WordPress is an excellent blog authoring tool and can also be used as an all-around content management system (CMS) for your site.  Best of all, it’s inherently search-engine-friendly.

People often ask us for tips on WordPress settings for SEO. Here are the bare-bones basics:

- In Settings > General Settings, choose a site title and tag line that contain keywords you might want to rank well for.  Of course, the site title should also be recognizable as the name of your blog!

- Under Settings > Permalinks, we recommend a custom structure for permalinks that includes the post name, as seen here:

/%postname%/

This will create permalink URLs containing the words in your post title,  for example, “this-is-my-best-post-ever.html.” If you would prefer to include the date or other elements, scroll down on this WordPress Codex page for a list of other available tags.  Here’s an example of a URL format that includes the current year as well as the post name:

- Under Settings > Writing, be sure that the update service is filled in. A respected updating service is the following:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

- Under Settings > Privacy be sure to select that you want your blog to be publicly available.

- We recommend including breadcrumbs on each post. We use a plugin called Breadcrumb NavXT to make ‘em.

- HTML titles are important for SEO. You can install a plugin called All in One SEO Pack to gain the capability to edit HTML titles on each post, and to set up a good default format for all posts.  Some examples of good default formats are the following:
“Post Title | Blog Name”
“Blog Name: Post Title”

This screenshot shows an example of All in One SEO Pack settings for a breaking news website:

With these basic settings in place, your site will be indexable in search engines, and have at least a minimum level of on-page optimization built-in.  We’re guessing that was a lot easier than you thought it would be!  Congratulations – aren’t you glad you chose WordPress?

Readers: do you have an WordPress SEO tips to share?

Q: I’m a newbie reading your “Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day” book, and I had a question. On one hand I’d like my target keywords to be general and broad. However, these are highly competitive terms, and the big boys already have a leg up on them, so I was considering going after more specific keywords, [names of individual products] that I carry. Problem is that I have over 6,000 [individual products].

Should I be going for more general terms? Should I go after specific product names? Do I choose my 10 most popular products to optimize for? What if those products change in popularity over the months, and I just spent months trying to optimize for them?

A: Your situation is well-suited to a “long tail” approach to keyword optimization. This means that rather than selecting a short list of 10 or so keywords, you will dedicate your site to ranking well for a wide range of keywords, with all pages following site-wide general optimization guidelines. Each of the many thousands of product names may not get much of search volume, but in aggregate, this “long tail” provides a large amount of traffic.

For example, let’s say you have a shoe store and you decide that optimizing for specific shoe model names is the way to go. Do some keyword research on a sample set of product names (perhaps 5) to determine how people are searching. Are they searching for just the name, or something like “buy XXX online,” or any other variations? Do they include a brand name too? (as an aside, these patterns might change seasonally, so be sure to look at year-round numbers rather than just current numbers). Once you know what word patterns you’re targeting, you work on optimization for a TYPICAL product landing page. For this page, you make up general rules such as:

• HTML Page Title always follows the formula “Joe’s Discount Shoes: Buy [shoe name] Online” (or whatever your chosen formula is)
• Product Name always follows the formula: “[brand: shoe model]” (or whatever your chosen formula is).
• Description always includes “buy [brand: shoe model] online…”
• URL is always /brand-shoe-name.html
• Product photo always includes an ALT Tag: “Shoes: [Brand]: [Shoe Model]“
• Navigation text always includes shoe model name

(Note these are all examples and you should develop your own list).

In addition to the above, you may wish to choose a small number of generic, highly popular terms and to target these on your home page, or even include them sitewide, by incorporating them into your formulas. This combination of “queen bee” keywords (popular terms that get royal treatment on your site) with “long tail” keywords (lower volume keywords with a large number of different landing page possibilities) is often a powerful SEO strategy.

The basic principals in the book don’t change, but you’ll be applying them to ALL your pages rather than just a set number of landing pages.

Q: I really like your book but I am unable to find specific guidance on something that I think is really important – optimizing for exact phrase searches – “search phrase here” versus search phrase here. What’s your recommendation and why? It seems more or less impossible to have a realistic shot at high rankings without exact phrase optimization. On the other hand, how many people really search with exact phrases (I don’t but maybe I should!)?

