Internet Business Pro by Joe Perez

Hi everybody. I hope you are all having the best day/evening EVER!

Welcome to Internet Business Pro by Joe Perez (moi) to my new readers.

Short disclaimer: You will soon realize, I don’t have any subliminal strategy in writing these posts, but rather will randomly post things that I come across in my personal time that I think might be helpful to you. So these are living documents – check back for updates.

This post, in particular, is a perfect example of my random-ness.

**This post was updated at 11:45pm PDT on May 30th, 2009. The reason for the update is to let you know that the Platinum SEO Wordpress Plugin has been upgraded to include the Canonical Link Element that was the purpose of the Canonical Link WordPress Plugin below. Please note, SKIP THE CANONICAL LINK PLUGIN – IT IS NOT NECESSARY ANYMORE! If you have already installed it, just go ahead and deactivate it. It should not disturb anything :0)

I recently created Internet Business Pro and, in doing so, figured I would share some of the things that I do, and am doing, when setting up a new wordpress blog for seo.  Now before we get started, let’s make sure to grab all the plugins that I’m going to be installing initially. (I use initially because, as the blog grows in content, there are additional plugins that you will want to install in the future. It is still too early for those, but I invite you to subscribe to my feed for the rest of the seo plugins I use in the near future.) Here is a short list of links and brief explanations of the best wordpress plugins for seo, in my opinion. Remember, this is IN MY OPINION so please feel free to suggest additions to this list! I am happy to engage with you on your recommendations in greater detail, so please feel free to contact me at ImJoePerez(at)gmail(dot)com and I’d be glad to chat with you! I am a perpetual student of SEO and WordPress and welcome to any and every opportunity to learn more/new strategies.

In order to follow these directions with the least amount of problems possible, make sure that you are setting up a self-hosted wordpress blog for seo and you must have access to your blog as the admin. Oh, and I’m a PC.

*This post does not cover the VERY first part of what some may confuse “setting” up your blog (How to INSTALL WordPress) with, but that link should get you where you need to go. Come back when you’re ready!

Also, please keep in mind that there is timing involved in the installation or activation of a couple of these plugins so please don’t jump ahead too much or you may set yourself back. Download these to a new folder called JoesPlugins (or something you will remember as the best for you to keep track of). Download each of these plugins in this new folder and allow them to remain as zip files. Don’t upload or activate any of these WordPress SEO Plugins just yet!

1. Google Sitemap Wordpress Plugin - This is an awesome plugin for creating valid Google sitemaps. Sitemaps make it easier for Google to index your content = more pages get higher ranking. 
2. **Canonical WordPress Plugin - This plugin helps you solve duplicate content issues. For a more in-depth explanation of exactly what this plugin addresses the canonical link element does/is, please watch this video of Google’s Matt Cutts on the Canonical Link Element on that download page.
3. Internal Link Building WordPress Plugin - This plugin is AWESOME for internal linking your posts/pages. Search engines LOVE a properly inner-linked blog with all relevant info being directed appropriately for the best content.
4. Platinum SEO WordPress Plugin - This is a great plugin for creating individual title, descriptions and keywords for each post.  A PERFECT compliment to the Internal Link Building WordPress Plugin.
5. Sociable WordPress Plugin - This cool plugin maximizes your blog’s reach and allows others to share your blog and build backlinks across various social networks to your blog.
6. Optimized Tag Cloud WordPress Plugin - This plugin converts your tag cloud into valid html markup to ensure you get the most SEO weight for your tags/ keywords.
7. SEO Friendly Images WordPress Plugin - This is a SUPER nifty plugin that creates the appropriate ALT and TITLE tags for your images. This makes your posts…wait for it…W3C/xHTML valid as well!

Are you ready to install these SEO WordPress plugins? NO!! Not yet you’re not.

We still have to discuss a few other VERY IMPORTANT things you need as far as strategy. SEO is not something that any plugin will be a quick fix for. Search Engine Optimization is a very well thought out and strategically executed process requiring quality content for your users (when done effectively and without any risk of being banned for violations from shady tricks). I am a white-hat SEO and will only teach you the safest, most expedient methods in setting up a new WordPress blog for seo – based on my real life experience of optimizing many, many, many blogs over the years.

Where’s Your First Post – or First Five? 

