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Part 1 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.

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…

In celebration of Facebook’s replacement of ‘Become of Fan’ with the wonderfully ambiguous ‘Like’ FourTen Creative decided to give out some freebies. Use these icons to drive people to your Facebook Page.

Download All Including Hi-Res

This post continues the Get Your Non-Profit Online for under $125 series. Start here.

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

Liftupchile.com was started to raise awareness and funds for the ongoing relief effort in Chile after the 8.8 magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami of Feb 27th, 2010. At the site you can view images of the destruction and learn how you can donate to the relief effort. Pick up a custom designed Lift Up Chile t-shirt to show your support and spread the word.

This post continues the Get Your Non-Profit Online for under $125 series. Start here.

Step #1 Website (part 2)

Well, by now you have secured a domain name, set up hosting, and installed WordPress with one of those fancy one-click installs. Now to tackle WordPress.

Basic Settings

WordPress is a pretty intuitive program to get started with, but let me point you to some of the important settings that will likely be needed to take your WordPress blog to the place where you can mange your web presence.

Start by clicking on Settings in the admin menu. You will want to make sure your Blog Title and Tagline are the name of your organization and a short mission statement. You’ll want to get these right because templates will reuse the information in multiple places.

Now click on your Reading settings. Tell is to display a Static Page as your front page so it feels more like a normal website than just a blog. Select the default About Page or any other page you feel is appropriate. Later on you will want to create a page called Blog or News and set this as your Posts Page.

Get Yourself a Nice Theme

Under Appearance, click on Add New Themes. Go searching for a nice theme that works for you. Try not to do a Google search for themes because you’ll just get confused. Go to wordpress.org/extend/themes and look at the most popular ones. They are popular for a reason! Also consider a premium theme from a developer like WooThemes. I make no money from this referral! I just think their themes rock.

Once you enable your new theme you will likely have some new options to control under Appearance or Settings. See the theme’s documentation for all the info.

Many organizations will get distracted at this point trying to make the site look the way they want. Your choices are paying for a designer to put the site together for you, or finding a volunteer to handle it. In my experience as a designer, many people will put off the easy part of creating their website, waiting for the complex part to be tackled by a volunteer. So, since this is a tutorial for an organization lacking that budget, just deal with the lack of logo for now. Come back and upgrade later!

Load Up On Plugins

Ok, choosing plugins can be like choosing a plumber. Just cus everyone else uses them doesn’t mean they are quality. Some are. I am recommending that you read comments at wordpress.com/extend/plugins before committing to any.

Under plugins, select Add New. Here is my list of recommendations. You’ll find plenty of varying opinions on these as well, so take it or leave it!

• Akismet: Included with WordPress. Filters spam comments. Worth it!
• All In One SEO Pack: Enables setting of meta data on pages, posts and site-wide. Very useful for making sure your site is visible to search engines and handles keywords automatically on posts.
• Google Analyticator: Handles placing your analytics code. I recommend it because it displays a snapshot of your site traffic on the dashboard.
• Gravity Forms: Forms! Everyone needs forms, especially a general contact form. Gravity Forms is the first plugin I ever paid for and I use it on every site. So flexible and the key for me is that it stores form data in your database for future use or export. This means you can use it in so many different ways.
• Google XML Sitemaps: Creates and updates an xml sitemap. This is another way to make your site more likely to be fully indexed by Google and other search engines. That makes you easier to find when people are looking for you.
• Sociable: Adds those social media icons for people to bookmark and republish your pages and posts on social networks.
• Twitter Tools: Whether you want to send your posts to Twitter or bring Twitter into your posts, this creates the link.

Once you have gotten all of your plugins set up, you’ll be ready for content! So start writing.

Next post: Driving Traffic to Your Website

This post will be the first in a series focused on getting non-profits with limited resources online. Check back for future posts.

The Online Imperative

Many non-profits work in the world of  immediate need. For them, it is a luxury to think of technology upgrades, social media connectivity and custom websites. But in our modern society, communication is key to sustaining support for these organizations and the web is key for effective communication.

The goal of these posts will be to get your non-profit online in as few steps as possible with the greatest reach and simplest maintenance in mind. We will accomplish this through a variety of open source and low-cost tools to manage your web communications presence.

Step #1 Website

There are a few pieces to line up to get your website online: Domain, Hosting and Software. There thousands of people out there willing to sell you all of these at a wide variety of prices, so I am providing recommendations based on my experience only.

Domain (yoursite.com) - Choosing a good domain name is the first step in building an effective website. It saves everyone a lot of time and mental energy if you choose a memorable and easy to spell domain name for your site. Try to avoid hyphens, exotic domain extensions (.biz or .xyz) as the people you are trying to attract to your site might end up somewhere else. Chances are that your desired domain name with a .com extension is taken, so get creative, you acronyms to your advantage and utilize the old standby prefixes and suffixes like ‘my’, ‘go’, ‘online’, and ‘web’ when you really can’t find a good option.

It is ideal to combine your domain name provider with your hosting provider (see below), but when that isn’t possible, large companies like enom.com and godaddy.com tend to be the most affordable and easy to use options.  Bluehost.com will include a free domain name for life with your new hosting account.

Hosting (the servers) - Once again, there are plenty of people willing to charge you a wide variety of prices for hosting. Many offer proprietary content management systems (or CMS, covered below) or website building tools that lock you into their methods and capabilities. These are to be avoided for the large part especially as a cost consideration in this tutorial.

The other choices involved in hosting are the platform (windows or unix) and other database and email services. I recommend a unix based service that allows for mysql database hosting and full control over email accounts. I use Bluehost.com for many reasons including cost, customer service and features. There are other comparable providers and some are even cheaper, but I am sticking with my experience here. You can click on the link above to sign up at their site. Their hosting runs about $6.95/month and is the greatest cost involved. Off to a cheap start huh?

Software – Many people are immediately intimidated at the complexity of web design based on a fear of code. Html, php, and javascript will all be utilized to build your site, but there’s no reason for you to know anything about it. That’s because website management has by and large moved to a Content Management System (CMS) model. The difference is that you only need a web browser and internet access to maintain your site as opposed to costly software and you are not locked to your files being stored on one computer.

There are many fine CMS’s out there, but I exclusively recommend WordPress. Technically, people will tell you WordPress is blogging software and not a full-blown CMS. Millions of people using WordPress to manage their website would disagree, as would I. Out of the box, wordpress can manage most sites any small non-profit would need. The benefits of WordPress include a wide developer community, free templates, free plugins to extend capabilities and tons of great tutorials…like this one! And best of all, this open-source software is free!

If you chose the right hosting provider above, then they likely offer ‘one-click’ installs of WordPress. If not, you can download it from WordPress.org and follow the installation instructions. The goal here is to do this without programmer intervention. However, when you need help, a one or two hour investment in an experienced web designer may save you 20-40 hours of headaches.

To install WordPress with Bluehost, you log in to your account, click on SimpleScripts down the screen and select WordPress from their list of applications. It will ask you for some details and bam! You’ll have a website ready to configure.

Our next post will focus on the configuration process for your website.

Money paid so far: $6.95/month for hosting 1 year = $83.40 (but maybe you found a better deal!)

Next post: Configuring your new WordPress website