS can make you sob
- Security issues with WordPress? Can’t do ‘hard baked’ pages?
- Get Google Analytics and webmaster console
- If you are getting 90% traffic from search engines, that’s bad. About 60% is probably best.
- Gaming search engines gets harder as processor grunt increases. Don’t bother putting your black hat on.
- It takes time to get right, but can save a lot of marketing pennies
- Journalists are cheap – get them to write your content
- Can’t beat good writing
- Links: general directories are useless.
- Pimp yourself around: comment on related sites with link back to yours, put signposts up on relevant sites, be remarkable/stand out so people want to link to you
- Getting pageviews is fine, but to what end? You can generate traffic, but what do these people do when on your site except consume bandwidth
- Plenty of content, lots of key phrases
- 10% of traffic will have commercial intent
- Adsense is horrible (agreed!) If you are going to run ads use affiliate schemes
- The fundamental thing is that Google wants to find the sites that people want to see, so it really is just about the content
- SEOdigger.com – find out what keywords a site ranks for
On the is SEO ‘vulgar’ idea, yes it is if you want cheap good traffic and potentially revenue. In a sense its the as money being ‘vulgar’.
I know of a particular site and the owner sniffs at my efforts on SEO, but when I look at his traffic numbers compared to mine, its obvious he is hurting.
So I’ll take vulgarity any day!
Many of those points were valid. I can not stress enough as a blogger and a SEO person, content is key. Google ranks people with great content high, not people with great links.