Often times, new bloggers make the mistake of setting up their blog and not having any content ready – or they just throw some quick content together as their first post. This is what gets indexed by Google as the first thing! You have no idea how many bloggers get called away suddenly (trust me, I know this HAPPENS) and can’t finish the basics of setting up their wordpress blog for SEO. This translates into something you don’t want being cached and indexed – in simpler terms appearing on Google results for your brand/name. Take a look at these sites that made that mistake or just haven’t gotten back to setting up their WordPress blog → Google’s SERPs for WordPress Incompletes.  (I will concede that some of these may be demos, but feel free to click through some of those and see the multitude of errors in planning.)

What I’m trying to convey to you is to make sure you have your first post well thought out and already written in a word/text format ready to go.

What Are Your Categories Going to Be?

You are going to want to know what types of things you will be blogging about to set up your categories now. You can always add new categories at any time, but we want to have a structure in place for the direction of your new WordPress blog. Think of it as labeling boxes for all of your thoughts. :0) Have these ready to go as well.

What Will be Your Title, and Description for Your Blog? What Search Terms Would Best Explain Your Blog?

It is very important to understand your keywords that your blog will be found by, and that you are optimizing for. You want these to be targeted to the user that is a “perfect fit” for your blog – in readership and activity on your site. Notice how I said “activity on your site.” The key, in my opinion, is engaging the user in a click through your blog once they get there. Here I go off on a tangent → Something that I have seen to be a factor in ranking is bounce rate. If a user is prone to scrolling your content then clicking out of your site it makes rankings slightly harder to attain quickly. Best results were seen when there were multiple click thru’s from home page internal links. This has alot to do with the search terms that you optimize for and users find you by.

So what I’m rambling about ultimately is to make sure you know which keywords you will be targeting for your blog as a whole and also have an idea of which future posts/pages you will be writing that you will be optimizing for individually by this point – it would be best if you would even go as far as to write your headlines for 3-5 of your future posts/pages and target 2-3 seperate keywords (keyword phrases) for each. These will come in handy in the near future – and you’ll be EXTREMELY happy with the results you achieve if you take the time to strategize your title, description and best 15 keywords now. Example: Sample keywords – books, book reviews, lisa, lisa stanley, new book reviews, expert book reviews, book critic, new book critic, novel reviews, critic lisa stanley, book critic lisa stanley, novel critic, novel critic lisa stanley, book reviews by lisa stanley. Sample Blog Title – Novel and New Book Reviews.  Sample Tagline - By Critic Lisa Stanley.  Sample Description – Novel and New Book Reviews by Critic Lisa Stanley offers expert book reviews and novel reviews on various titles.  First sample post headline, “Lisa Stanley Reviews New Book – Love Lost,” second sample post, “Expert Book Reviews of Melon Sun and Wholeheartedly,” third sample post, “A Novel Review of It Was There All Along,” and… well, I’m sure you see the strategy here.

What I hope to have just done is show you how much you should really take a step back and think a little deeper about your keywords, content and overall SEO strategy. When you think you’re ready to move forward…

Let’s Start Setting Up a New WordPress Blog for SEO!

Log into your WordPress Dashboard.

The first link on the left you want to click is “Settings”. It will bring you to General Settings where you will input your Title of your blog and Tagline. Use your highest priority keyword(s) here. Example Title:  Book Reviews by Lisa and the tagline Expert Book Reviews would be targeting “book reviews” as a keyword. Be wary, anything over 60 characters (added from the title and tagline TOTAL) is spammy, in my experience. Once you have input the title and tagline, make sure the rest of the settings are to your liking (I set my weeks to begin on Sunday so my calendar looks normal to me) and “Save Changes.”

The next link on the left that you want to click under “Settings” is “Permalinks”. (Unfortunately, this is where we may lose some of you based on your hosting company. For the more advanced users, I’ll give you a link to help the possible issues you may be having IF you run into trouble.) Click the “Custom Structure” button and enter the following structure into the blank field     /%category%/%postname%/   

What this does is structure your URL’s/links to read what the category is and also what the title of your post is – something we call “Pretty Links”. Below the “Custom Structure”, you also have the option of designating a category base. Example: If you are blogging your poems, you won’t necessarily need categories so you may choose to designate “Poems” as the optional base category. Be careful duplicating keywords here as it begins to get spammy to the search engines – after all, nearly every link in your site will have this Category Base keyword. Don’t use the optional Category Base unless you HAVE to for the sake of your readers. What we have already done above in setting the Custom Structure is good enough! “Save Changes.”

