4 SEO Plug-ins for WordPress
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Is your website is powered by WordPress? Curious about ways you can optimize your site’s performance? Add new features and functionalities that you never dreamed were possible with the abundance of free WordPress plug-ins that at your disposal here. In this post, we’ll be discussing a few SEO-focused plug-ins that can help get your site optimized in a pinch, without any time-eating legwork holding you back.
One of the more popular SEO-related plug-ins for WordPress.org users, the WordPress SEO plug-in includes a wide variety of helpful features that help you to write better content, analyze pages, set templates for titles and meta descriptions, and much more. The plug-in comes with plenty of helpful documentation that can help anyone (from novice to expert) maximize their site’s potential.
Get the plug-in here.
This plug-in automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines. Here’s a list of some of the features you’ll find:
• Support for Google Analytics and custom post types
• Automatically generates META tags
• Automatically optimizes titles for search engines
• Helps you to avoid typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Backwards compatible with many other plug-ins and more!
Get the plug-in here.
Are you plagued by duplicate content? Looking to increase your site’s ranking? The SEO Content Control plug- in will help you to identify and clean up different types of weak content in order to improve your website’s quality and to rank better.
Get the plug-in here.
This customizable plug-in will help you to automatically add alt and title attributes to the images on your WordPress site.
Get the plug-in here.
SEOWH Resource Round-Up
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Photo credit: marciookabe
For the last couple of months, we at SEOWH have used our blog and social media channels to share informative links with our audience. We thought we’d put them all in one place for easy access. Enjoy an array of articles on everything from SEO best practices to keyword research and more! We want the resources we provide to be useful, so please feel free to comment with topic ideas and suggestions.
Looking back at 2011:
Web Analytics Year in Review 2011
Looking ahead to 2012:
SEO Hosting Blog | 5 SEO Trends To Follow In 2012
An SEO Playbook For 2012
Keywords & Keyword Research
Mapping Keywords to Content for Maximum Impact – Whiteboard Friday
Five Questions to Streamline Your Keyword Research
Visualize Your Keyword Research
Best Practices
The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO
Why You Need A Social Media Dashboard
Grassroots SEO – Strategy, Process & Life Cycle
An SEO Checklist for New Sites – Whiteboard Friday
Do As I Say, Not As I Do: A Look At Search Engines & SEO Best Practices
Content & Content Strategy
SEO Content Strategy: Keyword Expansion
6 Ways to “Thicken” Your Content
Google Algorithm Changes
Scripting SEO: 5 Panda-Fighting Tricks for Large Sites
A Visual Look at 2011 Google Algorithm Changes
Miscellaneous
7 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation
Advanced Google Analytics – Tips and Tricks
Local Search Evolved (Infographic)
5 SEO Trends To Follow In 2012
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With the numerous algorithm updates done by Google over 2011, most SEOs are on the edge of their seats waiting to find out what’s in store for 2012. The new year will likely require SEOs to bone up on their ethics, visitor interaction and smarter optimizing practices if they want to get the best results.
The past year has proven that Google is planning to bring the hammer down even harder on SEOs with questionable practices. Quality, ethics and smart optimization strategies will be the factors that differentiate the smart SEOs from the uninformed ones.
1. Quality Content Is A Must
2011 has taught many SEOs a valuable lesson in focusing on well-crafted content that engages readers. Gone are the days of useless keyword-filled, pseudo-articles clogging the web’s arteries and leaving the end user frustrated and searching for something legitimate.
The Google PANDA updates of 2011 have left once-profitable websites in the dark, as Google has taken to penalizing websites with poor quality content. Placing an emphasis on the quality, uniqueness and the readability of the content will be the name of the game in 2012. However, keywords are still important factors in good SEO. Moving forward, the challenge will be finding the delicate balance between optimizing for readers and staying in step with Google.
2. Emphasis on Social Proof
Google will take social proof into even higher consideration in 2012. The number of comments on content, the amount of tweets and Facebook ‘Likes’ as well as ‘+1s’ will be an indication to Google as to the quality of the 
content. Place a stronger emphasis on engaging users and inspiring social media interaction in order to come out ahead on this trend.
