ChirpUp.com

Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft’s Bing are critical marketing channels for mid-size businesses. We love using WordPress as a marketing platform because these search engines love blogs. Your site and it’s updates will be “found” by Google quickly if it’s based around a great blogging engine like WordPress which has several powerful plug-ins for optimizing search engine results. (A plug-in is like a mini-program that works with WordPress to increase the functionality of your selected WordPress template or “theme”).

One fantastic plug-in is the All-in-One SEO (“AIOSEO”), which has a few key fields for assigning strategic keywords and phrases. There are several other SEO plug-ins (AIOSEO is the most popular). Plus, some WordPress themes like Thesis actually build-in similar SEO functionality. Whichever you choose when installing WordPress, the same basic concepts apply.

It’s very important to have a keyword strategy for your site and support it with individual blog posts and SEO settings.  In this post we’re going to cover the most universal fields found in most SEO plug-ins.  When adding a new post, look for the SEO fields below the text editor section:

Custom Title Tag Field

This is the Page Title that you will see at the top of a web browser. It is the most important of the three settings. By default, it inherits the blog post’s editorial title. But, for the purposes of SEO, it is possible (even advisable sometimes) to override the default post title by specifying a custom title tag that optimizes your content in search results.

Let’s say Bill is the CEO of Bill’s Human Capital Consultants in Chicago. Bill writes a post with an editorial title “Head Hunting for Top Executives”. Depending on his keyword stategry and objectives, Bill might want different in this field so that Google associates his company with the desired search results. For peak SEO power, Bill might override the default Title with the keywords “recruiting” or “Chicago” so that it reads “How to Recruit Top Chicago Executives”.

In most cases you’ll get more value if you override the default and manually set it to a title that explicitly associates a few of your most important keywords with your brand. Grammar isn’t top priority in this field since it does not affect the editorial title or body of the post. You can make the Custom Title Tag a little longer than this example, but don’t go overboard.

Meta Description

This is a 160 character summary of the post that searchers will see in the returned results. It’s not very important in terms of SEO, but it does entice the searcher to visit, as this is the text that appears below your title in search engine results. These descriptions should be short and sweet: “Bill uses a proprietary database for finding and evaluating top executives”.

Meta Keywords

Most search engines don’t pay much attention to Meta Keywords. But, just in case, we recommend including some of your secondary phrases that didn’t make it into the Title. Use commas to separate phrases like “Human Resources, Staffing, Hiring, Consultants” etc.

Blogging and the (AIOSEO) plug-in are a powerful and free start to your SEO strategy. A thoughtful keyword strategy coupled with a properly configured blog program opens new marketing doors for mid-size businesses.  Please contact us with questions.

NOTE:
There’s a lot more to SEO than discussed here. Using the WordPress SEO plug-ins correctly, coupled with writing good headers and content in your posts, helps you optimize your “on-page” SEO. The second and probably most important part of SEO, “off-page” optimization is not discussed in this post. “Off-page” optimization primarily consists of getting quality in-bound links to your site. A great first step to getting quality in-bound links is writing great content!