Now before we get to the final link under “Settings”, I want you to click the very top link that should be your Blog Title and the words “Visit Site”.
Here is where we are going to check to see if we lost you. When you get to your blog’s home page, click on the first post title. This should take you to that post with the URL looking pretty with “Hello World!” or the default title of your first post. If you are seeing a page that says something like “Oops, that page doesn’t exist” or “wrong page” or “404 Error”, then you have to fix your .htaccess issue. You must have access to your FTP for your website/domain from your hosting company so you can access the .htaccess file directly. The following link should guide you through that process. WordPress CodexIf you can’t figure it out, set your ‘Permalinks Settings’ back to “Default” and contact your hosting company to help you access your FTP – and more specifically, your .htaccess.

Now We Are FINALLY Ready to Install the WordPress SEO Plugins!

Log back into to your WordPress Dashboard.

On the left side, click “Plugins” and you will be taken to the “Manage Plugins” page. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you should see a link that says “Plugin Browser/Installer” – if you see this link, click it and skip below. If you do not see this link then you will need access to your FTP once again and can not go further until you have the ability to upload files to your blog via FTP access from your hosting company. →If you are uable to continue because of your hosting company, I urge you to consider changing to Dreamhost GREEN Hosting from $5.95 per month.

Select the folder that you just named JoesPlugins (or something else) and upload, one at a time, all 7 of the .zip files (WordPress SEO Plugins) you just downloaded but DO NOT ACTIVATE THEM YET!

Once they have all been uploaded, go to the “Manage Plugins” page (go ahead and “upgrade automatically” if you see “There is a new version of…” the inactive plugins – still without activating). Then ACTIVATE all of the plugins EXCEPT for the Google Sitemap Wordpress Plugin.

If you have installed a broken plugin, you will have to uninstall it completely and try to download that specific plugin again and go through the same process. Here is a link to help you if you have a broken plugin. How to Uninstall a WordPress Plugin

Now it’s time to configure your new SEO Plugins!

1. Internal Link Building WordPress Plugin - This plugin’s settings are accessible under Posts called “Keywords”. As you add new Posts/Pages you will want to come back to this and update your target keywords by post/page and designate a url for each targeted term. Right now, you don’t have anything really to configure. (Remember why we wanted to have that keyword strategy ready though?)
2. Platinum SEO WordPress Plugin - This plugin’s settings are directly under “Settings” and reads “Platinum SEO”. Click that link and make sure you have your Title, Description and Keywords ready. This is where we will be inputting them!
3. Sociable WordPress Plugin - This plugin’s settings are directly under “Settings” and reads “Sociable”. Click that link and add whichever communities you want your readers to be able to share with. Don’t pick all of them of it will look too clutterred in my opinion. These are the ones I use that I think have a pretty good reach: Digg, LinkedIn, Sphinn, Live, Deli.cio.us, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Mixx, Google, Tumblr, GlobalGrind, YahooBuzz, Twitter and Facebook. The most important thing you want to make sure to do is “Use the “target=_blank” option to open all inks in a new window. This will help keep users on your site while they are bookmarking. 
4. Optimized Tag Cloud WordPress Plugin - This plugin is actually now a widget and is located in your ‘Appearance Settings ‘under “Widgets”. Add it to your sidebar of choice (I say choice because some themes have more than one. If yours doesn’t – no worries). Just make sure to use this widget instead of the default tag cloud.
5. SEO Friendly Images WordPress Plugin - This plugin comes already configured to automatically add the title of your post and image name. You are also able to add the category parameter instead, if you wish. I recommend using the default configuration, so, no need to modify anything here as well!
6. Canonical WordPress Plugin - This plugin comes already configured with nothing to do on your end! You gotta like that. Developers do all the work and we get to reap the rewards. If you can, make a donation or link back to their sites. I’m sure they would GREATLY appreciate it! (and you never know, maybe they’ll remember you when they release a brand-spanking new wordpress seo plugin

Now It’s Time to Make Your FIRST Post for WordPress SEO!

I hope you’re thanking me for making sure you were ready with your first post by now. ::wink::  If not, you will after your site gets indexed for the first time – effectively.

