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!

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.

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

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.

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…

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

SEO Basics – Part 1 PageRank

What makes your website more likely to be found by search engines? Search engine results are driven by a collection of factors including incoming links and content relevance, site traffic and past search performance. WordPress makes it easy to manage SEO factors through a combination of Themes, Plugins and Content.

The goals when engaging in Search Engine Optimizaton (for the purpose of this tutorial) are to

1. Get Found – You website should be easily found when people search by your business name, url, your name, or a description of your services and locality.

2. Compete – There are likely other websites in your field or community competing for the same audience as you. SEO seeks to help you raise the visibility of your site above others in Search Engine Results.

3. Deliver Organized and Relevant Content – Websites with organized, relevant content have better results in search engines and are more likely to attract links and repeat visitors.

We will discuss three SEO topics and how they relate to your WordPress powered website: PageRank, On-Page Elements, and Keyword Strategy.

PageRank: Google thinks you’re cool…

PageRank is a number expressed as a percentage, decimal or numeral 1-10 that reflects the perceived authority of your website in relationship to other pages on the internet. Google employs an algorithm to establish a web page’s comparative value to all other web pages on the internet based on how many pages are linking to it. Each link to a website is considered a vote. A vote from a website with a high PageRank translates to a link with more weight. See example at Wikipedia for more info.

The best way to build PageRank is through natural backlinks. Great ways to build backlinks are to ask people in your community to link to you, add yourself to free, relevant directories such as DMOZ, and to connect to your website from personal profiles in the various social networks you belong to.

It is important to remember that PageRank is not the only factor that determines your search results position. Therefore, attaining a higher PageRank should not be the goal of Search Engine Optimization Projects of Web Design in general.

Things to consider when designing your WordPress website are; Who are you lending link support to? And which pages on your site do you want people to be more likely to find? When you create a link to another website, you give a vote (and a bit of your PageRank) to that website. If you wish to link to another site without leaking PageRank, utilize the rel=”nofollow” attribute. You can add this to any link you create by switching to the HTML view and adding the attribute after the a tag. See image below. You can also use plugins like Tiny MCE Advance to enable the advanced link panel with the option to set  No Follow on your links.

When structuring your website, also be aware of where all of your menu link are driving people on your site. Consider adding ‘nofollow’ to links within your site that lead to pages of less importance. The ensures that PageRank within your site stays with your desired pages.

Fun fact: PageRank is named after Google co-founder Larry Page.

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

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Now that your site is up and running, you might be wondering, “Why isn’t anyone visiting my site?” Well, the simple answer is, they don’t know about it!

It is the goal of this post to give you some tools for declaring your website’s presence on the web and driving more visitors to visit it. The goal is to expose your website (and your message) to a broad audience and seek to continue to produce new visitors, repeat visitors and site conversions (no, not evangelism, but we’ll get to this later in this post).

Part 1 – Hey Google! I’m here!

Submitting your site to search engines for review is not difficult at all, and is the first step to getting your site indexed and found by searches. This means we give search engines a heads up, they send their robots to scan your page and save it in their indexing for future searches.

Submit your website to Google by visiting http://google.com/addurl. Do not pay anyone to submit your site to search engines for you. Some of these services could save you some legwork, but many of them will try to sell you something else and some are even outright scams.

Another way to raise your profile with Google is to submit a sitemap. If you use a sitemap plugin for WordPress, you should create a Google Webmaster account and submit your sitemap there.

Part 2 – Link Up!

The most important factor in your PageRank (this is Google’s semi-mysterious web page rating) is the number of links back to your website on the internet. If you have a new domain name, this means you’re starting from scratch. If you had a previous site, make sure you use proper tools to preserve old links to your site by forwarding them too relevant content or to your home page. The Redirection plugin for WordPress will help you with this after reviewing existing links to your site through Google’s webmaster tools.

Building links to your site is hard. For the purposes of this article, we’ll say – don’t ever pay for backlinks. Great ways to build backlinks are to ask people in your community to link to you, add yourself to free, relevant directories such as DMOZ, connect to your website from personal profiles in the various social networks you belong to.

Part 3 – Get Social!

Yep, social media is here to stay, and the good news is that you can make it work to your website’s advantage. The goal of engaging social media (as far as your website is concerned) is to republish content or links back to your site through social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

WordPress automatically produces an RSS Feed of your blog content. This handy feature makes it easy to republish your blog content automatically (read: no effort). And every bit of content republished by you through social networks is a possibility for one of your connections to republish it to their contacts. That’s can turn into an exponential opportunity for exposure. Keep in mind, people only republish that which is interesting or valuable.

Your WordPress site feed address is simply http://yourdomainname.com/feed.  Use services like TwitterFeed or plugins like Twitter Tools and follow Facebook’s instructions to get going.

Part 4 – Tell Everyone!

Now that you have a great website and it should be easy for people to find, don’t forget to tell people to visit it. This seems painfully obvious, but in order to build repeat visitors to your site, it is vitally important to use email blasts, printed reminders and personal invites to come back to the site. Repeat this invitation ad nauseam and track your website usage statistics to see what is effective.

Hopefully these posts have gotten your organization to a place where you feel good about your website and instead of focusing on the design, you can now focus on producing interesting and valuable content to engage your visitors. And don’t forget, your website exists to further the mission of your organization, not just to develop high traffic patterns. Consistently evaluate the time and resources you put into your web presence versus the perceived benefit to your mission.

Good luck and happy websiting! (new word, just for you)

-scott @ fourtencreative