Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

Copywriting, Content Optimization, and SEO Optimization may be tedious, but they do not have to be time consuming nor arcane with the new Scribe SEO for WP Plugin & the upcoming Scribe for the general Web service, which methodically guides writers through the SEO copywriting and content optimization process boosting Search Engine Optimization Results as well as Click through from SERPs!

SEO Copywriting & Content Optimization – Automated by Copyblogger himself!

The Scribe service is the brain child of Brian Clark, aka Copyblogger, and he had great reason to create this tool, helping people achieve better results with Google’s Search Algorithm.

I successfully tested this content optimization plugin myself on an Artisteer generated theme, its already been proven to work with Thesis themes and StudioPress among others as well.

Why SEO Copywriting is Important

If you want your content, your web page, web site, blog article, news article, product page, service, etc to be found on the net, it needs to be written and published in a way that search engines can understand.  You not only have to write the write (key) words, the right number of times but you have to get them placed in the right spot too – SEO Copywriting in a nut shell. Its not the end all to getting a number one position in the SERPs, but it can be a solid starting point, one that should be skipped.  Yet up until now, content optimization is something that is typically a time consuming process with a learning curve as steep as the boredom curve of using it!

Any writer, professional or amateur, publisher large or small, business hoping to gain traction on the internet and maintain their position there in a world where location is definitely everything, all of those groups need to make sure that their website is search engine optimized for copywriting and that includes every page of importance in that website too.

Is it necessary to optimize every silly little blog article?  No.  But if you have an important blog article or three, you should definitely consider it.

Scribe SEO Copywriting in WordPress Video Tutorial and Walk through

Wow, that title is a mouthful.    Anyway, enough of the optimized mumbo jumbo.  Odds are if you have read this far, then this might actually be something useful for you to consider.  The 2 videos walk through the plugin for wordpress from Scribe, the brain child of Brian Clark, aka Copyblogger.  I wanted to take a look at the first incarnation of this service, to get a feel for what it can do.  The video gives the overview in the first part, and in the second part I delve into what it actually does, and where the pricing sweet spots are.

Yes this does cost money.  That’s why I put the video together.  You can download the plugin for yourself and use a 10 page analysis free trial yourself, but that’s a big time commitment up front.  So check out the second video at least (if not both) and see if you think this plugin would be useful for you.  After the videos, I ‘ll share some of my own insights on how you might want to use it.

Part 1 Scribe SEO Copywriting w WordPress Review

Part 2 Scribe SEO Copywriting for WP Review – What it Analyzes, How it Helps and Where the Bargain is

As a former accountant and financial analyst I don’t generally step up to the plate and shell out money for something I can do myself.  I’m cheap, I know it and there are times when that is a character flaw. 

All that said, when I look at this plugin I can see that there would be times when you would want to optimize some but not all of your content.

Sure, altruistically, we might think that every single thing we ever write is very important and should get the maximum amount of attention.  In reality that is not the case.  Sometimes on the web, some pages just communicate timely little pieces of communication, like a happy birthday in 2005 or a ‘I had a bad day in 2006 and noticed XYZ’.  Some of these article might help a writer or business connect better with parts of their audience or customer base, but the shelf life on these articles is probably pretty short.  So imho don’t spend money optimizing it.

But if you have content that is important, that is generating some traffic or incoming backlinks all on their own, take some effort to optimize those articles first.  Get some more bang for your buck out of your high performing articles.

Then start looking through your content for those elements that are under performing for no apparent reason.  See if there is a SEO copywriting optimization opportunity to increase those articles or product pages in the SERPs(not to be confused with SERPS) through some crafty SEO suggestions from this great plugin.

After that if you have time and money, and you want to boost some other things knock yourself out.  As you write new content, if you want those articles to have the opportunity to reach their full potential, then optimize them also.  But don’t neglect your big rocks, get them in your jar first before you put the smaller rocks in if you want your site to fill up with traffic.

