I’m in the deep south. Mi double S deeeeeeeep. You either slow down or look foolish down here. Taking a nap on a hammock brings credibility…wrap around porch kinda credibility. I’m used to this style of living, btw. Where empathy buys you a place at the table but don’t expect it to be returned (but then again, empathists(sic) know that their wisdom is seldom reciprocated).

I’m in their world this week and I’m glad for it. Ima (Popkin thankyou) drink it up like moonshine and dew drops. Ima keep lettin’ my little girl feed sliced apples to the horses across the street. Ima slowin’ down and gonna listen to wiser generations than mine own speak. We move so fast these days. So fast that we skip past the meant punchlines. We listen long enough to think we we get the gist and then we corrupt the speaker’s message with our personal experiences.

Return to the uncorruptible. Do not take the pop challange of the coca cola commercial. Ronald McDonald is not a true clown. Stop reading now if this “don’t make” sense. Cake is not a lie. Joan of Arc died for it.

But pop culture will tell you otherwise.

It will tell you that 1-2 great stanzas and a power chord will sooth it all it out. If you believe that then I’ve got some pharma grade farm land to sell you….one procedure and we’ll remove your emotional tonsils and you’ll no longer be autistic.

I challenge: Stay autistic. Recognize the retardness in everyone and only then will conformity = the absurd. Little ones low in years + TRUE selfless parents (please God let me be a selfless parent) know this: LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY. Teach unlearnedness. It ain’t about the dollars but it *is* about the Benjamins …and the Nathans….and the Lauras. It’s people that count (and the relationships we build with them).

My 4 yo sleeping on her great grandaddy’s lap might very well be my life’s pinnacle achievement and I’m at peace with that. I worked hard for that moment. I drove 500 miles. I played make believe. I ran her around the yard till her cheeks flushed and she felt fevered. I told pawpaw (grand dad) my ulterior motive. Ima soak up him soaking it up. I hope one day to double my age so that I can bask in the same kind of radiation my little daughter now blesses her great grand pappy with. It all comes back to this: love.

That’s it/my random thought for this late night: empathy. Conservative or liberal. You can’t aruge with this one universal truth. We either strike out to find something in common with one another or we. just. strike out.

The web is rife with duplicate or poorly worded content. Many search marketers put out material on the web solely to provide contextual back-links. Usually content is duplicated or plagiarized from another source. Useless to the real world, this “fake” content only exists for the search bots.

The web doesn't need anymore of this...

There is a reason for this: it works! It works especially well if you use NameJet or DropDay to identify an expired domain with a history (PageRank, Listed in DMOZ/Yahoo/Google directory entries, and back links). Just buy related domain names, throw up some prose semantically relevant to your business, and have keyword-rich anchor texts in your back links.

But activities designed to just “game the SERPs” are just that: games. Games are bad for SEO because:

• The web is getting cluttered with useless content.
• SEOs that practice this must constantly outdo other SEOs that do the same and causes brinkmanship that spirals toward blackhat.
• Outside of (maybe) obtaining a better rank, games don’t benefit the core business.

Well done SEO is a holistic process. It should permeate the entire IT infrastructure of your business. While this doesn’t mean that you need to see every decision through an SEO lens, it does mean that you need to take some time to identify your digital assets and unique content.

Some simple questions to help identify your unique content:

• What is your mission? Why are you in business? What service do you provide? What sets you apart?
• Do you document your work? Take pictures? Video?
• What advice are you always repeating to new or prospective clients?

Since I primarily work in real estate, most of my SEO examples are going to come from this particular industry. Case #2, while based on a real estate office, applies to almost any industry.

Case Study #1 – Goal: Get more real estate related traffic to our website.

RE/MAX Executive Realty isn’t the largest Charlotte real estate company in terms of number of agents. It isn’t even in the top 5 when just counting heads but their agents are enormously successful in terms of individual volume. This means RE/MAX Executive is in the top 5 when it comes to revenue, transactions, and number of active listings.

Why bother mentioning this? Because in order to identify unique content opportunities, you have to find out what makes a company unique. You need their back story.