A: While our gut is telling us that only a small percentage of searches are performed with quotes, we don’t know of any published research on this. Your question made us curious, so we took a look at our own sites (using Google Analytics), and found that between 1 and 3% of entry keywords contained quotes.

It is certainly possible that your audience has a greater-than-average tendency to use quotes. We would think that certain types of content, like musical lyrics, might have a higher than normal proportion of searches in quotes.

However, we suspect that even if folks are searching using quotes, there’s no single particular phrase that you will be able to focus on. Since searchers are moving further and further toward the long tail of search, there are going to be more & more variations in what they’re searching for. As far back as 2004 Google reported that 50% of its search queries each day were unique (used only once that day). What this tells us is that we must not get too fixated on a single incarnation of a phrase. Instead, we should be thinking about clusters of variations on a phrase, and even synonyms, all used naturally on a page. (Which is nice because it allows for more natural language than trying to say the exact same thing several times on a page!). One of the best descriptions of this is by Matt Cutts, the famed Google engineer, as he describes creating an article and incorporating keywords.

Our advice: stick to using quotes in your data gathering (if at all), and focus your optimization efforts on several variations of your top keyword choices.

Q: If I’m using a keyword such as “planet orbiter” or “planet orbiters”, do I need to focus on both words for meta searches, PPC, etc. or can I focus just on “planet orbiters” and trust that a good enough campaign will yield results for the singular “planet orbiter” search as well?

A: Since search engines recognize a difference between singular and plural words, we think it is best to represent your keyword in both singular and plural forms on your website.

Despite Google taking great pride in the fact that it returns meaningfully different results for “apple” and “apples” (people searching for the single word “apple” are more likely to be seeking the company and not the fruit), for the vast majority of searches, most people would agree that there isn’t a whole lot of meaning in the difference between singular and plural searches. If you think that your searchers could be querying both words, you should optimize for both too.

This is even more important when it comes to symbols such as apostrophes and dashes in words. Search engines provide different results for mockingbirds and mockingbird’s – as well they should. Be sure to do your research to determine which is the most popular form of your favorite keyword.

For pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, it’s usually a good idea to target all variations of a multiple-word keyword phrase (“mockingbird songs” “mockingbird song”, “mocking bird song”). In the rare instances when we sponsor single keywords, we usually only sponsor the singular version and make sure broad matching is enabled so that the plurals and other variations are represented. But if this is a critically important keyword for you, it’s probably worth your while to go ahead and sponsor individual variations. Again, though, it’s not always a great plan to sponsor single keywords, so make sure that you track carefully to make sure the traffic you pay for is converting at a reasonable rate.

You may also be interested in our previous “Ask the Experts” answer about targeting variations of multiple-word keyphrases.

As any SEO (search engine optimization) specialist will tell you, it’s never too early to think about the eventual search engine presence of your business. Even such a basic choice as the name of your business should be considered from an SEO mindset.

Your company name will very often be the text used in linking to your website. It’s likely to be the single term for which you have the best chance of gaining a top rank on search engines.  Conversely, it’s a term for which you are going to really, really want that #1 rank, so you shouldn’t make it too hard on yourself.  Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts for choosing a search-friendly company name:

