Searchable, Crawlable, Optimized Content – The SEO Fix You Are Looking For?

Website owners are constantly looking for that one SEO formula or template that will assure them of that coveted top spot on the search engine pages. Many webmasters have retracted from their black hat ways and are cleaning up their acts – deleting link building campaigns, url redirects, keyword stuffing, etc. – and are turning to more Google-friendly methods to avoid being penalized. One of the many SEO strategies that people are investing in is CONTENT – good, relevant, easily crawlable content. But is it THE magic SEO formula that people are looking for?

Imagine ordering a decadent looking 3-tier specialty cake baked by Cake Boss Buddy Valastro himself – intricately designed and made with absolutely the finest ingredients. It’s got everything in it to definitely make it a conversation piece among the guests. But, what if someone forgets to display this wonderfully made cake and it stays in the kitchen where no one gets to see it except the kitchen staff. No doubt it’s a wonderful and probably the best tasting cake your guests will ever taste but unless they see it, admire it, slice it, taste it – they will never know what they are missing. Same thing goes with your wonderful, relevant, crawlable, well-written content. Out of sight, out of mind.

But hey, you can have your cake and probably eat it too if you take a wholistic approach to SEO. Yes, by all means, go ahead and build relevant, optimized, searchable great content. But don’t stop there. Make sure that you get it out there and give your audience a taste of it. Get people engaged enough to share it, link to it, and make them want to come back for more. Use and maximize social media. Add that tested and reliable SEO plugin. Market your brand. Plan your public relations campaign. Grow your audience. Junk those outdated SEO concepts. Analyze and study your statistics. Realize that it’s not a one-time event but it’s something that needs to be maintained constantly. SEO is not a one-template fits all type of thing. It is anything and everything that contributes to your website’s visibility and helps you land on that top page in the SERPS.

For more on this topic, check out this helpful article on Moz.com.

WordPress Plugins and Widgets To Help You Manage Your Content Efficiently

Managing large volumes of content can be quite a task if not managed well especially if you are handling multiple contributors, authors, and guest authors. Here are some useful WordPress plugins to help you streamline and monitor your content activities:

Postrunner

Postrunner is a guest posting system connecting authors with site owners. This plugin facilitates the process of hooking a WordPress site into Postrunner to receive guest posts. PostRunner streamlines the guest posting process for authors and publishers who want to share content, but don’t want to deal with the normal prospecting, pitching, and negotiating traditional guest posting requires. Authors get abundant guest posting opportunities; publishers get quality content for their blog or website while maintaining total editorial control.

Really Simple Guest Post Plugin

Really Simple Guest Post Plugin allows your visitors to submit posts even without registration (as a guest author). Anyone will be able to submit post and it will be added automatically as a pending post for review, approval or rejection. Posts will be directly saved into WordPress database and will show up in Admin Dashboard as pending post with given Title, Description, Category and Tags.Moderator will be able to review and approve them as needed. Authors Name, Author url and email will be added as custom field.

Frontend Publishing

Frontend Publishing is a lightweight plugin that allows you to accept guest posts/articles without giving your members access to the sensitive WordPress control panel. It will automatically filter out all the posts that don’t meet the submission guidelines of your website. It can be a huge time saver if you have a very popular blog or article directory. You can allow members with a certain user level to publish posts instantly. All other posts are added to the ‘pending’ queue.

Custom Content Type Manager

The Custom Content Type Manager (CCTM) is a WordPress plugin that allows users to create custom content types (a.k.a. post_types) with virtually any type of custom field. This plugin allows users to create custom content types (also known as post types) and standardized custom fields for each, including dropdowns, checkboxes, and images and more. You can select multiple images, posts, or media items and store them in a single field making it easy for you to store a gallery of images or long lists of values. This plugin also lets you export and import your content definitions, making it easy to ensure a similar structure between multiple sites.

Ajax Content Filter

Ajax Post Content Filter allows you to filter your content with a drop down box. Just install the plugin, activate and open the ACF Posts located in the left side menu bar. You will need to add new ACF posts by filling up the post title and placing your content in the editor then publish it. Simply put the shortcode [ACF] in a page or post in admin. You can also put the shortcode ajax_content_filter() in your template file and you will get the simple dropdown box on your page at front side.

Fancier Author Box

Give identity to your single or multi-author WordPress website with Fancier Author Box – a WordPress plugin that allows you or your authors to connect with your audience on all levels and encourages people to read the author’s bio and engage on major social networks. You can modify display settings and color settings according to your preferences.

