Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling of Blizzard Internet Marketing has released a WordPess SEO Whitepaper that is available for free in PDF form. The white paper goes over the usual suspects such as the use of pretty permalinks, SEO Plugins and socializing your blog. The whitepaper also gives quite a few tips and tricks to help configure your WordPress powered blog so that it is SEO friendly from the get-go. This is an excellent read for those that are brand new to WordPress or for those curious to know what they could do to improve the SEO on their own blogs.
If you happen to download and read the PDF file, let us know what you think of the information.
This whitepaper is very intresting, especially for somebody new to WordPress and/or WordPress SEOptimizing.
For other, those who already has some knowledge of WP and optimizing it for search engines, it’s a good ‘book’ for repeating the great possibilities and attractiveness of WordPress.
Great for newbies, but with just enough meat to be interesting to more experienced users!
That’s right, Walter 😉
I thought that most of it was pretty basic but I hadn’t thought of the no-index on archive pages (makes sense) and using excerpts to make category pages more useful. Thanks!
Although I am blogging for 6 months, I will read it and try to apply some of the basics inside, if not already. 😉
Maybe for a post, this information is not new for a PDF, appears in many blogs. And i Think that the “newbies” already Know
Wow. I hate to say it, but I found nothing of value in this document.
Why in the world is it published as a PDF? This should be in simple HTML, and if you want it to print nicely it just needs a Print stylesheet. Makes no sense…
Some of the information is wrong, such as the advice that tag clouds help SEO. Yes, they aid in navigation, no they don’t help SEO.
There is some very bad generalized information present, such as advice to use “no index” on Archives (terrible, terrible idea), and to submit to random blog directories (3 words – “bad link neighborhood”).
Generally speaking, newbies could do much better by spending a couple of hours reading Lorelle on WordPress, and more experienced bloggers can just do something else.
John
“Windows servers are basically for Windows applications and WordPress is definitely NOT a Windows application.”
Erm, is that right? Sorry, the guide didn’t inspire me with confidence, and its’ very easy to do something wrong, and then spend months putting it right.
I agree with Darren’s concerns regarding the completeness of information in this PDF. Saying Windows servers are just like Windows applications is like saying a banana is just a stretched, yellow apple. Bashing an Operating System in a document about SEO is not only off-topic, but a perfect example of what not to do when trying to optimize ROI for their “handout”.
John’s suggestion to read about SEO on Lorelle’s site is spot on for anyone that is looking to seriously take on the slow process of ranking higher on the big search engines. Not only are Lorelle’s articles easier to read and understand, but they’re much less biased. Once the basics are learned, people can then move on to the much more thorough SEO blogs that get pretty deep in the theory and practices.
Rather generic, and not sure I’d buy into all that was said, there is a lot more to SEO than the article displays. The basic concept is okay, but SEO is a lot more than just a keyword rich title. The article seems more generic, and it gives a rather false impression that SEO is simple to accomplish. It really isn’t.
I’m really new at this, but I’ve read a lot in the last six months and a few things I had questions about, like using category/postname as a permalink, instead of just postname like everyone else suggests. Better? Does it put more keywords in the URL? Is that always a good thing?
That’s just one of the things I saw that conflicts with the general consensus. Which isn’t always bad, but there should be reason behind it and I didn’t find enough explanations as to why something might be a better idea.
I hate “tips” that just say, “do-it” and not why.
I can’t believe they suggest using category in the permalink! It’s a bad idea for the following reasons:
1. if you decide you want to change your category structure (always possible with a new blog), you can’t do so without breaking the permalinks.
2. if you post using the wrong category, you can’t move the post to the correct category without breaking the permalinks.
Basically if you use category in the permalink structure, you can never rename or delete a category, and you can never move posts from one category to another (unless you want to get into permalink redirection which is messy). Not a good idea!
If I was starting again, I’d just go with postname.
Most of it was old hat(to me…) – the snippet about noindexing archives was a heads-up. Learned the hard way to use just postname pretty links. Would be a good read-thru for someone starting out as long as they understood that these were ideas presented as starting points and not the end-all be-all.