Expanding the scope of your social efforts, such as establishing and maintaining a presence on Google+ and other growing social channels (such as Pinterest, YouTube and others) will be key . Though Google+ is still growing, the search engine that created it will likely take the size of circles and ‘+1s’ to gauge the quality of your content.
Learn more here.
3. The Growth of Mobile Search
With the increase in smart phone technology, more and more users are relying on their mobile devices to search for information. Mobile marketing proved to be a colossal contender in 2011 and its rank of importance in the SEO world will only climb higher as the year progresses. Leave no stone unturned when optimizing for mobile web – this is where the users will be in 2012.
4. CRO & SEO & Best Practices
The relationship between CRO and SEO will be more important than ever in the coming year. Conversion Rate Optimization is the process of creating an online experience for an end user with the goal of converting the user into a customer, and a good conversion rate is crucial to an online business. Driving all the traffic in the world to a website that does a poor job of converting visitors does little to actually help the client’s business prosper. 2012 will force SEOs to place more of an emphasis of SEO/CRO hybrid services, as one is not very effective without the other.
Learn more about CRO best practices here.
5. More competition!
2012 will be the year that more and more companies let go of their reservations and start investing in SEO. This increased interest will bring a higher number of competitors, and ranking for once-easy search terms will require more . In 2012, true SEO professionals will stand out from the crowd by continuing to provide their clients with strong results. SEOs using questionable or weak practices will find it harder to find and retain clients in 2012.
9 Tips For Link Prospecting
0Enjoy this helpful article from SEOmoz‘s YOUmoz blog. Online marketing specialist Paul Rogers breaks down 9 actionable tips for link prospecting. An excellent resource!
See the original post here, or learn more about the author here.
I find link prospecting to be one of the most time-consuming and challenging parts of link building. In order to build and maintain a natural link profile for your website, your prospecting activity needs to cover a wide range of opportunities and generate the right targets and leads for your project/campaign. So prospecting is usually pretty easy to start off with – run a few Google searches and you’ve got yourself a set of content-rich websites within your target industry. However, once you’ve gone through this initial list, you realise the challenge that you’re faced with.
Here are some of the things we do at GPMD to generate a broader set of quality prospects. Using these practices, we’re able to identify a huge selection of relevant, high quality blogs and industry websites within different sectors.
Tip 1: Advanced search queries
Advanced search queries are our starting point. They’re quick, easy to use and they are great for finding opportunities for guest blogging, collaboration projects, sponsorship etc.
Examples of advanced search queries:
Inurl Search (Dental inurl:blog / Dental blog inurl:.co.uk)
These search queries will filter websites with your preferred domain extension or search term within its URL. The above examples will return dental blogs and dental blogs based in the UK.
Exact Phrase Search (Dental “Guest post” / Dental “Write for us”)
These queries (using speech marks to find the exact text) are ideal for finding websites that are either looking for guest bloggers or accept guest blog posts. The above examples will return dental websites that accept guest posts and dental websites that are looking for writers.
Intitle Search (Dental Intitle:Guest Post – Dental Intitle: Advertise)
Searching for specific content within the title helps to filter the pages that are most relevant and also find opportunities by searching for advertising or guest posting opportunities. The above examples will return dental websites that accept guest posts and dental websites with advertising opportunities.
Wildcard Search (Dental “Guest *” blog)
Using the wildcard (*) filters results that contain the exact words within your query and an additional word in the position of the wildcard. The above query will return dental blogs that feature “guest post”, “guest writer”, “guest blog” etc within their content or title (with the second word in place of the wildcard).
Using more than one of these strings within the same search will help to further refine the results and provide very specific prospects for you to use to build links.
Example of a query that could be used for finding guest blogging opportunities for a dental website.
Tip 2: Use Twitter tools to find niche bloggers
Building relationships on Twitter is a great way of generating opportunities. By regularly talking to bloggers within your industry, you’re developing an outreach that could be utilised for product launches, obtaining reviews, guest blogging and much more.
Follower Wonk:
Follower Wonk is a great tool that allows you to search through Twitter bios, helping you to identify targets for building relationships or just approaching for link-building.