In this case, their advantage was two-fold:

• They have a huge inventory of active listings.
• Their agents make more money and keep a larger percent of it so they are willing to partner on marketing their listings.

5 years ago, RE/MAX Executive launched an in-house virtual tour company. Each site was a standalone site. Each site had custom written scripts that were different from the generic MLS descriptions you would find on Realtor.com (and all the other sites). Each site was tied to a specific address. Each site had professional photography.

All of these (contextual, timely, geo-specific, and unique) sites linked back to RE/MAX Executive.

Oh, and they helped the agents sell their properties faster. We kept stats back then. Properties listed with the virtual tour service sold at least 40% faster. We were doing 50+ sites a month. RE/MAX didn’t make money on the tours once the production costs were subtracted but we kept the program running for years because it helped us in three ways:

1. It was a recruiting and retention tool for agents.
2. It generated more sales.
3. It generated natural back-links.

Case Study #2 – Goal: Educate our agents and recruit others to join our company.

Hadi Atri, an owner of RE/MAX Executive, is a veteran of the real estate business. While he no longer actively practice real estate, he is the Broker-in-Charge of his company’s Ballantyne office. He advocates life-long learning and encourages his agents to continually train. What separates Hadi apart is that he personally attends the training sessions himself. He is always updating or improving some part of his company.

An active, forward-thinking owner like Hadi presents several opportunities for unique content:

• Evaluating different programs and providing case studies where a particular program improved one of his agent’s business.
• Providing a 30-year perspective on Charlotte’s housing and business environments.
• Promoting new programs the company is launching.

Basically, Hadi is busy…all the time. His enthusiasm for training and years of experience give him a perspective others want to hear. So we setup a blog and a twitter account and trained him on good article writing practices (and installed the Scribe Content Optimizer). The strategy helps in multiple ways again:

1. Gives an official channel for Hadi to communicate with his agents and potential recruits about programs being offered by RE/MAX Executive.
2. Provides a feedback channel for agents to interact with Hadi.
3. Generates natural, contextual, and timely backlinks.

Conclusion

In both case studies, SEO was only one of the benefits. You shouldn’t do SEO just for SEO’s sake. After awhile, you’re creating too much static. SEO done right should emanate from the core of the business and enlist its principals. It’s your job to craft a system that allows your clients to create their own timely, interesting, and relevant content…and make sure that content augments their search presence.

The target audience for this is someone familiar with WordPress and has installed plug-ins on WordPress in the past. If you just want to write more compelling posts and not tinker with the insides of WP at all, skip down to the bottom of this post.

WordPress-powered sites typically rank well on their own. The search engines like blogs for a number of reasons right out of the box:

1. Structure – WP provides a great system for organizing your content within pages and posts. Pages are usually for static content that doesn’t change frequently (like your contact or about pages). Posts are article-like pages that are timely and focused on one particular subject.
2. More Structure – With WP’s widgetized layout system, you can have widgets for links, categories, tags, etc. The link section is important and we’ll cover it more below.
3. Technorati and Google Blog notification – Everytime you post a new article, WP will notify several blogging services. This can mean your content gets indexed extremely quickly. I’ve seen posts appear in google’s results in as little as 2 hours.
4. Ease of Use – . WordPress is easy to use. This ease of use allows your clients to contribute articles to their blog. Your clients are the best experts you’ve got when it comes to their product or service. Train them and then cut them loose. (there is even a great plug-in to help, more below).

How to Tweak WordPress Settings for SEO

The first few adjustments to WordPress are pretty simple but still provide a powerful boost to your SEO efforts. We’ll go down the line

• General Settings – two things to look at here, your Blog Title and Tagline (duh, right?). Make sure they both contain phrases your are optimizing for.
• Discussion – you want people to leave comments on your articles. Make sure you are allowing comments but don’t let them publish the comments without your approval to avoid spam. (we’ll cover spam plugins below, too).
• Privacy – make your site visible to the search engines (duh, right?)
• Permalinks – This is a big one. The default on WordPress is http://yourblog.com/?p=1234.  Change it so the link includes the name of the post. This helps search engines scan and index your content better.

