news

Many website projects I encounter put the cart before the proverbial horse by starting with a list of features and functionality but very little content. Content creation can be the hardest thing for business owners or leaders of non-profits because they are bogged down in the daily operations of their organization. Before you start a website, brochure or marketing project, it is wise to be clear on what your organization is all about. The goal of this article is to give you a checklist of items to have nailed down (on paper!) before creating content for your project.

In all of these items, clarity and consistency are key.

#1 Organization name - As obvious as this sounds, some organizations haven’t nailed down how they want to be referred to when it comes to a name. Does your name state what you do? Does it beg an explanation? Is it too long and convoluted? Are you better served by using an acronym? Does your usage of acronyms create more confusion? Make sure everyone on your team uses the same name in conversation and writing whenever possible and practical.

#2 Vision statement - What do you hope to accomplish through this business, church, sports team, etc.? This can be a lofty goal which serves to provide direction to your members internally and inspire or attract others externally.

#3 Mission statement - What is your organization going to do? Some confuse the mission and vision of an organization due to an overemphasis either vision or operations. The key difference is that the mission should contain a statement regarding how you will go about accomplishing the goals in the vision statement.

#4 Core values – The above items generally come about after reflection upon the core values, competencies or offerings of an organization. What you identify here may relate to a service you offer, a product you sell or an intrinsic value you hope to pass on through your organization’s operations. It is helpful to distill three or four values out of the breadth of your operations. Once you establish these values, they serve to inform both the vision and mission statements (so you might start here!).

#5 Motto – Last and definitely not least on this list is the organization’s motto or slogan. Whereas the above materials (items 2-4) may only be used internally, the motto will likely appear right after your organization name in all public communications and marketing materials. Some rules for the motto: Keep it short, it should clarify your name, it should describe your services, it should provoke a response, and it should be consistent with the items above.

Consistency and clarity are most important in forming all of these pieces that serve to identify your organization. I emphasize this because before you engage in marketing, you should have a solid identity. Otherwise things get turned around and it is tempting to let a good name, motto, logo, or gimmick lead your operations. When that happens, your brand and your organizational identity are likely to be compromised or damaged.

After successfully documenting the above items, it should be easier to engage in any web design projects, logo design, advertising or building of the organization through public communication.

If you need help with any of the above items, feel free to get in touch!

WordPress has been gaining popularity over the past couple years due to the success of WordPress.com, improvements to the software by its active development community and the proliferation of free templates and plugins which extend the functionality of WordPress from ‘blogging software’ to a robust content management system with social media smarts.

That is no news to many, but I still get people wanting to know whether it’s worth moving from their existing html/php website managed by their existing web person. My totally impartial response is, ‘heck yes!’ So I offer you 6 reasons to migrate your existing website to WordPress with a custom template.

#1 Lower your costs

The typical WordPress capable hosting package with a shared hosting provider like Bluehost.com will run you $4-$8 per month now. What are you currently paying? Just a couple years back $30/month was pretty standard and I routinely find small companies running small websites paying in excess of $100/month for hosting and ‘services’ from their host. With WordPress, many hosting providers know exactly what you need and offer excellent support if something goes wonky on you.

#2 Remove the middle-man

I realize I’m always sabotaging my business by pointing this out, but with WordPress, you don’t need to pay a ‘webmaster’ to make updates and enhancements to your website. Be the master of your own domain quite literally and you’ll likely save hundreds if not thousands of dollars each year. Learning WordPress is easy and made even easier by the proliferation of training materials online and in bookstores.

#3 Unleash your content

One of the basic features of WordPress is the blog capability. What you need to know about blog content with WordPress is that it provides a way to serialize content for distribution via RSS. What the what you say? Every blog post can be made available for re-publishing through automatic and user-controlled methods like Facebook, Twitter, (a million different bookmarking services), feed readers, email distribution methods, etc. If you are a business person, you’ll appreciate that this greatly improves your reach to new audiences with very little investment or effort.

#4 Search engines love it!

Whether you use plugins, built in template options or just WordPress’ stock permalinks options, your website will become more friendly to search engines without the multi-thousand dollar investment in an SEO professional (geez, I know how to kill my business…). WordPress allows you to control url’s, heading tags, page titles and (with plugins) meta keywords and descriptions. This makes your site more likely to be found by people performing related searches.

By the way, I blogged on SEO for WordPress here. Have a read!

#5 WordPress got social skillz

Have you seen some of the rockin plugins for Facebook and Twitter interaction lately? If not, you’re missing an opportunity to foster the development of a social community around your brand, service, or website/blog. Stronger social connection result in greater brand loyalty. If you’re  in the market to seamlessly integrate social media outlets with your website, WordPress makes it easy.