Example: If you’re looking to obtain links from dental blogs, you could search for dental blog, dentist blog, dentistry blog and so on. You can then filter the results and order by the available metrics to help find the most suitable people.
Topsy:
Topsy is a very useful tool that lets you search the social web (including blogs). You could search for your brand, niche keyword or web address, find the people who’re talking about you or your industry and then get in touch (and hopefully get a link from their blog). You could also search for guest blogging opportunities using things like ‘guest blog dentistry’ and then approach the website owner/blogger.
These are just a couple of examples, there are literally thousands more tools that can help you find link building opportunities.
Tip 3: Look at blogroll and directory links
When you find a really good blog that you would like a link from, don’t just contact them and wait for a reply! You should be looking for a links page or a blogroll to find other similar bloggers that could also provide a good link to your website. It is important to remember that not all good blogs are optimised for search, making a lot of them really hard to find – unless you use these kinds of techniques.
Also, when you’re looking down at your competitors’ links from directories like spammylinkdirectory.com (not a real website), you could be finding a few new opportunities. Chances are that you’ve already looked through your competitors’ links, but you might find different websites that you haven’t analysed within these directories, some of which may have some good ideas/links that you could emulate for your website.
Tip 4: Reverse image search
I often hear people moaning about how some blog or website has used one of their images in a post or article – without realising that this is a great opportunity to obtain a really good link!
If you come across another website using your image, send them a polite email, compliment their content and website, and just ask if they can add a link to your website as the source of the image. This link-building technique is natural and free – which is why optimising your images and making them freely available is a great way of generating these opportunities. You can search for your web address in Google’s new-look image search feature or tineye.com, both will help you to find where your images are being used.
Tip 5: Use PPC advertising to find advertising opportunities
Running a short-term, low cost PPC campaign is a great way to find link building opportunities. Once your PPC ad is live on lots of related blogs, you can contact the blogger, mention your advert and suggest that you look at other options.
I would recommend complimenting the blog content and asking to submit a few guest posts about your experience within your industry. Then, once you have obtained a number of links, simply turn off the adwords campaign.
Tip 6: Use BuzzStream
I started using BuzzStream (a link-building CRM tool) around three months ago, with the intention of streamlining my link building process, and it has saved me a huge amount of time! BuzzStream does actually have a feature designed to identify link prospects, but I haven’t really used it, I am more interested in the BuzzMarker and the BuzzBox.
The BuzzMarker is placed on your bookmark toolbar and it pulls in a huge amount of data with one simple click. This data includes whois information, social media accounts, contact details and even data from key SEO metrics (including SEOmoz data). All of this is then available within the CRM system itself and can be added too or edited at any point.
You can also BCC the BuzzBox email address into emails that you’re sending to prospects, which will then automatically add the emails into the CRM.
Tip 7: Ask questions
Once you have built a relationship (or link) with a blogger or industry professional, why don’t you ask them which blogs and news websites they follow? This is a great way of identifying websites that you may not have reached or found otherwise and it will take very little time. If the blogger is a friend of connection of the person who recommended it, you then also have an angle to start contact with.
Tip 8: Use what’s already out there
Competitor Analysis:
Looking at the links that your competitors have will provide opportunities and inspiration, but there is a limit to the number of links that you can get. Once you have found new opportunities from your competitors, why don’t you look at their links, and then links going to their links and so on? If you’re looking at relevant websites, chances are they will have some good links that you can look to emulate.
Old linkbait:
If you’re looking to implement an idea or even just get some quick links, looking at what has been done before is a really good place to start.
For example, if you’re looking to write a list of the top 50 most influential bloggers in your industry, have a look at those who are featured on the list and check if they link back to the website. If they do link back, they could be an easy win. Also, as your version will be the latest one, it’s probably worth contacting the people linking to the previous version and asking them to link to your new release.
Tip 9: Utilise existing relationships
If you’re involved within your industry, chances are that you know people that have contacts that have blogs. Well, now is the time to pull in that favour and get the introduction.
If you know people, or know people that know people, make sure you take advantage of the situation, as I can guarantee that your competitors will be doing it.
These links are simple, natural and are difficult for competitors to copy.