Insider recommendation: Permalinks using just /%postname%/ will slow down your blog if you have tons of articles. WordPress recommends that the first part of your link be the post number.

For large and heavy traffic blogs, I use the following custom structure: /%post_id%/%postname%/

The Useful Plugins

These are in order of importance according to me.

1. All in One SEO Pack by Michael Tolbert – If you do nothing else, do this. It works right out of the box and watch it automatically optimize your tags and help avoid content being duplicated.
2. Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold – There are some arguments our there that you only need to submit a site map once but I don’t buy it. Everytime I update my blog I want Google, Yahoo, and Bing to be notified and my site map submitted. This plugin does it automatically .
3. Scribe by Scribe – This plugin will score your article against SEO best practices. Do this enough times and you will internalize the lessons and not need it for yourself. This is a must-have plugin if you are getting your clients to write their own article.
4. Akismet and WordPress Hashcash – These aren’t exactly for SEO but they will help protect your blog against spam.
5. WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache – Again, not SEO plugins but they make your site faster and site speed is now part of Google’s ranking alogrithm.

For a complete guide on optimizing WordPress for SPEED, check out Vladimir Prelovac’s WordPress Optimization Bible or read it straight from WordPress.org’s Optimization Guide.

The Artsy Side of WP SEO

1. Content is KING! CONTENT is king! Content IS king!

Nothing beats compelling content that inspires random people to link to it. Nothing. Write from your heart or get others who are truly passionate about the topic to write for you. This article literally *flew* off my fingers because I am passionate about web design, WordPress, and SEO. Mary Kay Miller recently posted a nice  7 step guide to compelling blog content.

2. Play nice, make friends.

Notice that I linked to some of the guys who wrote those super useful plugins? Search marketing is about participating in the community. You have to be likable because half of your job (attracting inbound links) is in the hands of people who don’t work for you.

So go out and participate in the community. This means commenting on other blogs, linking to other blogs, and writing good articles that are a service to the community.

3. Promote your work.

After I’m done with this article I’m going to post it to my social network so others can benefit from it. Hopefully my tweet will be retweeted thus exposing my little blog to a wider audience and more potential back links.

Promote smart. This article leans more towards people who are still new to WordPress and SEO so I would make sure to mention that in my tweet. I don’t want my veteran SEO cohorts wasting their time. They already know this stuff.

The most basic step in an search engine optimization strategy is the website’s domain registration. This quick article will review the internet marketing aspects of registering your domain.

Step #1 – Use Network Solutions as your main websites registrar.

Yes I know they are expensive and chocked full of advertisements for upgrades and add-ons but the simple fact is that the sites registered by NS rank well. Godaddy/Wild West Domains is by far the largest registrar yet you will see more NS registered sites in the top ranks. Don’t register all your domains with them, just your main website.

Step #2 – Don’t Register Anonymously.

Your whois information is contact information for your company. Designate an email account and contact person or persons to be listed on the website. The owner of the company should be the owner of the domain. The webmaster or internet marketer should be listed as the technical contact.

Step #3 – Register For 10 Years.

Registering for 10 years shows the search engines that you are serious about keeping this website up and running.

This should cost about $180 on NS if you don’t sign up for any add-ons or upgrades. Typically I only do this with the .com variety and register all the other domains with DreamHost or Godaddy (disclosure: the DreamHost link is an affiliate link that earns me hosting credit, please support the free articles by doing some business with them).

Step #4 – Don’t Forward Your Domains and Don’t Forward Your A (IP traffic) Record.

If anything, point the entire DNS to the server where the site will be hosted and set the other records from there (MX or CNAME).

Forwarding the A record isn’t horrible. If you must do it, do it. But it still is a slight vote down and is seen by some search engines as domain forwarding…another no-no. Domain forwarding is just another way to scream out “duplicate content”. Pick one domain and host your content there. If you must change domains, use a 301 redirect.