Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Know your stats

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Know your stats Wordpress SEO ExpertThere are all sorts of metrics we can use to measure our online success. Certainly the bottom line is return-on-investment (ROI) but there are all sorts of markers that can help guide us to that final success.

It’s so easy to get bogged down by it all. How many people signed up for your mailing list? Are you split testing? Does Google Analytics need to look so complicated?

All these things are worth knowing, and learning.

But then you need to use those to plan and strategise. And that’s an art-form unto itself—I’ll post more about that another day.

In the short term though, start looking at your web statistics. See if they’re going up or down—the first step really is that simple. And if you start by looking at the simple stuff, it will lay the foundation for you to understand the seemingly more complicated bits later.

Personally, I do use Google Analytics, and a few other metrics, but the one I check most often is the simplest, I have AWStats installed. I can see very quickly if visits are up or down, and therefore if I’m building or breaking my online community.

Ultimately I want to see a good return on ROI, but I know what I need to achieve to get that—and the first step is—are people coming to my website, are they reading it, and are they coming back for more?

If you’d like some help understanding your web stats, or what to do with that information, let me know.

But at the very least, know not to be fooled by “hits”—they can be the most misleading metric around. More on that later.

10 Youtube URL tricks worth knowing

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So often when I’m embedding a Youtube clip on a website for a client, I’m asked to customise it somehow. Now there are a variety of ways this can be done, from removing the “related videos” at the end (which I always do for schools, at the American School in London we must have done this a hundred times a month!) to overlaying images on top of the video entirely, (see danielwagner.com for an example).

But like so many things online, as long as you know the basics yourself, there’s a lot you can do with those.

Just adding little bits of code to the Youtube URL for example can have a big effect.

Example:

4. Hide the search box

The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

Here’s a great list of 10 tricks worth knowing.

Free wordcount tool, aim for 300 for SEO

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important part of building your online community.

A good guideline is each piece of content you create (be it a page, or blog post) on your site should have at least 300 words of original content.

Here’s a helpful tool—copy and paste your text in it, and find out instantly how many words you’ve got.

Those people using WordPress have a word counting system built in already, but the other advantage of this tool is is works out and lists the keywords your text is best suited for. So if the results there aren’t what you’d like, tweak your copy until your see your targeted keywords in the top few spots.

300 words can be harder than it seems. You don’t want to waffle and just pad it out. More often than not verbosity and writing for the web are not good friends.

So I challenge you to never take the easy way out, but rather to work hard to get at least 300 words of targeted (effective keyword use), interesting, well structured content.

Word Counter.

Meta tags and building your online community

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Part of building your online community is without a doubt, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You want your tribe to be well-positioned, and desirable.

It’s just just new members either, but existing ones want to know they’re a part of something exciting, something that ranks highly. Something prestigious.

The “meta tags” in your site’s code are really important here. There’s a science behind it of course, but it’s something you want an expert like myself to help you with. They’re small pieces of code that search engines read to get a better ides of what your site is about, and what keywords it should look for.

However, here’s one of the tricks of the trade you can use yourself. This tool gives you feedback and advice regarding your meta data, helpfully colour coded for people who don’t want to worry about interpreting too much of it.

My favourite metric it returns is to check how relevant your keywords are to your content. This is an absolute must, and something to look at for all your pages.

It’s a bit technical, but the colour coding helps.

Mind you, so can I.

Meta Tag Analyzer.

Check your search engine rankings, a helpful little tool

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This online tool simply tells you how your site is ranked on Google, Bing and Yahoo! for the keywords you provide.

Why is this worth blogging about? Because it’s free, and the fifth such online tool I found–but the first one that worked.

It doesn’t search terribly far into the search engines, so unless you’re in the top 10 of Google or Bing, or the top 50 of Yahoo!, you won’t get a result. And clearly you need me to help you out. 🙂

via SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS @ Mike’s Marketing Tools.

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