Why You Need A Social Media Dashboard
Social media is an essential component to any forward-thinking business, big or small. Whether you’re promoting a product or yourself, it’s the speediest and most cost-effective way to engage your audience and create buzz. In the last 5-6 years, social media has grown from the somewhat simple platforms of Friendster and MySpace to the massive, multi-purpose worlds of Facebook and Twitter.
Niche networks popped up to satisfy specific communities. You’re a photographer? Use Flickr. Relentless networker? LinkedIn’s your place. Both companies and people alike found themselves immersed in multiple platforms, expressing themselves in remarkably different ways on each one. However, there was one small problem. Logging in and out of multiple platforms to post content began taking up time, as did keeping track of the responses accrued in each channel. While the benefits of social media were becoming increasingly clear, the maintenance of multiple channels could sometimes serve as a barrier to productivity.
But in 2012, there’s no need for all that multi-channel, log-in/log-out nonsense.
The social media dashboard is a multi-purpose, time saving tool that provides just about all the solutions a social media/marketing manager could ask for. Previously annoying, repetitive tasks can get whittled down, even planned in advance. Multiple people can manage multiple accounts. Reports can be created that analyze trends and measure metrics that you never even knew existed. It’s not just an effective tool, it’s an essential one. Here’s some reasons why a social media dashboard will help you to engage your audience, measure results, and lessen the intensity of your to-do list.
You can delegate Tweets/posts
Some dashboards enable you to assign certain messages, mentions and queries to certain team members, so you can make sure the correct person in your organization is following up with a customer.
Customizable themes
Don’t want to work on the same ho-hum default screen as everyone else? No problem. Certain social media management programs allow you to customize your background so you can express your vibrant individuality on your dashboard. Go on, pick any color you like.
Post to multiple networks
Although best practices often dictate that different channels should have different types of messages, sometimes you want an identical message to reach all your networks. Dashboards let you do this in seconds flat. Select whatever networks you need, and deploy your message- no logging in/out necessary.
Custom reports
You’re not immersed in multiple social media outlets for your own narcissistic pleasure (although I’m sure there are a few exceptions). You want to know who’s listening, who responds, and how you can deepen connections moving forward. Dashboard applications let you set goals, and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. What’s more, you can explain to your boss/underlings why your initiatives succeeded/failed and plan accordingly to ensure future social media domination.
Custom URLs
Some dashboards (such as Hootsuite) contain custom URL shortening tools to track click-thrus on links. These tracked links can also be included in reports for measuring how successful your message/content is.
Stay on top of the chatter
You know how fast social media moves in good times and bad. With the right/wrong circumstances, you could be buried in a sea of responses across multiple channels and have no idea how to proceed. One false move in a crisis situation has the potential to have devastating effects. A dashboard can help you to observe how your organization is being talked about over different outlets, and give you the advantage to spot trends and plan out a long term response strategy instead of playing an endless, frustrating game of catch up.
BUT WHICH ONE SHOULD YOU USE?
There’s a few tools like this on the market right now- some free, some rather expensive. We recommend Hootsuite, which is a “freemium” dashboard application. This means you can use portions of the tool for no charge- but certain features require a “Pro” account which opens you up to a wide range of additional features, like custom reports, ad-free screens, unlimited RSS feeds, vanity URLs, enhanced support, and more. Hootsuite also offers a 30-day trial of their Pro services, so you can try before you buy.
Click here for more information.
If you’re looking to streamline your social media tasks and set goals for growth in the new year, Hootsuite is a great place to start.
SEOWebHosting Community Newsletter Volume 1, Issue 6
Welcome to the SEOWebhosting.net Customer Newsletter!
Dropped Domains and NEW C Class IPs & available!
1. Great deals on dropped domains!
All domains contain the following:
- A PageRank between 3 and 5
- 10 or more inbound links
- 5 or more indexed pages of content
- Various amounts of traffic
The cost per domain for the initial year is $250/domain.
Click here to order, and to get more information.
2. Pre-orders available now for NEW /16 C Class IPs!
We’ve purchased a new group of C Class IPs, and are allowing our customers to reserve spaces by placing pre-orders.
NOTE: Clients must contact sales directly for all pre-orders.
This offer is NOT available through the website.