Editorial Calendar Plugin

The Editorial Calendar Plugin gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog. See all of your posts and when they’ll be posted. You can drag and drop to change your post dates, manage your drafts with our new drafts drawer, quick edit post titles, contents, and times, publish posts or manage drafts, easily see the status of your posts, manage posts from multiple authors.

Custom About Author

This plugin acknowledges authors for their post by displaying a brief biography about them at the end of their post. It is perfect if you have multiple guest bloggers on your website and they do not each have a user account. It also gives an added incentive for bloggers to write guest posts on your site. Multiple custom profiles can be created and they take preference over website user profiles. You also have the option to specify a specific profile to display for each post. Custom profiles are completely configurable, it can include links to social media (such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Google+) or you can specify any HTML/text you want to display. This plugin displays the author profile at the end of the post. It gives you have the option to display the author’s website user profile or a custom profile.

WP Biographia

This plugin allows you to add a customisable biography to posts, RSS feeds, pages, archives and to each post on your blog’s landing page as well as via a widget in your sidebar. It integrates out of the box with the information that can be provided in each user’s profile and supports custom post types. Display of the Biography Box can be hidden on a global or per user basis for posts, pages and custom post types as well as on a per category basis.

Running Out of Content? Content Curation Might Be Your Answer

Have you ever gone down a supermarket aisle and just labored at the thought of choosing which cereal box to choose from the dozens and dozens of flavors right before you? Or what about a candy store? A bag shop? A book store? Having so many choices can be pretty overwhelming.

Imagine the Internet is as wide and as deep as the Pacific Ocean – filled with letters, words, images, music, videos, games, information, spam, bacon, and everything else you can think of. All this content begging for you attention and yet you don’t know where to start, which to choose. So many choices. In the end, you end up with nothing. What if someone filtered out all the stuff irrelevant to you and presented you with the best of the content you are interested in and then served it to you on a silver platter? Convenient, don’t you think? This process of sorting through the vast majority of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful way is called Content Curation. (Neil Patel, Kiss Metrics)

What is Content Curation?

Content curation is hand selecting content created by other sources and sharing them with your community. Best done when whoever is curating adds their own explanation for sharing, reaction or opinions.
– C.C. Chapman author of Amazing Things Will Happen and co-author of Content Rules.

According to Michael Kolowich of KnowledgeVision,

Content curation is a way to view the world through an expert’s eyes. A great curator selects from a great many sources, is clear on mission and scope, is consistent on selection criteria (“most thoughtful”, “most original”, “funniest”, “latest”), adds value with indexing and/or commentary, gives credit where credit is due, and shares generously with his/her sources.

“… Content curation also pulls from many sources. However, instead of automatically posting every piece of content pulled in there is a manual filtering and sorting process that takes place in order to select only the most valuable pieces of content for a given audience. Curation also involves adding helpful annotation that frames the information already provided from the original source in such a way as to add additional value and/or understanding.” – (source: Nathan Weller, ManageWP)

We know that the name of the game today is delivering high quality relevant content on a regular basis. Google demands this. Google rewards this. Unfortunately, the reality is, your content creativity well can sometimes run dry. And when that happens what do you do? Many websites turn to content curation. Is it a valid option?

At SXSW 2013, WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg stated that content curation along with long form content would be one of the key areas of focus for his company in the future.

Of course there will always be detractors and those who will argue against it in favor of original content creation and this is normal. However, websites will benefit when content curation is layered with content creation – adding a different dimension and variety to the usual fare being dished out.

Curation tools, websites, and plugins are readily available and have made it simple and easy for anyone to curate content and distribute it within seconds. If you are interested in integrating content curation into your WordPress site, check out one of the more popular ones, Primal for WordPress to help you get started in the right direction in no time.

The Missing Ingredient in Your Content Marketing Strategy

We live in an age of automated scripted responses. Customer service isn’t what it used to be. If you dialed for help nowadays, you’d get more or less an automated cookie cutter response to press 1, press 2, press 3, press the # sign, or dial 0 to talk to a customer service representative. If you are lucky, you get to talk to a real in-house customer service representative. If not, you get redirected to a call center agent from another side of the globe with a ready-made spiel to “answer” all your questions and “help” you with all your concerns. We’ve somehow lost that human touch in the midst of all this great technology.

Even web content can seem cold and clinical – distant, especially when the only end goal is to increase traffic and page rankings. Keyword stuffing. Readers are smart enough to sense whether you are truly serving their needs or you are simply dishing out self-serving, ego-centric content.

Ever read a status, a tweet, an update, or a headline, that made you click the link to read more? Irresistible. Something must have struck a chord – an emotion, a memory, a feeling, an idea, or maybe an experience that resonated with you or even provoked you, that made you connect with whatever you were reading.