Prioritizing Long Tail Copywriting Optimization

1. Identify your highest trafficked Pages or Posts (Check your stats, google analytics, shortstat or a popularity tool if you are running one)
2. Analyze & Optimize these first!
3. Then go back and focus on good articles that are low performers
4. Finally, Optimize new articles as you see fit

UPDATE

Just to give some additional static visual references, I went through the process of analyzing and optimizing this very article.

First, I go to my post to edit.

I noticed right away that my All in One SEO tags, description and title had not been uploaded correctly to WordPress from WindowsLiveWriter where I’m running the All in One SEO Bridge and All in One SEO in WP.  So I next copied and pasted that information into wordpress and updated my wordPress page because something wasn’t working with my add on.

Everything is all green now for Scribe SEO, so I’m ready to hit analyze.  (I’m still working through my own free trial as of 3-19-2010)

It processes . . .

I scored an 89%, which isn’t too bad, or at least feels a little gratifying.

The 3 yellow areas indicate that my title is too long, so is my description and I only have 7 external links when I should have about 8 external links.  So I did a quick Google search on the keyword ‘copywriting optimization’ thinking I might find some additional resources or further background information.  Had to chuckle when I saw that this article, published 5 minutes ago was already in the Google top 10.

I was already pretty generous with some links to other blogs, so I simply added a Wikipedia link to SEO Copywriting.

I next reviewed the Keyword analysis in Scribe’s tab.

I was happy with the results of the copywriting optimization on this front so moved on.

The next tab gave me some suggestions about ways to adjust the primary keywords as viewed by a search engine.

The Tags and Serp Tabs were self explanatory.  (I do like the SERP Tab for a preview of your article listed in Google)

The SEO best practices tab, is just general SEO information as far as I can tell and not specific to this article

I wrapped things up, by shortening my description, removing the original blog title and replacing it with a shorter version for optimization reasons, and copied the old title (which the stupid writer in me thought had a nice hook and made it an H3 level header.

Finally, re-ran the analysis (each re-run of the analysis deducts from your account, so I don’t recommend too many redos, I had a 95% score on this article.

Basically that boils down to about $0.32 – $0.40 to optimize my article and make sure it is delivering the results I want it to deliver!

Artisteer 2.4 (beta now its Artisteer RC 2.4.0.25435)  just became available.  The new version (in beta out of Beta in full release still) supports two major feature advances:

Vertical Menus for WordPress or other CMS systems like Drupal, Joomla etc

You can essentially run two menu systems with Artisteer now (at first glance).

In the image example above within the Artisteer design environment I have the option of both a horizontal menu and a (new) vertical menu. 

No idea yet how that will be managed in WordPress as I haven’t exported one of these puppies yet, but that’s coming up next!

Category Driven Menus

Update – I just heard through the forums that not only have vertical menus been added, but now category driven menus are possible.  There appear to be binary options for this.

• You can either have a Category based menu OR a Page based menu in the Horizontal menu or in the Vertical Menu.
• You can have a category in the horizontal and a Page based in the vertical or vice versa.
• You can NOT have a category AND a Page based menu in the vertical at the same time.
• You can NOT have a category AND a Page based menu in the horizontal at the same time.

All that said, this is just the post export (standard) options.  There are probably some easy ways to hack some additional combinations into a theme after the fact

Flash Header Support for WordPress Theme Design

There is also flash headers support for WordPress themes now.  I can add some very basic animation templates that Artisteer includes with the software, or if I have an .flv file I can import it into the theme header.

I’ve tried building flash banners using Camtasia to create .flv files that I then import into Artisteer 2.4, which worked very well!

Changing a Template from one System to Another (Ergo WordPress Theme to Blogger or Drupal)

Here’s a nice cool upgrade option.  If you have designed yourself a nice little template in say WordPress and you want to use the same exact design in Drupal or Blogger or Joomla or DotNetNuke or just an HTML page (for like a WP page template with modifications!) you can now do this with a click of the mouse (ok 2-3 clicks).

