Ok so you’ve read the last post wp seo secrets I ?  now, where to start..?

Well, our apologies in advance for the length of this post, (but, not really) ..there’s probably 2 or 3 more like this to come yet, and if it’s too long to read, you don’t deserve to know

We’re going to get started on planning and creating content, operational strategy & tactics over the next couple (few) posts, this one will deal with basic content creation principles.

Content – Pages

..We need to get posting pure and simple, but firstly we need to work out a few things. Are we having static pages? as per the previous post we think you want them, and they don’t just want to be “about us” and “contact”

..We need to think ahead, a long way ahead.

What is your ultimate keyword target? ..say over 3 years your site explodes, and you became the authority on your topic, what’s the ultimate glory ranking word/s?

Hopefully it will be in your domain name anyway, but if not, no matter, we optimize the front page for it, and get the correct variants and modifiers into the descending URL structure.

So with our site as an example, SEO Ibiza, obviously the ultimate targets are the big one worders, SEO & Ibiza, it wouldn’t get any better than getting first page for both of those.. (but neither would exactly be “converting keywords” and so cost / benefit must always apply))

So carefully optimize your top level (index) page for your ultimate target term/s. You wont be ranking for them for a while, but we’re ready.

Then continuing onwards, and using our blog as an example (ignoring the site above it for the moment) think about the next level down modifiers, which are words that go together with your top level target words.

As our main site targets the vast majority of the “proper” SEO keywords that we know convert (and some others too ) we really use the blog mainly for supplementing content to “rank though” the site above, and for immediacy in the charts when required. (see numpty for example) so the WP page names below are a bit more offbeat, but serve as examples.

Use the Google suggested phrases for your main keyword (at the bottom of the Google page) to help you if youre unsure, we there’s a very good chance that if you correctly structure the sub-phrases you’re on a short cut to sitelinks or maybe “keyword authority” around a certain phrase (your top level one)

So our blog static pages that are supposed to rank (not “about” ) are SEO +

• Music / Media <<– try search
• Alliances <<– try search

The point of this is to demonstrate that when you start ranking for the bigger  terms above, if the site is structured properly, the sub-terms will have already taken care of themselves. We are basically aiming to ultimately rank each and every page for it’s name / title.

So if you are a web designer, your ultimate goal would “web design” and under that you might want to cover “Flash web design,” “Accessible web design”, CMS websites, then  maybe the Geo modifiers, UK,  South East etc etc,  we recommend (actively encourage) up to 10 or so static pages, especially if you are on the root/ and don’t have a static site above the blog, static pages generally get stronger over time with linkjuice, this is a huge advantage to have say 8 or 10 more  PR3 or 4 pages as PR banks we can leverage, or static content to rank the blog posts through.

So go here https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and look at the traffic figures for each of the subterms, and cross-reference with what’s most relevant to your site and product, not what has the highest traffic. Targeting the wrong words and chasing impossible phrases is just silly, we want qualified, targeted traffic only, all the rest is mostly pointless.

Decide what pages you need and create them.

Then  go through the tool about 3 more times using a lot different examples until you think you’ve got all the variations and different ways of saying things covered, add all the terms you like and follow the basic procedure given in the example below on the pages for the more competitive terms.

You may have (hopefully) have some expert knowledge on the subject to impart and can embellish the example given, but at a base level, if we have to build a  strong keyword landing page, this is how we do it. (still can’t believe we’re giving this away..)

So using “wordpress seo” as the example phrase in the google tool above, we selected these keywords as examples.

• wordpress seo
• how to seo wordpress
• how to seo blog
• wp seo
• blog setup
• blogging seo
• blogs seo
• seo blog

From this, just start writing naturally, inserting the phrases as the opportunity presents itself. We knocked this paragraph up straight off the cuff for this example.

<title>Wordpress, SEO & Your Blog</title>

In this article we’re going to cover all aspects of blogging SEO, we are aiming to produce a comprehensive guide on how to SEO a blog, from WP SEO configuration on the initial blog setup, through to your content, site structure and strategies, we’re going to explode your Blogs SEO until it ranks like a pro SEO (Ibiza ) blog

Get the idea?  you’ve gotten all the words covered in easy natural language in the intro. Now just talk some more around it below, naturally, and you’re mostly there.