• DO include keywords in your business name if possible.  Suppose your name is Joe Figudacamp and you are starting a company that sells restaurant fixtures in the Salt Lake City area. You could call your business “Figudacamp Associates” or you could call it “Figudacamp Fixtures.” See how the second name includes a keyword, and is also a better description of the company? Continuing along this path, you might consider naming your company “Salt Lake City Restaurant Fixtures,” but oh, it’s so long and boring. Here’s where the fun brainstorming comes in. Can you incorporate keywords while still choosing a memorable company name that represents you nicely?
• DON’T use a word that is also a common word in the English language, especially if it’s unrelated to your business focus.  Let’s say you’re a private investigator. Do you know how hard it’s going to be to rank #1 if the name of your business is “Sneakers”?  This advice applies to product names too.
• DO watch out for inadvertant synonyms, especially those that could have an adult tone.  Trying to do well on search engines for the private investigator’s company called “Sneakers” would be hard enough, let’s not even talk about “Dicks”!
• DON’T choose a phrase that is going to be highly competitive, unless you’re prepared for an uphill battle to that #1 spot.  In our book, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour A Day, we describe the process of determining how competitive a term is. For a quick read on the level of competition, do an “allintitle” search on Google for the phrase and see how many results come up (see Handy Search Shortcuts for help with this and other special searches).
• Likewise, DO think twice before using a personal name for the business. If your business is going to be tightly aligned with one person (interior designers or other consultants come to mind), and you have a unique, easy-to-remember, and easy-to-spell name, this might be a good choice.  If your name is common and you choose it as your business name, be sure to include differentiating terms: “John Miller Green Energy” will work better in the search arena than “John Miller Design.”
• DO include your location if you cater to a local market. Of course, DON’T limit yourself by including a location in your company name if you hope to expand in the future.
• DON’T go with a three letter acronym.  It may work for UPS and the IRS, but it’s a tough row to hoe for the average business.
• DO make sure the business name is unique, or close to it.  If there are other businesses with the same name but in different industries, consider adding a clarifying word to your name: not just “Pinkies” but “Pinkies Books.”
• DON’T go changin’.  If you already have an established business name, it’s generally not a good idea to change it based on SEO reasoning alone.

We’re no fools, we know that SEO is only one small factor in choosing a business name.  But let SEO play a role in the decision before anything is set in stone, and it just might pay you back with a successful search presence for your business!

Q: When generating your top 10 keyword list you say that one step is to combine your keywords. This confused me and I was hoping you could provide additional perspective.

On my top 10 list I have 3 phrases:

hamburger stands
great hamburger stands
best hamburger stands

Do you mean I should shrink this to 2 phrases (“great hamburger stands ” and “best hamburger stands”). If that’s the case, wouldn’t I be dropping out anyone who searches for “hamburger stands” which is a much broader (and very relevant) term for me? Won’t I miss a lot of people by doing this?

A: We do recommend combining keyword phrases when they contain the same keyword(s) in them. Let’s say your visible text contains 7 instances of the phrase “great hamburger stands.”  The search engines will know that your page is relevant to both “hamburger stands” and “great hamburger stands”, and you won’t “miss” your target audience. Technically, the keyword density (number of instances of the keyword phrase compared to the total number of words on the page) will be better for “great hamburger stands” vs. “hamburger stands,” but unless you’re in an extremely competitive situation, it’s still fine to combine the two on a given page.

Another very good reason to combine keywords is that it usually makes for much better writing. It’s important to avoid keyword-stuffed, repetitive sentences like this: “If you’re looking for hamburger stands, we’ll show you the best hamburger stands because we’re all about hamburger stands, especially the BEST hamburger stands.” And you want to avoid HTML title tags like: “ZappyCo: Hamburger Stands and Best Hamburger Stands,” because it’s not compelling to write that way!

And, most importantly, just because you’re combining the phrases doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t use just “hamburger stands” on your site – you should feel free to use it as needed! And you can also track your site’s performance for both variations of the terms.

We’re talking about organic (non-paid) optimization here. If you’re opening a pay-per-click account, as a rule it’s actually better to list all variations of your keyword phrases if you have the budget to do so.

Q: I am stuck on a problem that I hope you can help me overcome. I understand that almost everything hangs on the choice of keywords. I have subscribed to Wordtracker but can’t find a useful keyword that isn’t WAY OVERUSED already. See example below.

We are a non-profit organization that helps teachers and students learn more about business and entrepreneurship. We try to help teenagers start their own business and become successful entrepreneur. Each year we conduct a Business Plan Competition and a Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. We also provide curriculum and teaching aids for educators.

Unfortunately, each of the words underlined above scores a KEI (keyword effectiveness index) of .0004. How can I build a successful SEO strategy if I can’t find appropriate keywords that aren’t incredibly overhyped?

A: We just love your methodology for telling us your keyword choices. It really helps to put things in context.

It looks like you’re using Wordtracker’s KEI as a primary indicator of your keywords’ possible success. KEI is only one measurement. It’s at best controversial, and at worst, unloved by lots of SEOs. (For fun, you can Google “KEI is worthless” to get various opinions.) Our advice is to ignore KEI as it’s not really a prime indicator of the actual competitive climate of a given keyword, and it certainly doesn’t tell you anything about the suitability of a keyword for your website. In our SEO book we recommend assessing keywords differently, by doing things such as reviewing allintitle data (See our search engine shortcuts page for a how-to) and snooping on websites that are similar to yours in focus, among other tasks.