Contact our sales department at:
sales@seowebhosting.net
or
800-596-5936
SEO Conferences to attend in 2012
A new year is fast approaching, and that means a slew of SEO-related conferences for you to check out. Here’s a few that should be on your radar:
Online Marketing Summit 2012 : San Diego, February 6-10. This is the premier global educational event for marketing professionals. You’ll learn best practices in the areas of search, email, analytics, integrated marketing and more.
PubCon 
– Honolulu, February 14-15. The premier search and social media conference/expo will hold their 2012 event on February 14 &15 in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii.
SES New York: New York City, March 19-23. 70+ Sessions, keynotes and over 100 exhibitors all discussing online marketing. Topics include: demand gen, SEO, PPC, mobile, and more.
SMX: 
San Jose, February 28 – March 1. A search engine marketing conference that covers SEO trends, local, mobile and paid search, social media, and more. Learn about everything from the ins and outs of algorithms to SEO best practices.
THANK YOU!
Thanks for making 2011 a terrific year. We’re looking forward to making 2012 even better! Enjoy your holiday!
Infographic: The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
The good people at SearchEngineLand put together a fantastic resource earlier this year that breaks down SEO ranking factors in the style of a periodic table. A useful infographic for both the n00b and the SEO pro.
Click the image to see a larger version, or download the PDF from SearchEngineLand here.
Which Came First? Speed, SEO or the EGG?
SEO is all about performance. Google and Yahoo/Bing care about performance and user experience. Site speed is really important to users so by default it is equally valuable to SEO and ranking. Speed isn’t an easy demon to catch. With more than 200 ranking factors used in Google’s algorithm, why pay attention to speed? It requires excellent programming skills, the best hosting services and extremely talented web designers to make a beautiful fast website. It’s so much easier and cheaper to just ignore speed. Some people including Google’s Matt Cutts will tell you that speed isn’t all that important to SEO and ranking. Now lets look at some concrete reasons why you shouldn’t listen to them and put speed at the top of your SEO list.
Users Love Speed
Proven through countless studies, the effectiveness and usability of websites are impacted by speed. Speed increased conversion rates, shares and tweets. Users directly influence rankings through their behavior which means that speed in turn impacts many other ranking factors. Moreover, try to create “loyal” customers without a fast website. Good luck with that one.
Speed and Panda Emerged Together
According to Google, the Panda update looks at an entire site’s “quality” rather than grading all of the pages on a site separately. Similarly, speed is usually a site specific rather than a page specific metric. This is because speed is dramatically impacted by a site’s hosting and servers. Language and particularly using PHP for your entire website can increase speed while reducing hosting fees. PHP and fast hosting distinguishes the professionals from the amateurs on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily about big vs. small players although big companies tend to have faster websites. This is about technical sophistication and good code vs. hacks and code filled with junk. Clean code is another ranking factor that goes hand in hand with site speed. In addition, speed in more difficult to manipulate than content.
Google Labs has been concentrating on page speed simultaneously beside Panda. They have developed a new tool for speed optimization called Page Speed Online and they have released something called Page Speed Service. Why would Google go to all this trouble if page speed didn’t factor largely into their future plans?
Being First and Fast Matters
Moreover, as mentioned in a comment by Steven in response to Matt Cutts video about site speed: Speed matters in getting ranking credit for posted content. If a wise and wily webmaster can steal your content fast enough and post it (with or without credit) the search engines rank the faster website before the slower one every time. In the dog-eat-dog world of marketing nothing is more annoying.
Take a Look Around
Lastly, using Google’s little page speed tool: lets see how the top sites rank for speed.?First, the least competitive search term I could think of: “bird watching in Massachusetts.”
Page Speed Scores:
1. www.birding.com 87
2. massbird.org 68
3. www.7seas 69
4. blog.newenglandbirdhouse 51
5. www.massaudubon.org 68
Then for a very competitive term: “shoes.”
Page Speed Scores:
1. www.dsm.com 90
2. www.shoes.com 74
3. www.payless.com 65
4. www.aldoshoes.com 74
5. www.famousfootwear.com 77
And another little company, www.zappos.com: 91
Then for: “computers.”