This a hyper condensed version, ideally you want a minimum of 200 words, but we could rank just the text above if we had to.. in fact we already did it with 66 words, here – Simple SEO

But to get all the phrases in, you have to talk around them with other words that fit the mood, and when seen in context of eventually starting to rank for “WordPress SEO” we guarantee that all of the easier phrases and terms will be ranking long before.

The pages don’t all have to go up straight away, you can add them in over time, maybe as analytics shows interest in certain areas, (like the static site you should have above you) but don’t lose sight of this principle in a frenzy of blogging, it’s fundamental. Then turn the comments off on the pages, and forget about them, its time to get blogging.

Content – Posts

Posting from an SEO perspective is SEO Content creation, but you needn’t stress about keyword repetition, density or any of that nonsense, on posts you can really be natural, after you’ve done your post and theme planning.

We have 4 main types of post, although they often play dual roles. This post is both a theme post, and a working post..

1. Themed posts - pick your target themes and plan series of at least 3 posts around the topic. At least a week apart and staggered between the other types of posts is good. -Examples – UK / London SEO / WordPress SEO ..that kind of thing

2. Working Posts – where we have primarily an SEO objective. These can also be thought of as “node” posts and tend to deep link heavily, and are targets for linking into.

3. Opportunist Posts – which quite often turn into themes, generally inspired by news we’re onto quickly – example WordPress Tags Nofollow, and the Google upgrade series of posts started life as an opportunist post.

4. Filler posts – Just things we want to write about, but staying roughly on the general theme, examples – open letter to webbies – numpty of the year

So, lets make some..

1. Themed posts, for rankings, the most important kind.

Theme example of ours: Google algo update / change. 3 posts as below.

31st Oct 2008 – Original post includes “links / linkbuilding”

• <TITLE>Google Algo Update – Linkbuilding Hit
• blog/2008/10/31/google-algo-update-linkbuilding-hit/

03rd March 2009 - second of the series includes “Vince” and “Mar 09″

• <TITLE>Google confirm “Vince’s” Algo Change March 09
• blog/2009/03/06/google-confirm-vince-algo-change-mar-09/

02nd April 2009 – 3rd in series – includes Pagerank,  Links, Blogrolls

• <TITLE> Google Update April 09 – Pagerank – Algo – Links
• blog/2009/04/02/google-update-pagerank-algo-links-blogrolls/

Note we’ve used a combination of “change” and “update”, and worked in other words you’d usually expect to be associated with the main terms, “links”, “linkbuilding” , “pagerank” & “blogrolls”. The positioning of the keywords is also varied slightly (remember, further to the left, more weighting) so they dont try to compete with each other too much for rankings, but rather attempt to compliment each other, via overlapping Titles and linking at each other with (again ideally overlapping) TAT

And because we know this post is one of a series to come on the topic..

Write in extra keyword phrases for link opportunities in upcoming posts

Put the first post of the series up, and depending on your current linkstrength, or perhaps domain authority, plus optimization skills on the post, it will settle to (say) #30.

Now, as we all know, by now? Google likes relevant links. – Well they do, they like them hugely (we’ve been testing) and relevant internal links on a domain with a reasonable amount of trust, work almost as well as external links, you may need a few more, but they will often do the job alone.

Well guess what, a post that ranks for a phrase, (even if it only ranks highly in your own site) is a relevant place to link from, for that phrase.   unless it’s the only instance of the word or something.

So use the Google site: operator to search your back content for link opportunities you already have, ie.

use Google’s own relevance calculations to tell you which is the most relevant place to link from.

The higher it ranks for the phrase in the SERP, the stronger the link

So search site:www.seoibiza.com/ google update OR google algo OR algo update  OR google change, OR algorithm, OR….   get the idea?

Find 3 “Google relevant” places to link internally from, preferably where the text already exists, but if not adding a new paragraph to a likely old post is second best. If you don’t see anything that looks relevant, you could always change the post titles and urls and make it relevant (Use redirection to 301 from old URL to new)

Then the next post..

• a) links at the previous with the best TAT (target anchor text, remember?)
• b) links at 2 more old posts, using their ideal TAT
• c) write in 2 more pre-written link opportunities for upcoming posts
• d) edit Post Title (in all in One) and url slug. Use singular  / plural and semantic variations.

Next if you’ve got trackbacks working properly (dofollowed) WordPress now goes out and gets links for you. .. Lets say the deep posts you linked at are PR3.

