Okay, the new big thing in social media seems to be here, and it is called Pinterest. Let’s start as usual by gaining some traffic and referrals from that new site by adding a pinterest pin-it button to our WordPress website or blog, so that people can start pinning our pictures and therefor send us visitors as well. It goes like this

A code is needed to add pinterest pin-it button to WordPress site

As with adding the Google Plus button, there is no good plugin for this. Or, there is basically two plugins you can use, the Pinterest “pin it” plugin, and the other plugin that was so bad that I don´t even want to link to it. So we will be editing some template files for being able to add the pinterest button manually instead until someone makes a great plugin.

1. Start looking for the place where you want to add the button in single.php. You are searching for something that looks like this: <?php the_content(); ?>. We want to put the button right above that for making it appear above the content, in the same place where I have the Like, Tweet, and G+ Buttons.
2. Paste the code found on the Pinterest page for adding pin-buttons. It is in the middle of the page, and named “Pin it button for website”. But do not paste it as it is, we need to modify it slightly before inserting it. Modify it like this:
   <div class=”pinterest” style=”float:right; width:50px; margin-left:10px;”>
   <a href=“http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&media=<?php $thumb = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID), ‘thumbnail’ ); echo $thumb['0']; ?>&description=<?php the_title(); ?>” class=”pin-it-button” count-layout=”horizontal”>Pin It</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js”></script>
   </div>
3. You can still add more div’s around it and style it if you want to. But like that it will work. Place the same code in page.php, index.php and category.php as well if you want it to show on more pages.

Warning! You need to have “featured” image function active on your WordPress site, and you will need to have a featured image chosen for every post where this is gonna work. Because the Pin It button needs a picture in the post, and with this code it automatically choses the featured image.

Alternative codes for Pinterest Pin It button

You can also chose a code that makes the pin it button grab the first picture from the blog post or article, if you have no featured images in your blog posts. This is then what you need to do:

1. Put this code in the file named functions.php:
   function pin_img() {
     global $post, $posts;
     $first_img = '';
     ob_start();
     ob_end_clean();
     $output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches);
     $first_img = $matches [1] [0];
     if(empty($first_img)){ //Defines a default image
       $first_img = "/images/default.jpg";
     }
     return $first_img;
   }
2. Put this in single.php
   <a href=”http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&media=<?php echo pin_img() ?>&description=<?php the_title(); ?>” count-layout=”horizontal”>Pin It</a> <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js”></script>

Optimization of the code where the Pinterest Pin It button is

You can move the <script… to the footer for a faster site. And you can also move all the style’s to the style.css file for a nicer code. But anyway, it works like this also!

Thanks for reading about how to add the pinterest pin-it button to WordPress site, if you have improvements or questions, feel free to comment! And do not forget to test-pin this post for checking if it works!

This post was originally found here: Add pinterest pin-it button to WordPress site

You have probably all seen them all over Facebook lately. The “This is what my friends think I do“-pictures with 6 funny pictures in. And you maybe want to make an own? Well, it is not hard at all, you can actually download the photoshop template here and just add you own pictures to it.

This is what my friends thinks I do -image example:

This is one such picture I made that got quite a lot of attention on Facebook:

kitesurfer what i think i do -picture

How to make “This is what I think I do” -image, step by step

1. Download the template with the 6 images on, (or make an own black background picture).
2. Chose which six texts you want to use. The most common ones are the following:
   What my friends thinks I do.
   What my mom thinks I do.
   What society thinks I do.
   What my dad thinks I do.
   What my colleges thinks I do.
   What my boss think I do.
   And of course “What I think I do” and “What I really do“.
3. Write the six texts in the places they should be, below the pictures. There are already layers made for this, just edit the texts.
4. Edit the “heading” text. There is a layer for that as well.
5. Copy pictures from the web or from your camera and paste them at the bottom of the layer-list, right above the layer named “paste all your pictures here”.
6. Rezise them and save the whole masterpiece as a jpg or png, upload it to Facebook and see the likes dropping in!

The ”This is what my friends thinks I do” Photoshop template:

Click on the picture to download the what I think I do -photoshop template

So, now you have yor own great “What my friends thinks I do“-picture. Do you want to show it of to more people? Then just post it in the comment-field and I will make a showcase of the best “What my friends thinks I do”-pictures here on the blog. Go ahed, make something nice!

This post was originally found here: How to make “This is what my friends thinks I do” -pictures

It starts to be a long time ago since I last shared a case study, I think it is time for one again! This is a case study of a successful Facebook campaign we ran before Christmas for one of our (Genero Digital Agency) customers, MUSCH, a dog and cat food making company in Finland.

