WordCamp Bulgaria: Making sure your content is found

Making sure your content is found.WordCamp Bulgaria 2010

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Morning, WordPress lovers of Bulgaria :)

Open Source

AppleCSS

SEO

Geek

TheologyIBMS

BloggerSpeaker

Marketeer

Online marketeer

WordPress

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I’ll try to answer all of them.

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Ow yeah and I’m dutch.

I’ve got two kids, Wende, on the left, 10 months old, Tycho, on the right, 4 years old.

And if I cough badly during the presentation, I got this cold last week in Munich, during Oktoberfest

And yes we drank a couple of bottles of those.

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So I’m Yoast.

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My blog, yoast.com

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So, we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to talk about YOU. You want to be found right?

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Who of you thinks being found is about technical stuff?

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So you’d go through this entire article and end up with an optimized site.

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Wrong.

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You know what you get when you optimize shit?

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Just a bigger pile of shit.

There’s four steps to being found.

Let’s start with #1.

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Like Lady Gaga, you have to be remarkable

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Remarkable, like really, remarkable, like, a purple cow. If you haven’t read the book by Seth Godin, go read it.

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Stand out from the crowd.

What are you promising your readers?

The promise for yoast.com:

Tweaking websites is what we do here at Yoast,from search engine rankings to speed to user experience

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What’s your promise?

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Roll up your sleeves and work on your content, and your proposition.

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Now, start building your content.

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In today's environment, hoarding knowledge ultimately erodes your power.

If you know something very important, the way to get power is by actually sharing it.

Joseph L. Badaracco

Think about this one when you continue your blogging. True sharing is remarkable. Always.

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Step 2: optimize

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Books are judged by their cover: so are your posts, give them a proper title and description. Realize what your title and description will look like in Google.

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Quick preview from my upcoming WordPress SEO plugin

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Don’t be a monkey: write your meta descriptions yourself. But it’s even better to have a monkey write them or not write one at all than to have All in one SEO generate one for you.

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Related posts plugins are nice. Internal linking in your posts is even better (from an SEO perspective solely).

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Through all these cool plugins we often forget how to use the superbly useful internal stuff in WordPress: Categories, Tags and custom taxonomies. Do your categories still match the blog you have today? http://yoast.com/wordpress/simple-taxonomies/

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You can’t expect a search engine nor a user to click on more more than 3 times... Use for instance a plugin like WP PageNavi.

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Disable paged comments: THEY SUCK.

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Give a robot some directions: Noindex wp-admin, login and register pages etc.using the Robots meta plugin.

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Get some XML sitemaps. My new plugin will have those too.

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http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

There’s more. Read the article.

Step three: engage.

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Don’t distract your visitors. Clean your blog up. Remove unneeded widgets, I don’t care about your Technorati rating, nor does anyone else.

There’s no excuse for comment spam on your blog. Clean it up. Now.

Use Pingdom, or another tool to track uptime,but be the first to know when your blog is down and FIX IT.

Unless your 404 page looks like this, I don’t want to see it. Use John Godley’s Redirection plugin and track and fix them.

One part of WordPress sucks: search. Implement a Google Custom search engine to create a proper search experience, then start tracking your internal search: what are people searching for? Are they finding that? Can / should they expect that on your site?

Let’s get people to follow.

I prefer email, because of it’s high response.

In September, almost 20% of the yoast.com traffic came from Twitter.

If your readers understand what RSS is, the button can’t be big enough. If they don’t know what it is, leave it out entirely!

So we want to get those readers raving about us right?

A thank you page is the perfect moment to let people refer your site and mailing list to a friend or their Twitter followers: “I just signed up for Yoast.com’s newsletter, you should too!”

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Comment redirect: Someone just commented and showed engagement: use that momentum

Use Gravity Forms for contact forms and surveys, or Google Docs forms function to create surveys.

Use Gravity Forms for contact forms and surveys, or Google Docs forms function to create surveys.

Use Gravity Forms for contact forms and surveys, or Google Docs forms function to create surveys.

Use Gravity Forms for contact forms and surveys, or Google Docs forms function to create surveys.

Use threaded comments: They keep the conversation intact and allow for a better conversation.

Use Gravatars: They allow people to recognize each other across blogs.

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Step 4: measure

Measure. Measure. Measure.

There’s nothing better and free: Google Analytics.

Outbound link tracking.

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Pageviews by category

And now you get back to step #1. Repeat what works, remove what doesn’t work.

Good Luck!

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@yoastyoast.comjoost@yoast.com