WordPress: Power to the People

How many here have a WP site? Nearly every hand in the room goes up.

At Site Logic, it’s a requirement for every employee to build a WP site in the first week of employment (sales, accounting, everyone) and the second week is about figuring out how to monetize the site.

His analytics guy has 3 WP sites and he uses the earnings from these sites pays for a trip to Jamaica every year. And it’s a great playground for testing outside client sites.

Chris Auman starts the presentations, he’s going to talk about SEO, WP and the benefits from clients to production.

His confession: he’s a WP fanboy. Highly devoted and biased, but he thinks the takeaway is to find a good foundation. His guide for setup and optimization of WP is http://www.sanctuarymg.com/wordpress-setup-guide/.

WP is a CMS, but it’s a lot more. It empowers people from the ground up to take control of a website and Internet marketing to streamline and use plugins to make the website work for them.

About 12 years ago he’d develop simple scripts for clients to make simple updates to their websites. Then they found WP and have been using it since blogs came on the scene. It’s developed into a robust content management system.

The benefits:

1. Control
2. Efficiency
3. Empowerment
4. Support and inspiration

Who benefits:

1. Website developers
2. Clients and staff

Why WP for developers:

1. Database, theme, template driven websites
2. Built-in functionality that makes our jobs easier
3. Easy point-and-click interface for production

Why WP for clients:

1. Control
2. Reduction of costs
3. Easy/frequent site updates

WordPress out-of-the-box:

1. It’s not a magic solution and it’s not perfect – one issue that’s a definite issue to fix is duplicate content
2. Lean and fast loading code that search engines love
3. Crawled quickly and thoroughly
4. Automatically builds keyword-rich URL strings
5. Text-based, HTML navigation menus (no Javascript)

On-page SEO:

1. Title tags
2. Meta tags
3. H tags for Headings
4. Content and copywriting
5. Internal and external links

Plugins for SEO – these are where the magic happens

How plugins help with SEO:

• Core onsite SEO
• Navigation
• Spiders/sitemaps
• Internal link building
• Site quality
• Social integration
• Conversion
• Speed
• Mobile

For recommendations on particular plugins for each of the above areas, the download goes into detail.

Favorites:

All-In-One SEO
WordPress SEO by Yoast.com
XML and HTML Sitemaps
Broken Link Checker
Automatic SEO Links
Facepress II
Related Posts
Thank Me Later
Popularity Contest
WordPress Backup Buddy
Optimization for Speed

Near future:

More robust comprehensive plug-ins
Plug-in competition that will benefit the end user
Improved theme frameworks like Thesis
Continuous WordPress platform improvements

Paulo Pessanha is next. There are 54 million WP sites in the world. WP features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages and categories to help the search engines crawl your site and gather the info it needs to include your site within its database. And a huge number of third-part plugins can be used for SEO.

WP SEO benefits:

• Speed of creating and posting content live on the Web
• Crawlability
• Pings, comments and trackbacks
• Google loves it

Chose WP because it’s cheap, highly customizable and had a support community. They found an increase in productivity as writers worked directly in the CMS. They didn’t have any confusion over which was the most recent version. And since it was so intuitive anyone could join the team easily.

WP is cost effective for the enterprise and especially for the small business. WP allows SEO innovation and customization. Google loves UGC and social signals, so try to tailor your SEO strategy around those areas – a Q&A site is a great option.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.