There are a lot of great plugins out there that will do amazing things for your WordPress site – but one of the MOST important plugins to start with (and make sure you’re using correctly) is the All in One SEO. This is an easy way to make sure your title bar is optimized for the search engines.

If you’re not sure what your title bar is, it’s the title that appears at the VERY top of your screen (not the web address or URL that’s in the browser – but it’s next to the firefox icon if you use firefox and next to the IE icon if you’re using Internet Explorer). This is the first thing the search engines see when they come to your site. Don’t waste this space of something that’s NOT one of your keywords or is a generic term when you could be using something specific.

A simple example of this would be the WordPress Installation page I have. If you click on that page, the title bar will read ‘WordPress Installation – The WordPress Chick. So you know exactly what this page is about. The great thing about using this plugin is that once it’s set, you’re done. You don’t have to go back and configure anything. It automatically puts what you want, where you want it! Each time you write something (and this applies to a page or a post). This really is something you should implement right away! And then of course, track your traffic and visits before AND after you’ve set it all up!

Plugins are one of the things that make WordPress so much fun as well as making it easy to optimize your blog for the search engines. I recently signed up for Google Alerts (not sure why I hadn’t signed up for this sooner…and if you’re not signed up, I’d highly recommend it!) and set my alert on the word ‘WordPress’.  I receive a number of alerts each day on WordPress from various blogs or sites. One of the alerts I received today was on a video of Joost de Valk (yoast…look him up and check out how MUCH he does online and for WordPress). He’s created multiple plugins for WordPress and also has a listing of basic plugins you should have for SEO on your blog.  I have a tendency to go for the plugins that have a little ‘punch’ to them….visually- which isn’t always the smartest thing to do! You can have the fun, flashy plugins, but they won’t do you  any good if no one comes to your site!

One of the basic plugins he recommends is the SEO slugs plugin. I’ve just installed it, so I’m curious to see how it works and how it helps. It will definitely help on a couple other of my sites.

What this pluggin does is it takes any post title that is long (or basically a sentence) and removes the stop words. For those of you who don’t know, stop words are like ‘the, a, and, it ,is, etc.  You obviously don’t want any of these stop words in your domain name, but sometimes it’s hard NOT to use them in your post title.

Here’s an example of how it works from a post on another one of my sites:
The post title was ” Learning to pause with your kids..”    – with the SEO slugs plugin, the post title would look like this:
learning-pause-kids. Which is much easier for the search engines. Such a simple little plugin, but SO important.

So I’ve realized that one of the biggest challenges for people with WordPress is a lot of the technical side of what needs to be done to make sure your site is optimized. I’m sure that sounds somewhat obvious to many people, but if you’re just getting started out with WordPress, or you’ve managed to get your blog/site set up- you may be in the “what now?” stage. It’s quite possible you’re ready to self host your site too. Either way, as someone who wasn’t very technical until this past year, I can completely understand the frustration or challenges you may be having.

One of the most important pieces to having a website or blog is that people need to know you’re there- and you need to know how they found you. Google has some great free resources to help you get started as well as take your site to the next level- whatever that may be for you.

The first thing to do is to sign up for an account with Google. It’s totally free and there are a ton of resources that will walk you through what you need to do. I’ll also have some videos posted here in the next week or so that walk you through different tasks. But first, get signed up with Google. There are lots of things you can add to your account, but for now you should just start with Google Analytics and Google sitemap (I’d recommend a gmail account too). Once you’ve set up your account you need to download both the analytics plugin and the xml sitemap generator plugin for wordpress. You can find them here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

If you need help uploading these, drop me a line and I can help you get them installed. Just make sure you’ve signed up with Google too!