After you have the design you like, just change template type.  Then save file as something else if you don’t want to lose your original theme/template etc and you are off to the races. 

If you have a website powered by WordPress and you have a blog powered by Blogger, you could then easily cobrand the sites to look very similar as one working example.  Gonna have to ruminate on some additional practical applications.

Extending Free Upgrade License

For just over a year now, I have received free upgrades to Artisteer.  That’s part of the license.  Buy Artisteer and you get free upgrades for a year.  When I first picked up Artisteer in November of 2008, they were just moving to beta version 0.8 I believe.  1.6 versions later or from my perspective about 20 improvements, updates and upgrades later, it was now time for me to update my license.

For $59.95 I purchased another year of Artisteer upgrades, and now I’m cranking through the possibilities with 2.4.

In case you are wondering, it only took moments for my order to process and my old license became good for upgrades all over again.  There is a huge amount of value in this program, but every time I download another free upgrade (yeah I paid for it, but most software companies don’t give away free upgrades at all), it feels great and puts a smile on my face.  In total, I’ve invested just short of $200 in this software over the course of about 15 months, and I have earned a return on that investment of about 100x. 

You can check your own
upgrade subscription status here.

Artisteer Discount Code/Link

If you would like to get a 5% discount on a new Artisteer license (home/education or standard) feel free to use my referral link http://www.artisteer.com/?p=brett

UPDATE Artisteer 2.4 beta was updated to Beta 2 in Mid March and then to Release Candidate on 3-22., the items below detail bugs I found with Beta 1 and shared with the team that went into improvements in Artisteer Beta 2 and ultimately the full release out of Beta.

The following bugs are gone. 

Artisteer 2.4 Beta bugs I’ve identified so far Update And Work arounds to design a WordPress theme successfully

Note this is still just a beta, the rc should be available soon.  The beta has a lot more customization options if you have the full standard version of Artisteer.

I did encounter a few issues.

1. I opened a previously existing theme file and the 2.4 beta version added textures (where none previously existed) to the Sidebar header blocks and to the menu bar and menu buttons.  UPDATE 2-10 – This has been reported to Artisteer, they have been able to recreate this issue in this beta version of Artisteer 2.4 and they are working on it!
2. It also changed my sidebar background color, which may not be a bug, but just a guess as I think the ability to customize this might not have been available or at least not to this level of detail before. UPDATE 2-10 – This has been reported to Artisteer, they have been able to recreate this issue in this beta version of Artisteer 2.4 and they are working on it!
3. It also took sidebar icons and moved them to the far left of the block, and I do not have an option to adjust any offset now. (there is an offset option between the icon and the text, but not between the icon and the left side of the bar.
   1. 
   2. Update 2-10 – After speaking with Artisteer, they indicated a method for fixing/adjusting these settings.  I will mention that from a usability perspective this is not as intuitive as most areas of Artisteer and I have suggest they reconsider menu navigation slightly.  Regardless to make this adjustment (ergo to move the icon further over) . . .
   3. Go to Sidebar Select Header-> Hover over Text (not Icon) – then Click Font Options
   4. 
   5. Now go to the paragraph tag, and identify the number of pixels in the left indentation, this will move the icon and the text to the right of it over by however many pixels you select
   6. 
   7. Hit OK and you are done. 
4. Separately, I see a new bug that was partially buggy in 2.3, but not terribly noticeable.  Its now partially fixed, but more noticeable than it used to be.  Notice the category drop down box, in the 2.4 beta version on the left it extends outside the div tags of the left sidebar 1.  In artisteer 2.3, it was simply chopped off, so you couldn’t actually see the drop down.  Basically this form option needs to auto size to the appropriate width allowed by the css file for the sidebar in question.  UPDATE 2-10– This has been reported to Artisteer, they are looking into this issue, which in many ways is an issue driven by WordPress functionality.  They are contemplating some work arounds in Artisteer that will help correct the WordPress display functionality until better WordPress logic comes to exist.
5. 

