by Lori Culwell
So, can I just say that this “writing every day of 2013” is
totally transforming my life? I’m not
even exaggerating. It’s as if forcing
yourself to sit down and do something every single day opens a magical portal
to “I Want To Finish Things” land (for better or worse), and once you’re
rolling, you’re motivated to finish more things. To that end, I’m organizing and cleaning out
absolutely everything this year, deciding what to do with things/ ideas that
have been sitting around my office for awhile (including books, video projects,
classes I’ve been meaning to take, that passport I’ve been meaning to renew,
the whole bit). Part of this “scorched earth” approach has
also included refocusing the business model for BookPromotion.com as well as my
main business, which is SEO (search engine optimization, for those who don’t
know me).
One of the things on my list is that I keep meaning to put
together an updated SEO course/ guide for small business people, so I’ve been making notes
about that recently (updating a class I taught at UCLA a few years ago). However (and this is a big however), SEO
changes so much all the time, I’m almost ready to declare that course DOA and
advise people to not do SEO themselves anymore because I don’t want to give
people the tools to get themselves smacked down by Google. This is a big shift for me because I used to be all “SEO power to the people,” but now I’m actually afraid for people to do it themselves. SEO is becoming one of those things like fixing your plumbing or electricity– you CAN do it yourself, but you probably should not.
With that in mind, I think I will just take out my notes and tell you my
current favorite WordPress SEO Plugin, so that you can be proactive with your
business if you want to, but without getting yourself into too much
trouble. I have tested out the All in
One SEO Pack, Platinum SEO Pack, and the SEO functionality that is built into
the Thesis and Genesis frameworks, and my current winner for “best SEO plugin”
is the SEO for WordPress plugin by Yoast.
It is free and you can get it right here. What I like about it is that it is the one
plugin that acknowledges that you need to do some keyword research to at least
get yourself in the ballpark of what “supply” words you need to be using in
your site to fulfill the “demand” that is being presented by people Googling
things.
Here is the little tool built into this plugin that will help you do some keyword research so that you’re crafting your site around things that will get you found by the search engines. This plugin also has an awesome built-in analyzer thing that will allow you to focus a page’s content around a given keyword. Of course, you still need to CHOOSE those keywords, and for I would recommend that you go over and check out Market Samurai or Wordtracker. I don’t know if I would even advise you to try to do your own SEO right now, but if you feel you must, please be careful, use your keywords judiciously (i.e. do not stuff/ repeat your keywords over and over), and oh my God, whatever you do, do NOT hire a cheap SEO company to work on your website. These things will get you penalized! You are better off with nothing!
