Quickstart Guide

Basics for getting your site online

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Your domain (www.mysite.com) has to be “registered” somewhere. Then the website itself has to be “hosted” on a server somewhere. If you need help with any of this, please give us a call at 409-276-7222.

Domain Name: If you need a domain name GoDaddy or HostGator are good places to buy one. If you want to have your own hosting account this is where you can buy a hosting package as well. Otherwise, we can provide hosting and all the “back-end” server configurations and updates. The ‘.com’s’ are by far the most valuable so shop wisely when thinking about .net, .us, etc. A .com registration is more valuable, in my informed opinion, than a US Trademark. If something is Trademarked you can bet the .com is taken. Lastly, having your keywords in the domain name doesn’t (it used to!) help with your search results.

GoDaddy will try to sell you all sorts of things that you don’t need so be prepared to wade through a bunch of adverts.

Color Palette: Your choices of colors is unlimited. We can suggest a palette, or you can send us some web images and we can match the colors precisely. Same is true with background images or textures.

Images: Quality images are vital. We can scour the web for you to find free and paid images. Pixaybay is a good place to start your search. If you search on Google Images be sure to go to Tools >Usage Rights >Labeled for Reuse. Shutterstock has, amazingly, 250,000,000 images for sale. They also have lots of film and footage.

Text: Realize that many readers scan a page, they don’t read it so less is more. The search engines are favorable for articles that are 300 words or better. We have an excellent copywriter on staff.

Google Maps: If you have a location address you can use, getting listed on Google Maps is a simple matter. You can also configure the Map to not display your address. This part is included in all our web packages.

ECommerce: You’ll need product images all of the same pixel dimensions. We do that part. Each product then has a price and the shipping, taxes, and merchant accounts have to be set up. Also, we need to install and SSL Certificate on your site so that it’s encrypted and shows up HTTS://www.MyWebsite.com instead of just HTTP. If you’d like to learn more about how we develop shopping carts, take a look at WooCommerce.

That’s all !

SEO Keywords

Keywords for search engine optimization is something that almost all of our clients have heard of. However, almost none realize how to select these keywords and phrases. First of all we need to look at specificity. For example let’s look at an AC company. Firstly, we want to make sure that we don’t get hits for automotive AC. This can be done easily by using the keywords, residential and/or commercial. That’s easy an intuitive. Then we’d have to consider the geographic location of your customers.

Getting search results for “Houston residential air conditioning service is going to be really difficult, or impossible, to achieve–too many competitors! Houston is just too broad to be effective. Getting hits for “Galveston residential air conditioning service” is going to be infinitely easier than going after Houston as there are only a dozen in Galveston and 1,000 in Houston. Just rough numbers there.

There are a number of SEO WordPress plugins that can be configured to deal with synonyms. Think “air conditioning” and “A.C.”

Many web development companies fail to SEO the pictures so this is an area where WebWorks will gain you a key advantage. Take a look at our SEO your pictures article.

But how to choose the perfect focus keyword? Especially when you’re blogging and focussing on long tail keywords, it can be quite hard to decide which keywords to optimize for.

Learn how to set up a content strategy for your site. Write content that ranks and converts. Buy our content SEO eBook!

Your keyword strategy should have given you some idea what you want to write about. For blog posts, you will usually aim for a long tail keyword (containing multiple words). In our Yoast SEO plugin you will find a drop down menu which supplements your entry with suggestions. These suggestions are actually based on Google Suggest. This is exactly the same as what you’d see when you type the search term into a Google search box.

Once you have found a long tail search term you would like to start ranking for, you should put some effort into discovering whether or not the search volume of your chosen focus keyword is high. We will be the first to admit, Google has made this really hard. The only way to know ‘for sure’ how often a search term is used, is by having an active and alive AdWords account and by bidding on the search term of your choice. We understand this is a bit too difficult and expensive for most of you (we honestly hardly ever do this).

Not to worry, using Google Trends should give at least some idea, in a creative way, about search volume. Google Trends allows you to compare the search volume between two search terms over time. This will give some insights in the volume of the search terms people use (always relative to another term).

Using Google Trends to compare between your old focus keywords and the one you would like to choose will give you some insights about the prospects for your focus keyword.

Apart from knowing which search terms are actually used by people, you need to know whether or not your idea for your post or page fits the desires and expectations of the people who use the search terms. The best way to find out whether or not your content fits these desires is to Google your proposed (sets of) keywords yourself.

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Best SEO Plugins

SEO is the first thing you want to be doing after the website design is nearly complete and you’ve got four or five posts/pages.

Of course, if you want to get hits on your website, than you must implement an SEO technique, and this is the simplest way to do it in WordPress. That being said, Yoast SEO, is by no means a simple plugin, there is quite a learning curve.

WordPress is one of the best, if not the best content management systems when it comes to SEO. That being said, spending time on your WordPress SEO might seem like a waste of time, it most definitely is not. Optimizing your site to the best practices outlined in this article will help you improve your rankings, gain more subscribers and have a better website in general.

You can control your SEO titles with the SEO by Yoast plugin. There are two parts of the plugin that control these. First of all, as soon as you install & activate the plugin, you get an SEO section in your admin. Navigate to SEO → Titles & Metas and you’ll see a bunch of tabs for different types of pages on your site. For each post type and taxonomy you can set a so called Title Template (as well as meta description templates but we’ll get to those later).