You note a bad KEI score for “each of the words” you underlined in your paragraph. Taken individually, of course, your keywords are awfully generic. Trying to rank for single words like “teacher” or “business” would be an exercise in futility, so if that was your line of thinking, it’s no wonder that you’re finding your keyword choices problematic.

Even if you find a few gems by combining the keywords in your paragraph, we wonder if you might be barking up the wrong tree. We say this, of course, with zero knowledge of your campaign, but we’ll go by our hunch here. Since your business offers an unusual service, you are probably in a situation where most people aren’t actively searching for exactly what you provide. If nobody’s looking for your service, then you need to think about what they are looking for, and how your business fulfills this need.

One way to do this is to rewrite your paragraph from a user’s perspective and see what keywords emerge when you think this way. Off the top of our heads there might be some tie-in to summer jobs (i.e. you provide and alternative solution to them) or college preparedness (surely what you do helps beef up a college application), and it looks like you might offer specific tools for teachers – not just “curriculum” – like, say lesson plans. And, by all means, don’t forget to consider adding location-specific keywords to the mix. If you’re having trouble finding these kinds of keywords, it’s time to call up some of your teachers, students, and volunteers, and ask how they would describe your business to others. You might be surprised – and enlightened – by what they tell you.

Q: I’m a professional SEO. I have a potential B2B client who keeps saying: “Sure, online marketing works for B2C or just selling stuff on the Internet, but it doesn’t work well with B2B.” Is that true? And do you know of any studies that I can quote to show whether SEO works for B2Bs or not?

A: There are some very good reasons that SEO works for B2B (business-to-business) websites. The main reason is that targeting is the key to B2B website success. The total traffic for a B2B can be very small, as long as it’s well targeted. You don’t have to bring in thousands of users per day;  you just need to bring in the right people. By contrast, with their bigger audiences, large B2C (business-to-consumer) sites often find pay-per-click advertising prohibitively expensive. Websites with a very focused niche are actually perfect candidates for SEO. As a bonus, SEO will help your B2B clients think about their users – what categories do they fall into and what are they looking for – so it can be a great part of a holistic web usability effort.

Of course, if you’re promoting a B2B site, your SEO strategy should be tailored for a B2B site. You won’t want to focus on general keywords; instead you may want to focus on more specific keywords like product names and descriptions.

In some cases, it will be harder to track SEO success for a B2B than for a B2C.  This is because your conversions are not likely to be straight sales or any other quantitative value, but rather leads off the website, phone calls, or something even less tangible like branding. Further, the total number of people visiting your site is smaller than a typical consumer site, so you’ll have fewer opportunities to experiment with your SEO strategy through variations on landing pages or navigation.

We do know of one B2B study, which we quoted in our book, which states that “A 2004 survey found that in business-to-business (B2B) purchasing decisions, 63.9% of respondents stated that a search engine would be the first place they would go to research a product or service.(Source: Enquiro/MarketingSherpa).” Of course this is a couple of years out of date, but our strong suspicion is that these numbers are only going to go up, not down. One important takeaway is this: Visitors to B2B sites are using the Web for background research, not necessarily direct goal seeking as you’d see in B2C. Since this is the case, you as the SEO provider need to work hard up front to figure out how you are going to measure and track gains, and tie them to your SEO efforts.

One last thought: have you looked up any of this client’s competitors? In some cases, if your competition is using SEO in their marketing efforts, that’s reason enough for you to do it, too. You would hate for a competitor’s name to come up in a search for your product. (Ask your client whether they’d like to come up in a search for the term “myProduct vs theirProduct” and we have a feeling they are going to say yes!)

And lastly, think about how SEO can play into a company’s branding efforts and overall reputation.  All companies, but probably B2Bs especially, should pay some attention to their online reputation and make sure that searches aren’t bringing up anything embarrassing or discrediting.

Q: How do you feel about using Google Trends as a tool for search term relevance and popularity?