This is the kind of response you want from your audience. It’s the first step. Your goal is to take them beyond being engaged. You want your readers to be involved – to be in dialogue with you. To see you as a reliable, relatable persona they can depend on. An authority figure – reachable, available.

What is empathy in relation to content marketing?

A formal definition of Empathy is the ability to identify and understand another’s situation, feelings and motives. It’s our capacity to recognize the concerns other people have. Empathy means: “putting yourself in the other person’s shoes” or “seeing things through someone else’s eyes.”
(source: Mindtools.com)

People need to KNOW they are important. They need to FEEL they are important. They need to know that you are listening to them, and that they are not just merely some page view statistic to help you rank. They need to know that you know how it feels like to walk in their shoes. Once they know that you are listening to them, then they will pay attention. They will listen. They will subscribe. They will buy. Empathy with your audience is the impetus that will determine whether your readers will come back again and again.

Think about how popular brands like Nike, Dove, or Volvo “speak” to their audience through their ads. Nike inspires. Dove boosts self-esteem. Volvo is all about safety. These brands add that human factor in their messages that people can connect to. These brands have successful messages that make their audience feel that they are THE priority.

Seth Godin put it so succinctly in his blog,

The simplest customer service frustration question of all:

“Why isn’t this as important to you as it is to me?”

All brands have a commercial agenda. However, your goal is to make your brand have a “heart”, so to speak. Empathy. It sounds like some amateur psychological runaround BUT it is the missing ingredient you need to add to the whole content strategy. True, content is king, truer still, the audience, is its ever demanding queen.

30 Different Content Slider Plug-ins for WordPress

When looking at websites, slideshows and carousels are the best way to present images and this is usually achieved using jQuery. To have jQuery slider galleries or other image presentation on your web page you have to code or download a jQuery slider plug-in and integrate it. Those sliders give effective looks and are very attractive to users.

Here you can see 30 Different content slider plug-in for WordPress. Hope these plug-ins help you…Enjoy!!!

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Content Auditing – Is Your Content Up To Par?

“High quality content”, “Content is king.” – we often hear these phrases and although we know that content matters a lot, especially to Google, how many of us pay particular attention to what we post online? If you’ve been publishing large volumes of content on your website for how many years, have you ever taken the time to assess the quality of the content you have published? Have you ever conducted a content inventory, or better yet, a content audit on everything that appears on your website? Do you think managing your content will impact your traffic and conversion efforts or is its effect purely cosmetic?

A content inventory is the process and the result of cataloging the entire contents of a website. An allied practice—a content audit—is the process of evaluating that content.(source: Wikipedia)

WHY: Reasons for Conducting Content Audit

There are many reasons why you should consider conducting a content audit on your website especially for legacy content. You could use the collected data to evaluate specific functions and features of your website and its contents and optimize it to its fullest potential. Here are some reasons for conducting a content audit on your website(s):

  • Review your site’s architecture, structure, and navigational systems to make it more efficient and user friendly
  • Redesign, reconstruct, or renovate your website to make it more current or more responsive to the demographics of your current users. Consider the mobile market.
  • Migrate content to-from another site(s), from static pages to content management system (CMS)
  • Manage content quality, the amount of content, relevance, its layout presentation and design
  • Identify orphaned pages, content bloat, redundant pages that do not meet Google’s algorithm standards
  • Gather and analyze statistics as to user behaviour and interactivity on your website
  • Determine and identify popular and unpopular pages that get the most or the least visits – recognize effective content
  • Identify keywords and maximize organic search terms that drive traffic to your website

“Content audits are critical to understanding and evaluating the performance of your content against business goals, user needs, editorial standards, and performance factors such as search engine optimization and content use or web analytics. They bring value to your website project and on-going maintenance tasks by allowing you to carefully catalog and analyze your content structures, patterns, and consistency. Content audits tailored to your organization’?s content goals will reveal the highest quantity of specific opportunities for content improvement”.(source: content-insight.com)

HOW: Content Audit Strategy

Conducting a full-blown Content Audit especially on content heavy websites should be strategic and well-planned because it can be tedious and overwhelming. Strategy is key. Tactics can be modified and adapted. Some companies even choose to “throw out content” and start fresh. You can choose to conduct your content audit according to your needs and specifications in several ways:

  • Full Content Audit – Complete and comprehensive list of every content including all pages and all assets (downloadable or attached files etc.)
  • Partial Content Audit – Top hierarchy and subcategories or subset list
  • Content Sampling – Examine representative samples of content

