SEO Changing

[morestar]

I see what you're saying and if you're careful you would have already made sure your post title was SEO'd.

Very well. I truly believe as you do that most of the SEO needs can be/are taken care of with wordpress but also believe there are still some tiny but essential 'SEO things' one can do to a page or post that neither plugin could take care of automatically such as bolding or italicizing certain words.

Again though, I mostly agree with you. I haven't seen one other CMS that seems to offer so much for SEO via plugins and in it's initial install too.

[claybutler]

I agree with Morestar. These plugins don't really do anything for you.They just make it much easier to do the necessary work. That's a big difference. I only have one site that I allow the All In One SEO Pack to just pull the posts title for the title tag. All the others I hand write. Same with the meta description. A great post title is not always the best SEO title. It's just like spell checkers. They don't automatically make your grammar and spelling proper nor make your writing clear and interesting. They can help a talented writer write better by providing some hints for improvement, but do almost nothing for a poor writer. Garbage in, garbage out.

The idea of seeing social medial as another search engine is interesting but it's still apples and oranges. Optimizing your Facebook profile to perform well on Facebook is not optimizing your website. It's optimizing your profile. That's a good thing to do but it's a separate program entirely. Will it ultimately have direct positive SEO benefits for the parent site as it pertains to SE ranking? We don't know. But I wouldn't mix up the two as most people are already confused enough about social networking and SEO.

[janeth]

The idea of seeing social medial as another search engine is interesting but it's still apples and oranges. Optimizing your Facebook profile to perform well on Facebook is not optimizing your website. It's optimizing your profile. That's a good thing to do but it's a separate program entirely. Will it ultimately have direct positive SEO benefits for the parent site as it pertains to SE ranking? We don't know. But I wouldn't mix up the two as most people are already confused enough about social networking and SEO.

If I can do a search on Facebook would that not be a search engine?

And if you are doing search engine optimization would you not be optimizing my site to show up when a search was done?

[claybutler]

If I can do a search on Facebook would that not be a search engine?

And if you are doing search engine optimization would you not be optimizing my site to show up when a search was done?

Yes.100% correct. But it's Facebook's search engine for Facebook. I'm just saying that the general public (clients) have a hard enough time following the terms and ideas we throw around with ease. I don't want to introduce the idea that my SEO for their website also includes SEO for everything or when we talk about SE rankings we're also talking about FB, MySpace, and Twitter. If they want to budget for tricking out their FB profile then great, but I want my clients to have clear distinction in their mind.

So on an abstract level I agree with you. I just don't think it's helpful to introduce the concept to my clients. I'd prefer it to be a mental exercise between us SEO folk.

[janeth]

Yes.100% correct. But it's Facebook's search engine for Facebook.

And Google is Google's search engine for Google.

I'm just saying that the general public (clients) have a hard enough time following the terms and ideas we throw around with ease. I don't want to introduce the idea that my SEO for their website also includes SEO for everything or when we talk about SE rankings we're also talking about FB, MySpace, and Twitter. If they want to budget for tricking out their FB profile then great, but I want my clients to have clear distinction in their mind.

So on an abstract level I agree with you. I just don't think it's helpful to introduce the concept to my clients. I'd prefer it to be a mental exercise between us SEO folk.

And if the rest of the search engine optimization community start offering it along with Google, Yahoo and MSN where does that leave you and your clients.

You are limiting yourself to web pages and limiting your clients to the amount of traffic they could be getting.

A lot of people have already heard that FaceBook passed Google as the most viewed site in the US. And I am already working on it as a service to my current clients.

Social Media sites that use search engines would fall into search engine optimization.

[kevsta]

Facebook web search is just Bing isnt it? ..or do you mean building Facebook pages to rank for Facebook searches for the client company?

the thing is I think we're a long way away from someone deciding they need a new bed delivered in 2 weeks and going onto Facebook to look for it.

Personally I cannot stand being marketed to on Facebook, I use it socially only and delete anyone who spams me with business proposals or suggestions immediately.

[janeth]

Facebook web search is just Bing isnt it? ..or do you mean building Facebook pages to rank for Facebook searches for the client company?

the thing is I think we're a long way away from someone deciding they need a new bed delivered in 2 weeks and going onto Facebook to look for it.

Personally I cannot stand being marketed to on Facebook, I use it socially only and delete anyone who spams me with business proposals or suggestions immediately.

I am talking about ranking on a Facebook search and it would have to be done so it is marketing without marketing.

Guerrilla Marketing

[morestar]

Interesting and highly related article about social and search: Twitter Working On ‘Most Popular Tweets’ Search Project

[kevsta]

Facebook would be a good place for Divorce lawyers to market their services for sure..

“The social networking site was mentioned in one in five of all divorce petitions filed through an internet service.

Divorce-Online’s managing director Mark Keenan said he was ‘really surprised’ to find 989 clients making reference to Facebook in a study of 5,436 cases.


The most common reason seemed to be people having “inappropriate sexual chats” with people they were not supposed to,’ he added.

[Webnauts]

Wordpress by default is nice but not ready for production when it comes to SEO. Besides it is not a CMS for large scale/high trafficked sites.

For smaller sites WP is cool and there are plenty of plugins out there that you can install, but require appropriate configuration.

Still, using too many plugins, can only slow down the site or if new WP versions comes out, some plugins can become obsolete. Many plugins mentioned in this thread I disapprove in advance.

And the major problem is: SECURITY!!!

What's next?

On-page optimization is under-rated here. On-page SEO requirements are harder that ever. The standard old school on-page SEO stuff are far not enough.

For example, Matt Cutts recently said to avoid blocking Googlebot from accessing pages via robots.txt. Especially not blocking dups. And that because robots.txt sink PageRank.
YouTube - Should I block duplicate pages using robots.txt?

That is why I: http://www.seoworkers.com/robots.txt

In addition you can cannot rely on the canonical tag. No SE especially Google are obliged to treat that as a 301. It is just an reference. That means you should come up with some other solutions.

Another issue is, that using the page title also as an h1 can filter over-optimization filters. Also there are some filters for other heading tags h2, h3, etc when you repeatably use keywords: Don't Over Optimize Your Site - Search Engine Watch (SEW)

What about speed. Well many claim it will never be a factor. Are you sure? Google’s Need For Speed Is About Making You Search More

What about Rich Snippets? Rich snippets - Webmaster Tools Help

A must read: Eric Enge interviews Matt Cutts

What about search usability and conversion rates? SEOs can no more rely simply on rankings. Rankings without conversions is a failure.

There is no doubt that Social Media is a huge off-page optimization factor now. And link building is getting harder. But I strongly believe that Caffein will clean up a huge part of that disaster.

What does this all mean? On-page SEO requires now stronger web architecture/navigation, copywriting, user behavior and technical skills and off-page SEO requires strong internet marketing skills.

I think I said enough for now. I wish you all to enjoy the discussion. If I find the time, I will drop in again.

Janeth, nice thread by the way.