Not only have you linked at them and helped them further, but you have added extra <edited snippet> of content to them (which can quite often be the cause of a double indented listing and/or cause hits from words in the trackback text)

And.. you’ve also linked straight back at your new post, from 3 x PR3 pages, using your ideal anchor text (the post-title) Then take it a step further, go to each comment and edit the snippets, and anchors of the link/s. And vary them, slightly different, with anchor text overlap in the phrases.

ie Google Algo update / Google update Algo / Google change Algo.

Rinse and repeat with post 3, linking at both the previous two posts, and again the same process with the trackbacks. This (trackback optimization and backsearching your content) is a very powerful tactic for launching new pages or posts strongly, give it a week or two for the links to cache, and watch yourself float upwards, and this still isn’t the fully story, this strategy  gets stronger still when you have an optimized static page above you, that all three posts also link at using the ultimate target phrase ..

2. Working posts

Working posts are not necessarily designed to rank, although they usually do, but they have more  of an SEO working objective in mind. Usually to bolster up  previous post/s by more deep linking, and very often to tie multiple separate posts together by a common theme (and self-reinforcing links) into a “node” page.

example http://www.seoibiza.com/blog/2009/04/22/ukseo-services/

The primary objective here is new page launch, to announce and get the new static page indexed immediately, which of course it will be  the moment the spiders hit the post on pinging and follow the outbound links. Not only that but it’s indexed through a “Google relevant” link which is a good start in life.

Secondary objectives are:

1. test shot into the target SERP to gauge strength
2. build a theme base for “SEO UK”- remember this post will trackback link at itself using TAT and has been back-search-linked.

Think of it as a relevancy “node” attempting to tie together similar subjects. We will link at it from future posts, and it links to target pages / posts, plus also goes and gets links to itself.

Try to keep a 50/50 ratio of linking to other posts that will trackback to you, and external / target pages / posts, and the node should be self-strengthening with time as posts  it’s linking to and from are  further deep linked to.

Opportunist posts

One of the biggest problems faced by many many bloggers is what to write about on an ongoing basis, its often difficult to come up with new ideas and fresh material. But when you can get onto something important early, or even first, there is big potential for traffic, and picking up natural links by being one of the first into the SERP with a post about it.

Google also seem to possibly give extra long-lasting credence over and above the freshness factor to posts that were first in the charts, our “Google upgrade tool/s” post is an example of this (plus some timely use of redirection actually, but we’ll get to that later on )

We run Google alerts on our theme words, watch the big boys blogs, SEObook, SEOmoz etc, and just  generally keep an eye out for news or interesting stuff to expand on or add something to, and this is the key, make it your own, whether by adding in your personality, some extra information, or being controversial doesn’t really matter, just get onto it and get it ranking first or in the first 5 posts about it.

If youre 3 days late, it’s too late, don’t bother unless you can really add new value to it, no-ones interested in reading the same old thing re-hashed over and over.

Apply standard linking tactics (as per theme posts) and never be afraid to link out to the resource or competitors who break news, it probably helps bind you into the mix for the term, and definitely doesn’t hurt. (if they’re direct chart competitors just use bland anchor text, dont nofollow them it’s rude) If you’re linking to another WP blog post, the author will see it, and sometimes they’ll even link back at you if you’ve added anything of interest to the discusion.  ..More trackback power. (We run dofollow trackbacks guys, decent inbounds are rewarded, scrapers will be spammed as usual of course)

If the topic does go big for the owner of the original post or resource, his (exploding) traffic will all see your trackback in his comments and you then get involved that way.

Filler posts - these are as the name implies, exactly that, fodder to fill the gaps.

However, that doesn’t mean they should be poor, these are actually our favourite posts. Write about things you want to say, or get off your chest. Use humour as much as possible, make them as entertaining as you can.  Link as out as relevant, inbound if it’s applicable, but don’t try to get SEO links in that don’t go with the story. It’s a chance to practise your writing skills and not worry too much about SEO for a change.

So that’s the basics of WordPress SEO content creation in operation, there’s a lot more to come and offsite strategies that combined with the onsite tactics give you the same effect as:

1 + 1 = 3.

So that’s where it ends today, hope it wasnt too hard work, and you’ve seen something you might not have thought about yet, but if not there’s plenty more to come. At least 2, maybe 3 more posts will be along shortly.

The next post will be looking at how to leverage the content for indented listings, how to leverage the static site above with your wordpress content below, and some of the ways of leveraging RSS to help give your blog posts that instant chart punch.

..seeya next time, Ibiza out.