For titles the following things are important:

They should always contain your brand, preferably at the end, so people may recognize you in consecutive searches.
They should always contain the keyword you think is most important for the current post or page, which we’ll call the focus keyword from now on. The focus keyword should preferably be at the beginning of the title.
The rest of the title should entice people to click.

Some plugins, most specifically the All in One SEO plugin, use so called “automated descriptions”. They use the first sentence of a post to fill the meta description by default. That’s not very smart. That first sentence might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject.

When you publish a new post or page, the XML sitemap is automatically submitted to Google & Bing allowing them to easily (and quickly) find your new content.

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an <h1>, and nothing else. Your blog’s name should only be an <h1> on your front page, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an <h3>. Your sidebar shouldn’t be crammed with <h2> and <h3>‘s either etc.

On smaller sites it might make sense to noindex either the category or the tag structure, but in our experience noindexing those on yoast.com does little to no change at all.

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like this one did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

create a new page with updated and improved content
change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
publish the new page under the old post’s URL, or redirect the old post’s URL to the new URL
send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you’ve updated and improved on your old post
wait for the links to come in, again;
rank even higher for your desired term as you’ve now got:
- more control over the keyword density
- even more links pointing at the article
- the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it’s content and ranking

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.

A lot of bloggers still think that because their blog is a blog, they don’t have to optimize anything. Wrong. To get people to link to you, they have to read your blog. And what do you think is easier: getting someone who is already visiting your blog to visit regularly and thenlink to your blog, or getting someone who visits your blog for the first time to link to your blog immediately? Right.

If you’ve followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you’ve got a big chance of becoming successfull, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn’t. Go out there, and talk to people online.

If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you’ll need to rank is to be a part of the community

A good SEO campaign relies on not only implementing changes but also measuring the impact of those changes, seeing what works and doing more of that. Two great Analytics packages to measure results areGoogle Analytics and getClicky. For both of these Analytics packages maintain plugins, our Google Analytics by Yoast plugin and our Clicky plugin.

You can also measure results by tracking rankings, the problem with rank tracking though is that it’s hard to determine “real” rankings because of personalized and localized search results. Really the only outcome of being great at WordPress SEO is to get more traffic.

Another great source of data is Google Webmaster Tools.

Helpful Articles and Tips

Quickstart Guide

Quickstart Guide Basics for getting your site online[et_pb_dmb_breadcrumbs _builder_version="3.22.4" custom_margin="|||20px" global_module="1856"...

SEO Keywords

SEO Keywords Keywords for search engine optimization is something that almost all of our clients have heard of. However, almost none realize how to select these keywords and...

Best SEO Plugins

SEO is the first thing you want to be doing after the website design is nearly complete and you’ve got four or five posts/pages. Of course, if you want to get hits on your...

Train-search-engine-optimization-wordpress

SEO Your Pictures!

SEO Your PicturesThere are many, many factors that affect search rankings and the NAME of the .jpg file is a vital point. Here are the basics for SEO in WordPress but this...

SEO Your Pictures!

SEO Your Pictures

There are many, many factors that affect search rankings and the NAME of the .jpg file is a vital point. Here are the basics for SEO in WordPress but this applies to any sort of web development. The most vital consideration when using pictures on your site is ensuing that you are not infringing on a copyright. We cover that as well.

• Write the article in the WordPress composition window straight off. No need to use a separate word processor. ALL text formatting needs to happen in WordPress. If you paste in text that’s preformatted, then use the little tiny eraser tool in the toolbar to delete formatting. Just highlight the text and click the button. If you’re pasting in HTML formatted text, that’s fine and it needs to go in the “text” editor tab, not the “visual” editor tab. These two tabs are tough to spot. Just above the composition area on the right side.

• Find photos and rename them before putting on the site. Make ABSOLUTELY SURE you only use images that are open commons or show up on Google Images > Tools > Usage Rights> Okay for reuse. If you have a picture in mind, you can use Google Images to run an image search.

This will show you all the occurrences of the image on the web. If you see an image on a “Stock Image” site, you definitely shouldn’t use it unless you purchase the image. PixaBay is a great place to get free, open-source images.

• When you upload an image into the WordPress Media Library, you’ll see some important things on the right-hand side of the window, particularly File Name and Alt Name. After you upload, you will see the File Name. Copy the file name EXCEPT the .jpg and paste it in the Alt Tags. Google gives a big ranking boost if the pic file names and alt tags include key words that match the page they are displayed on. Vast numbers of web smiths put up DCM972.jpg. Lazy!

• There’s a function in the WordPress Dashboard whereby you can save a page as a draft. It’s the same place where the “Publish” button is on the upper-right hand corner of the page/post editing window. IMHO sending me the text of the article in an email is unnecessary.

• SEO by Yoast is one of our most vital plugins. At the bottom of the area where you compose a page, you’ll see the Yoast SEO wizard. You put in a key word (In the PRO version it allows a phrase) and it scores the page like a traffic light. If you look at the home page you’ll see that I’ve got all but one green light. Note that I optimized on the word Taxi. Google knows it’s a Galveston company already and Galveston is in the domain name. Yoast also has a few other things it does in the background like XML Sitemaps which go automatically to Google when the site changes.Once you see how the Yoast wizard works, you’ll just naturally include these attributes in your writing.

Once you publish a page, it will show up under Appearance > Menus where you’ll see it in the box on the left. Click the checkbox for that page and then “Add Page” Then it will show up at the bottom of the adjacent window where you can drag and drop the menu items.

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