Page Speed Scores:
1. www.dell.com 87
2. www.apple.com 74
3. www.hp.com 83
4. www.walmart.com 83
5. wikipedia.org 80
Then for a search outside of the US: “rent a car in Australia.”
Page Speed Scores:
1. www.budget.com.au 53
2. www.thrifty.com.au 57
3. www.vroomvroomvroom.com.au 85
4. www.avis.com.au 66
5. www.apexrentacar.com.au 63
Given the evidence, ignore site speed at your own peril.
Jen Thames is Brand Manager for Ugly Cable, Australia’s leading online HDMI Cable supplier
Buying Your Own SEO Real Estate
Marketing has always been about renting space. Marketers rent space on billboards, radio, television, magazines, newspapers, pay-per-click advertisements, the yellow pages, and so on. Traditionally, marketers don’t own their own space. They’ve always been borrowing somebody else’s.
In the age of the internet things are changing. There is reason to believe the best strategy going forward is to own your marketing space. This means making some serious changes in the way that marketers do business. Instead of buying space where people are already looking they need to start creating spaces that people will actually want to look.
Needless to say, this is a whole different ball game and some marketers are having trouble adapting. The desire to compare new strategies to old ones is almost impossible to resist. Marketers want to compare social media to old media, and they want to compare Google to the phone book. The truth is, while many business fundamentals remain the same, others are being challenged and transformed by these new tools.
How can the modern marketer own their own marketing platform? They can start by realizing just how much the search engine has revolutionized not only business, but the behavior of the consumer. In the past, consumers would turn to the phone book to find a business that could help them. Marketers would buy space in the phone book or make sure that their name started with “A” or “AAA” so that they would be the first business listed in a given category. And the phone book decided the categories.
Today, consumers are free to define their own categories. There is no limit to what they can type into a search engine. Starting your business’s name with the letter “A” won’t get you listed at the top of the search engine results. Instead, the search engines use your presence on the web to determine your importance. The parse the net for links to your site and use them to gauge your relevance.
This is where SEO hosting becomes useful. By creating a large number of high quality sites, and spreading them across a diverse range of dedicated class C IPs, you get the opportunity to own your own marketing channels. Using each domain as a legitimate site unto itself, you can then link these sites together in such a way that it will dramatically improve your visibility in the search engines.
Dedicated SEO servers and multiple class C IPs can be thought of as a form of marketing real estate, and space is limited. No new IPv4 addresses will be created, so a “land rush” is likely approaching in the near future. We recommend buying SEO hosting today to avoid this rush. Obviously we’re biased, but we make a good argument 
10 Things I Learned From Web 2.0 Founding Fathers
Tumblr and foursquare are two very successful social networking sites. One thing they have in common is they were are created by young masterminds. Tumblr, founded by David Karp, is on of the most popular social networking sites in the world wide webs getting over six million weekly visits. Foursquare, founded by Dennis Crowley and co-founded by Naveen Selvadurai, is a mobile social networking site focused on the user´s preferences and whereabouts. I took a couple of hours to listen to what these entrepreneurs had to say on their individual TechCrunch interviews . It’s always a good thing to get knowledge straight from the source so heres few tips I was able to pick up from them.
What I learned from David Karp the founder of Tumblr:
(Video here – http://goo.gl/8nIEy)
• Find mentors and listen to them.
• There are no great schools for software engineering.
• If you are a 16 years old genius you should apply to work at Tumblr.
What I learned from the foursquare founding father Dennis Crowley:
(Videos here – http://goo.gl/5HrxU and here – http://goo.gl/uoOB5)
• Forget about where you want to be and start doing stuff.
• Stop sketching – Start building
• It’s awesome when you’re phone starts telling you what to do.
• It’s hard to build a user base, but once you do the fun part begins. You can expose the audience to your future visions.
• Things happen because you make them happen.
• Some ideas will spring from the working process.
• You do not have to run your business the same way other businesses in your field do.
All the advice above can be useful to entrepreneurs from any industry, and not just for young tech hobbyists who are dreaming to start up their own business. The overall message is to be active and just keep on going with what ever it is you are doing. These guys came up with original ideas, and they worked hard to bring their ideas into the reality. It’s hard work, but it can be done.
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