I thought I knew quite a bit about search engine optimization until I found this nifty new tool called Scribe. Even though I optimize sites for search engines as part of my daily duties, it can be tedious and there is always more to learn. Unless you do this for a living it’s probably not the central part of your day now is it?

So how do you learn SEO techniques and see how it relates to your own content online? If you’re like me, you want to get your hands dirty and see SEO best practices as they apply to your actual content instead of reading an e-book and then trying to see how it relates to what you do.

That’s where Scribe comes in. Install the plugin, write your content and analyze it to see how to fine tune it for search engine optimization, learn some best practices and really get an understanding of how all this works. Analyze it again until you gt the results you’re looking for.

Here’s a video I put together to show you how it works on a post and what I do when I use it in WordPress.

You can also use Scribe with other types of sites and here are videos for Scribe for Joomla, and Scribe for Drupal too.

When you consider what it can cost to hire a web copywriter who understands SEO this plugin is quite the deal. How does that old proverb go? “Teach a girl to fish”??

Anyway, here’s a link to Scribe Plans and Prices

Want to learn more about SEO? Click here to grab your free SEO copywriting report by Copyblogger founder Brian Clark, a step-by-step strategy for creating content that scores well, is highly readable and engaging, and ranks well in search engines.

Please note: This post contains affiliate links for this product. I stand behind this review and hope you’ll support the work we do by clicking any of the links above.

There, I said it. And I feel better for it. See, here’s the thing. Some people sell social media as a “great traffic driver” and it is, it’s awesome Google candy too, but that shouldn’t be your goal or your sole reason for using it. What you really want to do is build visibility of your brand, whether that’s a personal or corporate brand. You want to be discovered and for people to actually care you exist. You want to establish your professional reputation. You don’t do that by peppering your conversations with link after link to your services page.

These promoters who say they can drive tons of traffic to your site may be just increasing your bounce rate. Think about it. The last time you went to a social bookmarking site looking for something interesting. You clicked on how many links? How long did you stay on those pages and did you connect with the brand or read a bit and move on?

In most cases it’s the latter unless there is a reason to engage.

So. Here’s my new mantra. Who cares about traffic to your web site. Build traffic to YOU instead. Whatever social site or web site you have a presence on has value and it’s highly likely that your aggregate traffic to your social media sites trumps your web site altogether. So quit worrying about where people find you and just make sure that wherever they do find you they get real, valuable information and a way to connect with you personally.

One aspect of my job and volunteer responsibilities is marketing events online. When there is an up-coming event I reach out to the various listing sites like Upcoming, Eventbrite etc. and make sure the events are properly listed to get the most coverage possible for the event. Recently though I’ve noticed a humongous up tick in search engine results for my clients from event and scheduling sites.

Let’s take the riding class recently offered by my friends and clients at Bright Ranch in San Martin , Ca. If you know me personally you know I get down to the ranch as often as I can to ride and so of course I’m happy to help them with their social media and online marketing as well.

Trainer Dennis Bright offered an all day horsemanship seminar last week and I helped them through the process of setting up ticketing on Eventbrite and distributing the information to a few event announcement sites as well. I also put it up on my own Plancast page and shared it with my friends. Now Dennis has a big personal following already, and those who knew him just called and made their reservations over the phone or in person, so the first run at Eventbrite was less than successful, but he still had an excellent turnout and we all had a great time. All good.

Long story short
As part of my follow up I did some searches to see where else the listing had ended up. You see most of these sites also share their content with local newspapers for their online audience, other events and calendar sites. The event created 5 pages of listings on a Google Search before the quality started to degrade! A quick look at the site stats showed an increase of 301.77% in unique visits.

Creating your own event marketing strategy
What’s the secret? Well I guess I’d say it’s getting the event out early enough beforehand so the various sites have time to pick it up. I love eventbrite for tickets so we do all the ticketing there and then posted on Upcoming, Yelp, Eventful, Facebook and Plancast and a few other event sites specific to the locale and then let the search and distribution engines do their magic.

This isn’t just for offline events either. I recently presented a webinar for Biz360 on listening tools for social media. The day before the event I did a quick search and although they hadn’t posted it on event sites someone had it on their plancast calendar and it showed up as the 4th result in a search for “Janet Fouts”. (It showed up in Google alerts. I don’t really spend all day Googling myself, honest!)

All of this has been quite educational to watch and you can be sure I’ll be fine tuning my social media coaching around events and online marketing in the future. So should you!

One of the major reasons to use WordPress is SEO, and lots of other people have added to my knowledge base over the years. Remarkablogger put out some really awesome  tutorials a while back and I learned a lot from him as well as many others.

Rather than keep all that SEO goodness to myself I thought I share it with you. Take what’s useful and add your own favorite WordPress SEO tips and tricks in the comments! Keep in mind that you may or may not want to use all of these. I’m running most of them and don’t have any conflicts, but plug-ins have been known to conflict with each other or the themes you’re using, so take it easy.

Plug-ins

WordPress All in One SEO Pack has been the acknowledged leader for some time, but Platinim SEO Pack gets even better. The biggest diffeence is now you can change your permalinks without getting dinged by Google or losing page rank. Platinum SEO will issue a 301 re-direct to the new location. VERY cool.

SEO Friendly Images Let’s face it, we all forgt to put in those important alt and title attributions, but it really can be a tool to get you better SEO. This plug-in does it for you when you forget.

Google XML Sitemaps creates a Google compliant XML sitemap nd updates the map with every new post or edit.This is a good thing and not just for Google. Most of the major serach engines appreciate an XML site-map.

Speaking of search engines. They really do still like robots meta tags. Robots Meta will add them for you. It will also create nofollow category listings to prevent the dreaded Page Rank leakage.

Cross-linker allows you to pre-select words you want hyperlinked to defined URL’s. Don’t over use it, but this kind of linking can help you get better SEO and help users find tose deeply buried treasures in your blog. Remembr though to keep your keywords to a minimum. Loading up a post with criss-links can make it painful to read through, and after all, content is still the point!

Google Positioner lets you track your keywords in Google and see how you are performing.

If you’re not using Platinum SEO Pack or All in One SEO Pack which let you edit the url for your posts. you should think about SEO Slugs. This one lets you remove the “stop words” that decrease the value of the page. So you can make a long file name like”/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings” into “immediately-higher-rankings” and get much better SEO results.

WP Auto Tagger uses the Yahoo API to suggest tags based on contnet. Search engines like tags that are relevant to the content. (DUH)