If you notice any other bugs with this or other versions of Artisteer in beta or not, let me know with a comment or contact Artisteer directly.  They are very responsive to bug reports and getting them fixed in future upgrades! 

A friend of mine that is learning how to use both WordPress and Artisteer, the theme design software, sent me a question about what appeared to be a broken sidebar option within WordPress. 

John of TransformativeLifeCoaches.com asks

I am wanting to install an Aweber autoresponder Sign Up Box (for a Giveaway report and a series of autoresponder emails) on our site. 

I believe the best way to do that is to put the Sign Up box in Sidebar 2 which doesn’t appear to be activated on our TLCoaches site. 

I went  to Widgets on the WP control panel to drag the "text/HTML" widget onto Sidebar 2 but it wouldn’t drag nor do any other widgets. 
Can you tell me the best way to get the autoresponder box on every page of our site?

In reality, WordPress and the sidebars on the site were not broken.  Here’s a quick snapshot of the site as of the date of the question.

This particular site only has 1 sidebar programmed into the theme.  With Artisteer (as of Sept 2009) at most you can design themes with 2 sidebars.  You can add more than 2 sidebars to the themes after export but that is another topic for a different day.

In this case, with only 1 sidebar designed in the theme, when a user logs into WordPress, they can only activate/use/drag and drop widgets to the sidebar that actually is turned on an enabled within functions.php of the theme they have created.

Two sidebars do show up sometimes, but only 1 will work when your theme has just a single sidebar activated.

The Solution

In this case if John wants to utilize a second (new) sidebar, all he has to do, is open up his theme in Artisteer and make a 5 second change to his layout, adding a sidebar where he likes, and then export and upload the updated theme to his website.

Piece of cake!

UPDATE

If you read the comments below, you will learn that the original solution and trouble shooting didn’t quite fix this problem.  the solution was a little easier, but also more hidden.

To fix this, John learned that he needed to click on the screen options button at the top right hand corner of every wordpress admin screen.

Then

On WP widgets page, I went to screen options and hit “enable accessibility mode”-simple solution, just didn’t know it was there.

Brett Bumeter of Softduit Media joined a large group of attendees and presenters at Barcamp Chattanooga at Chattanooga State Community College.  Brett kicked off one of the first sessions by demonstrating how to create a WordPress theme in 10 minutes with no web design or PHP experience.

This was a live demo of Artisteer for both PCs & Macs and neither video nor slides were available from the actual event, but people can view are in depth video from a WordPress meetup in Charlotte covering WordPress Theme design for people of any skill level from novice to advanced.

Barcamp Chattanooga was a lively and busy event with close to 100 people registering for the event.  Chattanooga is rather unique as a city that has an extremely high percentage of citizen twitter users as well, so this strong turnout for a first year event was probably not a surprise for local visitors. 

People travelled from Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham and of course Softduit Media’s Brett Bumeter travelled in from Charlotte NC about 5 and a half hours away by car.

Chattanooga will also be the location of a future Palm Pre development meetup and Birmingham will host the next WordCamp in the SouthEast at the end of September with attendance currently projected between 150-250 people.

Pictures from Barcamp Chattanooga

Softduit Media moved the site Belize Business Guide from its old location on a sub domain to BelizeBuesinessLaw.com.  The migration of this site that was designed by Softduit using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) was relatively easy to migrate and users should not experience any lost pages or files.

Softduit provides WordPress CMS upgrade and migration services for many businesses and sites.  If your company has a website that is currently stuck on an old static html site that is difficult for business owners or users to update, a content management system can put your company back in control of your own site and destiny. 

Our migrations are both fast, efficient and very effective in terms of generating powerful SEO results as part of the migration package.  We can also plug in and or setup social media accounts as part of this migration or upgrade with Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn.

You can review our Website Solutions or get a general sense of our package offerings and prices, but we will happily provide your company with a customized estimate.