Go ahead and make your first post, while being conscientious of your keywords. As soon as your finished, we will now scroll to the very bottom of the screen to your Platinum SEO Plugin area. This is where you will add the title of your post, description and keywords. Make sure to use similar keywords as what you created for your tags. I do plan to write another post on how to effectively tag your blog, but for now, just use tags that will best set that post apart from the rest but with a good term or phrase. Example: (Using the Book critic, Lisa Stanley example from above) Tags would be – book reviews, novel reviews, new book review by lisa stanley, etc… similar to the keywords, yes, but targeted to help the users. You will find the “Tags” field on the top right side of your blog near the “Publish” and “Save as Draft” buttons. Once you’re done, Save as Draft! 

Last Minute Checks Before We Let ‘er Loose!

After you save your post as a draft and have made sure that your ‘Platinum SEO Plugin’ is configured not only in “Settings” for your “Home Page”, but also for your first post, we need to go to “Settings” on the left side again and click the “Privacy” link. This takes us to a simple question for “Blog Visibility”. Make sure to select the top button that reads, “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.” You would be amazed at how often times people are setting up their blog and have prevented spiders and search engines as a question they were asked when setting it up initially, and just never remembered to check this configuration and allow them again. This is also why I did not want you to activate the Google Sitemaps seo plugin just yet ,either – since it will ping the search engines. Imagine if we had… and you made a change or saved something on your blog accidentally that pinged the search enines for the first time? The search engine bot would have been sent to your blog only to discover that it can’t index anything. Trust me, without getting too techy, this is bad.

Now You Can Activate the Google Sitemaps SEO Plugin.

As soon as it’s activated go ahead and click the new “Settings” link for it. It should read something to the effect of your sitemap not being built yet. DONT BUILD THE SITEMAP MANUALLY. I only wanted to point this area out and make you aware of the MULTITUDE of configurations you can make. More info on the best recommended settings for your sitemaps can be found here. (I also just realized that I will be writing another post soon on how to set up these configurations for optimum performance.) For the sake of time in getting you online with a HUGE advantage over most in WordPress SEO, I’ll assure you that the current default settings are good.

Now there are TWO things we need to address before we publish the first post.

Set-up your sidebar. Go to “Appearance” on the left hand side and click “Widgets”. If you get there and it says that you don’t have widgets enabled, no worries, we can always add those for SEO later. Go ahead and set up whatever widgets you want in the sidebar for now. Trust me, in the future (yet another possible post) you will want to go “widget crazy,” but I urge you not to add too many or things have tendencies to mess up, lightly put.

Click ”Links” on the left hand side. This will bring you to your “Blogroll”. Your blogroll, or (you can create any link categories you need) whatever the category you choose, is your recommended links to share with your readers on your sidebar. (You must enable ”Links” or “Blogroll” on your sidebar to display these.) WordPress was nice enough to set you up with links to all the WordPress Resources. I appreciate it greatly, but I’m only trying to link out of my blog wisely. I would recommend only linking to your best friends with relevant sites or the best resources for your blog’s subject matter here. In my experience in various niches, it is best to include a link or two to authoritative resources like .edu or .gov websites to expound on your subject. When you’ve added your first (In my opinion 3-5 links here for your first post is enough for SEO. As you add more content you can increase the links you choose to include. I’ll tell you more about that soon.)

We’re FINALLY READY to Publish the First Post and Open the Floodgates – a Little. 

I promise, just this one last thing.

Before I let you go and push that button to “Publish” your first post, remember you have only laid the foundation in setting up your WordPress blog for SEO. I will be writing more posts to help you through some of the advanced steps in continueing to optimize your blog, so please subscribe to the Internet Business Pro feed or follow me on Twitter for updates here, Joe Perez on Twitter.

With that plug inserted, go ahead and push “Publish” now. CONGRATS! You have just taken the first steps in having a super search engine optimized WordPress blog!

I’ll let you in on a little secret, being able to optimize your blog while delivering high quality content IS a direct path to making money online. If done effectively, it can generate MANY readers/customers who are searching for what you have – whether it be products, services, knowledge or plain ole’ online friendship! Oh, and the best part is that this is pure search traffic. Not even considering the social media addition to your blog that I’ll be writing about soon enough. Still testing some things on this one at the moment…

Please share this with a friend if you found it helpful, or leave a comment below.

Wishing you the best of success,

Joe Perez

PS. Images to compliment this post and video will be coming soon.