A: Google Trends is a tool that allows you to compare the popularity for up to five keywords or phrases over a period of time. I think it’s a great idea, and I have played around with it during keyword reseach, but I haven’t yet found a way to make it useful in that way. There’s nothing wrong with Google Trends – it just isn’t trying to be a keyword research tool. It might seem premature to pick apart something that’s in early beta, because it may change at any time. But Google Trends is free, so I’m guessing that if you and I have thought of using it as a keyword research tool, then other folks are considering the same thing. Let’s see how it measures up.

The first thing to note is that, at this time, Google is only using a portion of its search results in the calculation of its trend data. So, it’s important not to put too much stock in the results you get.

Now, let’s look at some sample results. Here, I looked for a correlation between the words “halloween” and “candy” by entering the query: “Halloween, candy”:

My first impression is that Google Trends keeps too much important data hidden to be meaningful in keyword research. A keyword research tool has to give you some hard data so that you can make an educated guess about what’s worth your time and energy to target on your site. Google Trends displays a vague timeline, and gives you no indication of the number of searches that you’re looking at. The lowest point is labeled “0″, but what’s the top? 100? 100,000? Without that information I can’t act on what I see.

This is most confusing when you’re looking at two words with significantly different search volumes.  In my “Halloween, Candy” example, I see the spike I expect around the same time of every year displayed for the word “Halloween” but not for “candy.”  So I searched both words separately. The graph for “Halloween” looked about the same, but the graph for “candy” looked much different when viewed by itself. It was much easier to see separate peaks and valleys, presumably because the scale had been altered when this term was displayed on its own.

Another strike against Google Trends as a serious keyword research tool is that it doesn’t offer any keyword suggestions. For example, I queried: “Halloween, horror DVD”. Again, the spike for “Halloween” was clearly seen. But there was no corresponding spike for “horror dvd.” Because I’d already done keyword research elsewhere, I knew that the term “horror movie” is more popular than “horror dvd,” so I changed my search to “Halloween, horror movie.” There, I saw a nice correlation. Without built-in help from Google Trends, I had to rely on my own knowledge and prior research to find the significant trend.

And one more problem: Google Trends isn’t clear enough about how it’s filtering the terms you enter. Is it looking for exact matches of your terms? Is it returning data on broader terms that contain the phrase you entered? I played around by refining my query, for example, searching for variations on “emmy, red carpet”, using various configurations of quotes and plurals, and I was able to get different results.  Google Trends also offers some helpful advice on advanced functionality, which includes some non-standard operators, such as the vertical bar. This is fun, but still I have the distinct feeling that I’m playing “guess the algorithm.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with that; it just isn’t great for serious keyword research!

It remains to be seen whether Google will continue its slow takeover of the world by making Google Trends into a robust free keyword research tool. But what can you use it for now? Well, Google Trends could be useful when you’re trying to nail down the timeframe of a seasonal word (i.e. should I start my Christmas promotion in October or December?). At this point in time, I think the best use of Google Trends for SEO purposes – other than fun – is to confirm a trend that you were pretty sure about in the first place.

Q: We sell commercial grade textile products in bulk to restaurants, hotels, nursing homes, country clubs, etc… (e.g. table linen, aprons, table skirting, towels, etc…). I have a very good list of the keywords I want to optimize for, but I’m not sure how to keep the “household” market away. They want to buy, for example, 1 tablecloth where our minimum is 1 dozen. My tendency is to put the words “wholesale” or “bulk” in font of many of these terms (e.g. “wholesale ______ or “bulk ________”). Is that a bad idea? Is there any other way to keep the “household” market away?

A: Your idea about keywords is very good. In addition to “wholesale” and “bulk” you might want to consider a word describing the customer, for example “hotel linens” or “restaurant tablecloths.” This might be closer to the way that your target audience is thinking. (Then, ideally, your website will have an appropriate landing page for each of these terms – but we’re getting a bit ahead of things now!)

We would also recommend that you clearly specify that you are a wholesale provider in your Meta Descriptions and, if possible, your HTML Page Titles. This will help to differentiate your website from consumer/household sites.

Last, be sure to pursue inbound links from niche directories that cater to your target audiences. This “third page of search” can be a good source of targeted B2B website visitors.