#6 The cool kids are doing it

WordPress.org reports over 3 million people have upgraded to WordPress 3.0. And think of all the people who haven’t upgraded yet! WordPress is used by such companies as Pepsi, People Magazine, UPS, Nikon, VW, Best Buy, Ford… If it’s good enough for Fortune 500 companies, I think you’ll be ok too!

So, if I’ve convinced you, why not request to migrate your site today? FourTen Creative can replicate the design of your existing site with a custom wordpress template.

You will be pleased to know that WordPress 3.0 has been released. After 6 months of development by a core of awesome volunteer coders, we have a lovely new version bringing with it notable enhancements to the default theme, menu system, post types, multi-site functionality (without wordpress MU!) and more. Read more at wordpress.org or watch the video below.

For more information about how you can leverage the latest technology in WordPress 3.0, get in touch!

I love working with business owners when it comes time to get their web presence up to speed. I even enjoy training them on WordPress as their first entry into website editing. I generally give my clients a 1 hour in-person training time where I give them a tour and let them get hands-on with their new website. But for some reason, the ‘drinking from the fire hose‘ approach leaves many with unanswered questions or tasks that they forgot how to handle.

Below is a collection of videos from various sources that seek to help FourTen Creative clients manage their new WordPress websites.

Basic Introduction Playlist at YouTube

This collection of intro videos provides a great entry the very basic, essential tasks in managing your WordPress  website.

Topics include:

• Logging in
• Pages
• Posts
• Images
• Users

Managing Widgets

Organizing The Dashboard and Post Edit Views

These couple videos provide a visual example of how to organize the Dashboard and Post edit page environment. This is especially helpful if you get lost easily when viewing the admin section of your website.

Gravity Forms

If you got your site from FourTen Creative, then you’ve been preloaded with some useful plugins. One of the most powerful is Gravity Forms. This intro video gives you a visual tutorial on creating, placing and managing forms with the plugin.

All in One SEO

Easily one of the most popular plugins for WordPress, All In One SEO Pack allows you to set title, description and keywords for your whole website, pages and even single posts. This is incredibly a great way too leverage the power of WordPress blogging for raising your site’s search engine profile.

Podcasting

A popular use for WordPress is to power a podcast. When I set up churches with a WordPress website, they are generally using the Podcasting plugin to create audio enclosures. Don’t know what that means? You don’t need to. Just watch the video and you’ll have a podcast going in no time.

Part 3 of a 3-part series on Search Engine Optimization for WordPress Users. This tutorial seeks to cover the broad picture of SEO practices and some specific application for WordPress users and developers. Start here.

Keyword Strategy: Keywords as a strategy, not just meta…

Most search engines have stopped basing search engine results on meta keywords. This is bad news for people hoping to gain a search engine benefit from including popular keywords that may not be relevant to their content. But don’t jettison your keyword practices altogether. Starting with a strong emphasis on keywords can serve to organize and inform the rest of your search engine optimization practices. Below are a collection of concepts to strengthen your overall SEO practices by starting with a strong keyword strategy.

Agreement: The strongest pages from an SEO perspective are those that can coordinate between all of the above elements to create agreement in relationship to the targeted keywords. If you have an existing business name and url, this may be difficult, so you may need to focus your efforts on sub-pages of your site to get your keywords into URL’s and page titles.

Focus: A well organized site allows each page to focus on a given topic. If you optimize each page, you have a stronger website made up of strong pages. Also, don’t try to make your website ‘more interesting’ by adding material extraneous to your focus. It will dilute the relevancy of your page for search engines AND humans.

Keep It Natural: Search engines know how to spot sites attempting to work the system by analyzing page structure and keyword density. Your website should appear as natural as a magazine article on a given subject. Natural keyword density is estimated around 10% compared to other words on the page.

SEO Concerns When Setting Up Your WordPress Website

Themes (Site Templates)

You will need to select a Theme for your site that takes search engine optimization into consideration. The big question is: Does the theme handle Meta Descriptions, Keywords, Page Titles and H1 tags for you? Or does it leave those factors in your control? You will want to review your source code any time you activate a new theme to confirm where your SEO elements appear (or don’t!).

Plugins

There are plugins that seek to help you manage your Meta Descriptions, Keywords, and Page Titles. This is desirable because of the fine control these plugins give you over each page and post. The most popular plugin All In One SEO Pack, does an excellent job at managing these factors, but can slow down your site compared to managing this data at the theme level.

