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)

One of the wonders of social media is the way a message travels through the many networks. Depending on the message sometimes it mutates into a whole new discussion, or sometimes it stays pure and focused, but if the topic is at all interesting, it’s going to start discussion somewhere.

So, what’s the point? Not every post on your blog or to your network has to be an epic novel, perfectly crafted or deeply intellectual. In fact, sometimes it’s better if it isn’t. If you do all the talking, how do others get to pich in their own thoughts? Toss something provactive out into the melee and see what happens. Watch it for a while and chip in with your thoughts on what other people have said and pass those on through retweets, links or comments. Circulating discussions make the world go ’round…

09.10.08

Thank you everybody for tuning in to the webinar, as promised you’ll find links discussed in the webinar below as well as a few that we didn’t get time to talk about.

Please give me your feedback on the presentation and share your ideas for future webinars here.

Click on the video to view the  Webinar.

Social Media Marketing from Janet Fouts on Vimeo.