The other day I started working on a blog post about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and I wanted to see if there were any new thoughts on the subject since there is quite a bit about SEO scattered around already. I had my twhirl client running, when what popped up as a tweet? Shoemoney writes a blog post called What Is The Definition Of SEO?
“DOH!!”
Well, onward and upward. In the online world there is a thing called Search Engine Optimization – SEO for short. SEO will help you help others find your website or blog.
Showmoney’s definition came from a bunch of influential folks in the online world, 21 to be exact, which is cool because you’ll be introduced to some folks that maybe you hadn’t heard of before.
From a beginners point of view or someone new to SEO, I like Neil Patel’s definition:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of understanding search engines and using that knowledge to make a website rank high on search engines.
The next question from this definition might be, “Why do I need to rank high on search engines?” Well, you don’t have to but if you want more people showing up at your site, you’ll want to, especially if you’re selling something.
Another question is, “SEO takes so much time, do I really have to worry about this stuff?” Well, you don’t have to because you’ll be found some how and sometime, but to dramatically increase your chances of being found quicker and higher up in search results pages, you’ll want to pay attention to it and somehow automatically link SEO tasks in your blog or website workflow.
Here are 16 SEO sources from some of the folks in Showmoney’s blog post as well as some of my own findings:
- Google’s Tips On How To Write A Good Meta Description by Search Engine Land and don’t forget about their SEO Tools.
- What Google Knows About Spam by Matt Cutts
- Beginner’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization by Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz
- Optimal Titles: SEO Case Study
- Plenty of stuff to check out at SEO Book and I especially like the vids.
- Quick Keyword Research Tools by Practical eCommerce – Checkout the SEO Report Cards for various sites. Very informative.
- WordPress SEO – The beginner’s guide by Joost de Valk
- The Official Google Webmaster Centeral Blog
- Yahoo! Search Blog
- Live Search Webmaster Center Blog at MSDN
- Stompernet – Going Natural 3
- A new Stompernet product will help you with SEO on your site.
- Title Tags
- Meta Description Tags
- Meta Keywords
- Heading Tags
- Images
- XML Sitemap
- Links
- Directories
- Web 2.0 Tracking
- Search Engine Optimization for WordPress – This is a pretty darn comprehensive guide on SEO. Extreme amounts of valuable information here.
- SEO Title Tag
Search engine optimize your blog’s title tags. Create a customized title tag for any post, static page, category page, UltimateTagWarrior tag page – indeed, any URL! And will auto-insert the tag name into the title on tag pages generated by UltimateTagWarrior plugin. Admin allows for mass editing of title tags. By Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts.
- All in One SEO Pack
- Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
- WordPress SEO: First Steps by SEOnoob – Excellent SEO Tips for WordPress
Here are some points from the video:
The video provides excellent detailed tasks you can do and use on your site’s SEO activities.
Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …
This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.
This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
Hi Bill,
Thanks very much for a very informative post.
It’s such a huge area to research so I was glad to come across a comprehensive list like yours.
Plenty of links here to keep me busy!
Thanks
Sally
WordPress is a great blogging platform and getting it search engine optimized really isn’t a hard task. Using proper permalinks and robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content and a few other methods can really make a difference. The All in One SEO plugin is really the best bet.
Where to start?
Titles, duplicate content, plugins… it’s all here.
Once my site / blog is up and running I shall be back to this page.
PS – nice title “SEO – 16 Saucy Sources”
Great list. I’d add the Warrior Forum to that list. A great source of information and experts.
This is great list, I am SEO practitioner in the last 10 years and I agree with what you have wrote. SEO need to be in tact with the time and algorithms. Things are not changing that fast, but there are always new ways of Internet Marketing.
SEOs are always on risk.. One who takes risk get success.
This is an awesome list! Was browsing the web because I did not know where to start. So glad I came across yours. SEO is really important if you want to generate traffic in your blog and your list will be of great help. Thanks!
What a list you got there! Thanks for sharing. I’m looking forward for more SEO resources from you in the future. This is really helpful.