Content

After you have your theme and plugins figured out, that will dictate how you manage SEO factors on the content level. A theme that leaves you to set the H1 tag in your content provides more opportunities for control, but you must remember to place your H1 text at the top of your content. Then use H2 and H3 for subheadings. This is managed with the Format dropdown in the content editor for each page and post.

Two Scenarios for WordPress Users

It is helpful to provide these two scenarios as case studies for how one might manage SEO for their WordPress site.

#1 Plugin Magic

So you’ve loaded up your plugins including All In One SEO Pack… now you need to remember to set those sitewide options and on each page and post that you desire distinct information. Review your source code to confirm you are not repeating any SEO elements unnecessarily due to theme functions.

Another complimentary plugin method would be to utilize an auto-tagging plugin which All In One SEO Pack would then set as your keywords.

#2 Optimized Theme

A well optimized theme can take care of the majority of your On-Page elements by utilizing WordPress data. Examples include: purposing the site description as a meta description, using custom fields to define keywords per-page, wrapping page titles in h1 tags and structuring page titles out of a combination of page title and site name.

#3? Hybridize

Any SEO strategy for WordPress can be hybridized by active management of your data and customization of your WordPress theme. The key is to choose a strategy that fits your workflow and automate as much as possible to make your strategy sustainable. An unmaintained complicated SEO method will produce less results than a well maintained, simplified method. This is no surprise!

If you master these SEO practices, you should see a marked increase in your SERP position as well as site traffic. Then you can move on to complimentary strategies like a Google Adwords campaign and Google Local Business listing to fill out your SERP visibility.

Previous Post: On-Page Elements – What search engines see that you don’t…

Part 2 of a 3-part series on Search Engine Optimization for WordPress Users. This tutorial seeks to cover the broad picture of SEO practices and some specific application for WordPress users and developers.

On-Page Elements: What search engines see that you don’t…

Now we will look at the elements that affect search engine visibility and performance in your website’s source code. You may have seen plenty of beautiful websites that just don’t perform well in search results. This is because designers didn’t take into account what search engines see, that normal eyes do not and vice versa.

We will examine the most important meta elements, attributes and tags for impacting your search engine performance.

Anatomy of a Basic HTML Page

Take a look at the page structure above and use it as a reference for the discussion to come. It is important to note that your final product will look nothing like this if you are using a WordPress website! We will explore why later when we discuss templates and plugins.

What’s in your HEAD?

Meta information (meta meaning ‘along with’ or ‘self’) are bits of data which serve to identify your pages and distinguish sections of content.

Meta Keywords are your starting point (we’ll explain why later in Keyword Strategy). This is a list of topics, localities, products or descriptive words that people would use to search for your website. All other SEO data should reinforce your targeted keywords. Selecting appropriate keywords can be the most important part of your SEO strategy. Try a tool like Google AdWords Keywords Tool.

Your Meta Description is sometimes pulled from your Tagline in Settings. This description provides a sentence or two utilizing your keywords to put the purpose or explanation of content in a short statement.

URL: Your domain name and page names reinforce your keywords and content. If you can secure a domain name that includes your #1 keyword, this will reinforce your strategy. Also, by utilizing ‘pretty permalinks’ in WordPress, you can achieve excellent url structure. Under Settings/Permalinks, select Day and Name or Month and Name.

Title Tag: The title of your page and website. You should provide a logical title which includes one or two of your keywords and then repeat the name of your website with a ‘from’ or ‘by’. See plugins for options on managing page titles.

A Short Aside: Elements in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)

Your Title, URL and Meta Description make up your search engine results page listing when properly organized. Keep in mind what a person searching would be likely to click on when they see your result.

Heading Tags: H1, H2 and H3 tags are typically used to organize content on the page. Search engines see these tags as providing clues to the purpose of the content. You should have one H1 tag per page, one-three h2 tags per page and nest tags in order for logical organization. A page name is usually displayed by your page template automatically and may have a heading tag applied to it already. View your source code to confirm.

Paragraph Tags: These tags set off content as content. Content wrapped in paragraph tags is given more weight on the page than other extraneous bits of text. It is tempting for some to use <br /> tags to achieve desired spacing on a page, but a well designed template will set you up to space paragraphs appropriately.

Alt and Title Attributes: A descriptive filename is a great place to start when placing images relevant to your content. But search engines can’t see images, so utilize the image Title and Alternate Text when uploading images to your WordPress pages or posts. These should reinforce your keywords.

Previous Post: PageRank: Google thinks you’re cool…

Next Post: Keyword Strategy: Keywords as a strategy, not just meta… And more WordPress Specific Concerns