WHO: Content Auditors:

  • Website designers and managers
  • Information architects and taxonomists
  • Content managers and developers
  • Content strategists and marketers
  • SEO managers

WHAT: Important Content Audit Items

  • Identify and document content volume and types
  • Identify and document the current content structure
  • Assess whether the content is being used
  • Document inconsistent content presentation

TO DO: Simple Content Audit Action Plan Sample

Conduct a Content Inventory

Create a content inventory spreadsheet and catalog. It may or may not include the following items based on your specs or based on the order of the most significant parts of your website:

  • ID, numbering or index
  • Page Title
  • Page Name
  • Page Type (homepage, navigation, ecommerce, blog, etc.)
  • URL
  • Level in the site (hierarchy)
  • Content type (multimedia, image, video, doc, pdf, HTML)
  • Owner/maintainer/author (content rights)
  • Comments
  • Character count or content size
  • Topics, tags, category, keywords, meta data
  • Date created
  • Last updated
  • Related files
  • Broken links (linking practices)
  • Duplicate content
  • Short Description or Notes
  • Alt tags on multimedia (images, video, audio, etc.)
  • PageViews
  • Unique Visitors
  • Bounce Rate
  • Page Authority

Track your content on the Internet, social networking sites, and contributions posted on other websites

Monitor the quality of your content as pertaining to topic, tone, consistency or compliance with your branding or marketing strategies

Assess and evaluate your content: keep, fix, improve, update, redirect, archive, remove, delete or trash

Use content analysis tools to get the job done if necessary (Excel, Content Analysis Tool, etc.)

Make an offline copy

If the job is too daunting, hire a Content Auditing Services Firm or a Content Audit Professional

The initial stages of the whole process can be time consuming and overwhelming but once you have a system in place that’s current and updated, you will be able to glean insight from all the information you’ve gathered and steer your website towards a richer, exceptional, more substantial, Google algorithm friendly content that will keep visitors coming back for more.

Index.php, The Loop and your WordPress Content

We have already discussed the header and the menu in our previous articles. In continuation of our series, we will now take a look at the Content section of the WordPress theme or the index.php. Here’s a recap of what we wrote:

Content Column (index.php)

The content container in WordPress plays the most important role. It holds the WordPress Loop which dictates the generation of content on the page depending upon the request by the user.

Content, on the other hand, consists of text, images, or other information shared in posts. This is separate from the structural design of a web site, which provides a framework into which the content is inserted, and the presentation of a site, which involves graphic design.

Now, let’s take a look at what a Loop is. According to the WordPress Codex:

“The Loop” is the main process of WordPress. You use The Loop in your template files to show posts to visitors. You could make templates without The Loop, but you could only display data from one post. The Loop should be placed in index.php and in any other Templates used to display post information.

The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post.

Before The Loop goes into action, WordPress verifies that all the files it needs are present. Then it collects the default settings, as defined by the blog administrator, from the database. This includes the number of posts to display per page, whether commenting is enabled, and more. Once these defaults are established, WordPress checks to see what the user asked for. This information is used to determine which posts to fetch from the database.

If the user didn’t ask for a specific post, category, page, or date, WordPress uses the previously collected default values to determine which posts to prepare for the user.

After all this is done, WordPress connects to the database, retrieves the specified information, and stores the results in a variable. The Loop uses this variable’s value for display in your templates.

Below is a visual of how all these php files and templates work together. It shows which template files are called to generate a WordPress page based on the WordPress Template hierarchy.

And here’s a sample code of a simple index page:

<?php
get_header();
if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) :
the_post();
the_content();
endwhile;
endif;
get_sidebar();
get_footer();
?>

For beginners out there, it’s like telling WordPress to do certain functions based on a set of defined parameters – an “if”-“then” scenario. “IF” (parameter A) is true, “THEN” (execute this action). “IF” (parameter A) is false, “THEN” (execute this action instead).

For the more advanced and those who would like to sink their teeth into something more “meaty”, here are some excellent references and tutorials you can check out:

WordPress Plugins for Front End Content Management

As the internet continues its path towards building stronger online communities, greater interconnectivity and increased social networking, website owners are opening up their doors to accepting content contributions from their audiences. To address the issue of privacy and confidentiality, some plugin developers have come up with front-end solutions to enable website owners to accommodate contributions from the community without compromising their backend controls.

Here are some useful plugins you can use to put everything you need for posting, editing, and uploading content on the front-end.

Front-End Editor by Scribu

Front-end Editor is a plugin that allows you to edit your content directly from the front end of your site. This comes in really useful when all you need is just to correct a typo or something you overlooked.

