Free Wordpress SEO Webinar Recording

Free Wordpress SEO Webinar Recording

Rae Hoffman of Sugarrae.com got her start online as a work at home mom just like me and you. Today she serves as an example of where sheer personal determination and internet marketing know-how can take you. She owns two companies, employing in house staff and providing several telecommuting positions. She inspires me to think big about my own business. I’ll leave things there, knowing Rae hates being gushed on

Rae agreed to join me for a free morning webinar on the topic of Search Engine Optimization and Wordpress. The Mp3 recording is provided in this post at no charge.

Why a Special Discussion of SEO and Wordpress?

Well, some of the cool things that Wordpress does to be super user friendly, makes it do things that could cause your Wordpress site to rank poorly in the search engines.

The good news is that many savvy developers have created plugins that provide workarounds to optimize your Wordpress installation. As Rae answered questions in the webinar and shared what she is doing on her own sites, she gave us a list of these plugins and explained how they are useful.

I made note of key areas I need to apply to my blogs.

1. Use a robots.txt file to disallow folders and files that I don’t want to attract search engine attention to.

In a Wordpress site this includes all of your Wordpress folders, your feeds and your mobile version if you have one. In the case of my sites with lots affiliate redirects, I should be telling the bots to ignore them too.

Rae mentions disallowing pages that have a high rate of duplicate content as well, such as a privacy policy or disclosure notice. She recommends this website to learn how to implement and tweak your robots file.

2. Use the ‘More’ tag all the time. ( <!–more–> )

When you are writing a post in Wordpress you can insert a tag that tells your site to display only the content above it on your home page or on category/archive pages. By doing so, it prevents entire posts from being duplicated several times on your website.

3. Do not assign a post to more than one category.

This creates unnecessary duplication on your site. This can be a hard habit to break for some but I’ve been following this SEO advice for awhile now. I think it makes my blog better to tell you the truth. It keeps me focused.

Rae’s Recommended Plugins (Listen to learn why she mentions them)

• Complete RSS
• Insert verbage at bottom of your posts in RSS feed
• Control number of posts showing on a category page
• Makes sure every post has only one URL
• Custom name your title tags (Rae notes this is not needed for Thesis users) All In One SEO does same thing by the way.
• Block search engines from your feeds.
  

Make Your Blog More Welcoming to People!

These plugins aren’t about SEO, rather they are about the actual people who will read your blog and become part of your community. Why is this important in a discussion of SEO? Because all the ‘on site’ SEO you do is for nothing if no human beings enjoy your site, comes back often and are inspired to link to it.

• Customize your Community - Make your back end look like your blog
  
• Provide registered users/commenters with links to social profiles
• Know what people are searching for when they visit your blog
• Thanks a user for a first time comment
• Greet a user and recommend they subscribe to RSS
• Display users photo
• Follow your commenters links

Another tip for making your blog user friendly that Rae emphasized is to create a lit of Top Posts on your blog. She does this manually on her own site, hand picking her favorite posts - those she considers her best work. (This also lets her create links with good keyword phrases to this content.)

Two more interesting plugins Rae mentioned add a Social Bookmarking graphic to your blog post only IF your Wordpress site detects an existing link to the individual post which would mean that someone has make an initial submission for the post. I love this - it makes it easy for your visitors to add their thumbs up.

• Displays a graphic if your post has been bookmarked at Delicious
• Displays a Digg graphic if your post has been submitted to Digg.

For Further Wordpress SEO Study Rae Recommends These Resources:

• Watch video here
• Definitive guide to Wordpress SEO

My thanks and appreciation to Rae for taking the time to help WAHMs learn and grow in their internet based businesses.  Rae, we wish you continued growth and success in everything you do.

Your Download Link:

Grab the Mp3 Recording Here (Right Click to Download)