Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Optimized Titles

October 7, 2008 • 36 Comments

Arguably, one of the most important elements of a website from an SEO perspective is what comes between the <title></title> tags in the header of your page. Take a look at any search result page in Google and you’re probably looking at a list of websites with big blue links … and the text of those links is none other than the text Google found between the <title></title> tags when crawling the page.

So, this next post in our WordPress SEO series will cover how to control what gets displayed in that section of our site, and thus not only controlling what the Search Engines display as the title of our post/page in results pages, but also leveraging a powerful tool for ranking for those keywords we’re targeting. (more…)

Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Keyword-Rich Permalinks

October 6, 2008 • 18 Comments

WordPress.org describes permalinks as “the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings.”

But permalinks themselves won’t help if you haven’t optimized them.  Understanding the role your permalinks play in your WordPress SEO starts with understanding the methods for permalink optimization.  Keyword-rich permalinks, along with the other ingredients in this series, will help search engines determine the kind of content in your posts/pages, and rank them accordingly. (more…)

Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Indexing Control

October 3, 2008 • 15 Comments

OK, so you’ve got yourself an XML Sitemap, and you’ve told Google where to find your sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools.  So far, you’re well on your way to optimizing your WordPress site.

The next thing in your journey to the ultimate in WordPress SEO is telling the Search Engines what they need to index. (more…)

Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Google Webmaster Tools

October 2, 2008 • 22 Comments

In my last post in this WordPress SEO series, we covered how to use the XML-Sitemaps plugin so you could generate a sitemap for your WordPress site.  Today, we’re going to cover the best way to get Google to recognize that sitemap and start crawling your site! (more…)

Premium or Freemium?

October 1, 2008 • 24 Comments

Quite a few months ago, I made a proposition to my readers. I put a call out for great designers, loyal to the idea of Open Source software, to contact me and collaborate on an idea that I thought would make many users in the WordPress community very happy.

Today, I want to put out a similar call for your input, and (in a roundabout way) give you more details about the upcoming project.

This idea of mine, which has been stewing since February, 2008, is very similar to the idea that my good friend Brian Gardner just announced over at his site.

So, I want to know from you, my loyal readers … what makes you lay down your hard earned cash when it comes to WordPress themes?

  • Is it the theme itself, features, innovation?
  • Is it the support that comes with a premium theme?
  • Is it the Documentation?
  • Is it the exclusivity (since popular free themes tend to be overused)?

I want to know! Premium themes are very popular right now … more so than they ever have been.  But there must be some reason we pay for a theme.  Are all premium themes really that much better than their free alternatives?

Second question, what if themes — good themes, great themes! — were available for free? Would you be inclined to send the author a “thank you donation”? Would you be willing to pay for support, documentation, tutorials, add-ons, etc.? What about people you know?  Would they be willing to pay for the added support, or would they be perfectly happy with just downloading the theme and nothing else?

I want your feedback! Either reply here in the comments, or hit me up on twitter with an @nathanrice reply.

Thanks!