Front-End Uploader

This plugin is useful if you have multiple contributors to your site because this plugin allows them to generate content and easily upload it right on the frontend of your website. Essentially, the plugin is a customizable upload form that adds files with allowed MIME-type to your WordPress Media Library under a special tab “Manage UGC”. There you can moderate your user submissions – whether to: Approve, Delete, or Re-attach to other post/page/custom-post-type before they are officially published.

Frontend Checklist

Create HTML or PDF checklists your visitors can save or print anytime they come back to your site. These lists are saved via cookies which enables visitors to continue using the checklist where they left off when they re-visit your site.

MarketPress FrontEnd

MarketPress Frontend is a powerful ecommerce plugin that can be used to set up a stylish online store easily. This WPMU Dev created plugin can help you: manage orders, create and edit products, product tags, and categories, set up store settings such as shipping, payment gateways, and coupons, all through the front end. This means that all your confidential dashboard information will be hidden away from sellers or other users who don’t need to see all that information.

FV Community News

Need more content but challenged? This plugin allows users to contribute articles while still maintaining full control over what gets published.

With this Community News plugin you allow your visitors to add fresh or related content to your blog. This plugin comes with a moderation panel and a settings page including support for custom post types, images, widgets, and shortcodes. You can simply sit back and relax knowing that your blog will have a continuous supply of fresh content.

Just make sure that the plugins are compatible with your current WordPress version before you install any of them.

Comment Management Solutions for WordPress

Who doesn’t love Spam? We’ve consumed cans and cans of this comfort food and we never get tired of it. Unfortunately, spam has become synonymous with what the internet hates the most – especially by bloggers. Too much of it is just pretty hard to ignore.

Comments – Love ’em. Hate ’em.

Admit it. When you started out blogging, you would check your blog everyday to see if someone left you a comment on your post. AND, you were absolutely thrilled when someone actually did. Never mind that it wasn’t from some popular blogger or someone famous. Someone left a comment. Hooray!

Soon after, someone left another comment. And another comment. And another comment. And another comment – this time with a link. More comments. More links. And pretty soon, your dashboard is exploding with millions of comments and links that have nothing to do with your blog post. “Hello world.” just turned into “Hello spam.” Now, you’ve probably realized that more doesn’t exactly mean great. What to do?

Approve. Reply. Delete. Trash.

WordPress has a built-in system that can handle all the basic comment management requirements necessary like approving, replying, deleting, or trashing comments. However, the native WordPress system, albeit simple and easy to use, has its limitations and the more savvy users need more than just the basics. Features like social media integration, media support, public user profiles, or better spam filtering options cause people to turn their heads to third-party solutions especially when comments flood the back end and become challenging to monitor and manage.

Ban-The-Spam Solutions

Why ban the spam? Spam is a global problem and often WordPress comments are the place when bots try to enter bogus content full of links to their sites. Here are some of the blog comment systems and/or plugins you can use on your websites to help you manage those annoying spam comments.

  • WordPress Default Comment System – built-in comment management system that’s simple and easy to use but needs supplemental plugins to ban spam effectively.
    Cost: FREE
  • Akismet – It is an external service for battling spam with a database of known emails, IP addresses, and usernames used for sending spam. This advanced hosted anti-spam service efficiently processes and analyzes masses of data from millions of sites and communities in real time. When a visitor submits a comment, it is checked by Akismet and put in a special Spam folder to be managed by the website admin later on.
    Cost: FREE (Personal, Non-commercial sites/blogs)
    • $5-$50 (For commercial, business, and professional sites / For publishing networks, agencies, hosts, and universities)
  • Disqus – Disqus, Inc. is a blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that uses a networked platform. The company’s platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. Features a powerful moderation dashboard and all the filters you’d expect: blacklists, whitelists, spam controls, and word filters.
    Cost: FREE (core version)
  • Livefyre – Livefyre Comments 3 is a comment platform for real-time conversations. Important features include real-time user generated content-publishing, mobile device-friendly, real-time profanity filters that administrators can moderate and flag comments from directly within the stream, or block by IP address and Web Browser, social media and multi media support.
    Cost: FREE (basic version)

Other practical tips to manage spam:

  • Control which comments are automatically published and which ones need to be moderated. WordPress has a built-in provision for this.
  • Tag comments that have more than one link to be manually approved.
  • Create a blacklist and/or white list of frequent commenters.
  • Disable comments on older posts and pages.
  • Install tried and tested WordPress plugins or 3rd-party plugins to beef up your comment management system.
  • Wipe out your spam folder regularly.