Diary of an Affiliate Marketer
Ineed to understand how optimizing for search engines works when using Wordpress and Thesis.
The whole point of optimizing is to give the search engines as much information as possible so that they have a clear understanding of what the contents of the page are all about.
The days of black hat techniques and trying to fool Google and the other search engines are long gone and to succeed on the internet these days you have to build a website with fresh original content to rank highly.
Therefore the only thing you can do to optimize your web page is ensure that you use every tool available to you to ensure the search engines read your page correctly.
Whilst no-one is sure exactly what Google’s algorithms measure these days it is still good practice to ensure that your keywords are in the title, the meta tags and the meta description.
In the past I would then have worried about keyword density (the number of times the keywords could be found in the main content) but these days I have found that not to be so important as long as there is a sprinkling of the keyword throughout the text.
Many believe that your results will be better if you have your keyword or synonyms of it throughout the text. As Google continues its drive to provide relevant websites for its searchers through the search engines it wants ‘real’ web pages.
This means that the days of keyword stuffed web pages are dead and it is even more important these days to keep it real whilst using keywords to inform the search engines about the contents of your web page.
I have been spending most of the day learning how Wordpress and Thesis can be optimized to get the best results. Thesis has been developed to get the best out of the search engines and whereas with just a free copy of Wordpress you would have had to go into the nuts and bolts, Thesis has done most of it for me.
Great, because it saves me a lot of time and fiddling and I have been wasting my time watching some videos on optimizing only to find that it was already done or able to be done at the click of a button with Thesis.
Now that I know the website is set up ready for the search engines I can start thinking about the content and begin uploading pages. I’ve just uploaded my first page and to be frank I’m gutted!
This is so easy!
All that time I’ve worked with more established websites and software using ftp to upload and download. Now, as I begin to use Wordpress, I realize that it is so easy to use and with Thesis allowing me to alter the layout, and look and feel of the website I can get a very professional website up and running in no time.
One big advantage I have seen which has benefited me enormously is the ability to log in from any computer and continue to work on the website from anywhere because very little software is required, if any.
I’ve put the finishing touches to my optimizing by changing the permalinks to display the page name instead of Wordpress’s default which is the page number and the search engines hate that.
By changing the permalinks I have achieved two things, one, made it easier for the search engines to understand the contents of the page because good search engine optimization is to use the keyword as your page name, and two, make it easier for the visitor to understand as the name of the page is the keyword they used when they searched for the information.
What is more descriptive for a visitor p=35? Or a page named ‘optimizing’?
Now that the website is set up for seo I can concentrate on the important things, the content which is what my visitors will really judge my website on.
