How Do Themes & Plugins Help With SEO?

How Do WordPress Themes & Plugins Help With SEO?

I recently wrote about the need for the website owner to take responsibility for  SEO and not rely 100% on a theme or a plugin. Themes and plugins do of course have some benefits if you understand what it is they do, and what they cannot do.

The benefit of themes and plugins

‘SEO-friendly’ themes and SEO plugins present your content in such a way that it is easy for search engines to understand, determine the relevancy of, and navigate. So if you’ve targeted your content for specific keywords, the search engine will have no doubt what that piece of content is all about. The content and keyword research is up to you. No theme or plugin alone can make your site rank highly if your content is not valuable and targeted. Also, this all relates to on-site SEO, but ranking is also determined by off-site factors such as incoming links from other websites. Themes and plugins cannot help you with these off-site factors.

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Don’t Leave Your SEO To A Theme or a Plugin

In the WordPress community, especially amongst new users, a lot of emphasis seems to be placed on themes and plugins as crucial factors in SEO. Theme companies compete for bragging rights on whose is the most ‘SEO-friendly’ while website owners are frustrated that they are not getting the search engine traffic they expected despite having such-and-such theme and an SEO plugin.

The reality is that these things are helpful, but only if you have the right content.

Themes and plugins are like well-written directions to a party (your content).  They help your guests (search engine bots) find your site’s content, but whether or the not the party rocks depends on what they find when they arrive, and that responsibility lands squarely in your, the website owner’s, lap.

Even the most SEO-tweaked theme and fine-tuned plugin cannot make your site rank highly if your content is not relevant and targeted for your audience.

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In Life and SEO – There Are No Guarantees!

Business owners are often asking how they can be ranked #1 on Google, or if they should trust the company that told them they would guarantee a first place ranking. A common turn of phrase is that a company told them they would “put them #1” on Google. If only it were that easy! I always steer clients away from such offers, tempting as they are, and try and explain the complexities and many factors involved in ranking. Google didn’t get to spawn its own verb by enabling folks to ‘put’ any ole’ site at the top!

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Basic SEO for Blogger – Adding Alt Text To Images

I personally use and am a huge fan of WordPress – I made the switch from Blogger many years ago. However I do have a couple of clients that use blogger to publish their blogs – they find it simpler to use. But simplicity comes at a price. Although it is owned by Google, Blogger does not do a great job at providing SEO features by default.  One of the basic things it lacks is an easy way for the user to add alt text to an image they are uploading.

Adding alt text to images is important for 2 main reasons:

1)   Accessibility – visitors to your site that don’t see well and are having the page read to them need alt text to understand what the image is all about.

2)   SEO – the alt text is the only way a search engine knows what the image contains. It cannot ‘read’ an image by itself and relies on alt text. Additionally you can attract traffic from Google Image Search with well-optimized images.

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Online Marketing Terms – SEO Edition

A Guide To Online Marketing Terms – Part 2

This is the second part of my developing series on online marketing terms explained. This time we focus on some basic SEO-related terms you might come across.

SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the process of fine tuning your website so that when your target internet surfer types a phrase into the search engines, your website is deemed to be among the most relevant for that phrase, and is displayed at the top of those results. Lately SEO has also come to refer to a person that performs SEO services, or a ‘search engine optimizer’.

Why You Should Care:
SEO can provide your site with lots of free, targeted traffic. What could be better?!

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