Help us gain more attention for this, Check and like the case on Facebook Studios here.

The Facebook campaign idea

The idea of the Facebook campaign was to give away dog and cat food to homeless dogs, for free, in time for Christmas. And in the same time draw attention to the company and increase the base of enthusiastic “likers”. The company was giving away 100 grams of dog food for every “fan”, for every Tweet with the hashtag #Muschjouluiloa, and for every blog using any of the campaign banners on their site. This is how we did it:

1. A Facebook page was made, where you could vote for which charity should get the most of the money. You could pick one of three, the one with the most votes would get 50% of the free food, the one with the second most would get 30% of the food, and the one with the least votes would get the last 20% of the food. Everyone got something, anyway, I think that is a smart idea to get rid of a lot of negative feedback. A touching story was made for all three  charities as well.
2. For being able to vote, you had to like the MUSCH Facebook page first. When you voted, you simple clicked a like-button under the logo for the charity, so you actually liked the story of the charity, and it was posted to your wall.
3. A bowl of dog-food was placed on the Facebook page, the amount of food in it increased with every new like. Just a fun thing!
4. Ads were made on Facebook pointing to the Facebook-page, different ads for cat and dog owners.

That was about it. People went crazy sharing and recommending the company, because they all wanted to help MUSCH give away as much food as possible to the homeless dogs and cats. People were sharing all the statuses that were made during the campaign time  a lot as well.

The results of the Facebook campaign (or case)

I think that the results of the successful Facebook campaign is best presented in this case-video:

In the first day the amount of fans on MUSCH doubled, from about 6000 to 12000. The next day it went up with another 8000. Totally during the two weeks the campaign was running, the amount of fans grew from 6,425 to 38,586, which is an increase with over 600%. The fan page was the most growing Facebook page in Finland during this time, according to “Fanilista” where the most pages are listed.

In the end, the three different charities got 3,981.4kg of free dog and cat food. Vaasan kissatalo (The House of Cats in the City of Vaasa) received 1,535 votes and 50% of the donated pet food. Pelastetaan koirat (Save the Dogs) got 1,236 likes and 30% of the donated pet food. Kodittomat koirat (Homeless Dogs) got 686 likes and 20% of the pet food.

At its peak, 29,483 people were talking about MUSCH and the campaign, and 1,140 recommendations were made. The blog post on the MUSCH web site where the campaign was described was shared 945 times, and the banners linking to musch were placed on 29 blogs, along with other content about MUSCH in a very positive manner. And mostly in blog posts, which means the links will be permanent, all of you knowing what SEO is about knows what that does for the rankings in Google as well.

The case were submitted to Facebook studios

Thanks for reading my successful Facebook campaign case study, be sure to go and like the case on Facebook Studios as well, that would be really appreciated! Read this post in Swedish here!

This post was originally found here: Successful Facebook campaign, case study MUSCH

After Facebook launched the timeline, I have thought about some different ways of making something in WordPress that looks like the Facebook Timeline. I made a page that shows all my comments in 2011 as a timeline (Check it!). I made it after seeing on Twitter that forsandree had made a guide for making a WordPress timeline for comments (Here is his timeline as well). Unfortunately for you, the guide is in Swedish. But I will try to explain it for you here!

What is the WordPress timeline for comments?

It is basically a page on my WordPress blog that shows every comment in a specific time-interval as a Facebook timeline. Check it here! It does not list the WordPress posts or anything, just the comments and a link to the post where the comment is presented, and the avatar of the comment author, a link to the comment authors site, and it is all presented chronologically, with the newest comments first. It also works if you have Disqus comments activated.

How to make a WordPress timeline for comments, the Facebook style:

Start with making a new file in your template-folder. Name it for example page-timeline.php. In that one, insert the code you have copied from Definition of Done (From this file).

Then, open a CSS-file you have, often named style.css, and paste all the css in the bottom of the file. The CSS that you find on Definition of Done (in the middle of the page).

Then upload the files to your template folder.

Then create a new page, leave it empty and in the lower right corner, under Page attributes, where it says “Template”, chose the one named “Tack-template”. Then publish the page. It will then be ready and look like the timeline. At least if you use the template “Twenty Eleven”. In other templates you might have to delete one of the closing div’s in the end of the file. There will be some Swedish words in there as well. You can edit the file for renaming all the Swedish terms. Or then, download my timeline files that are described a little lower on this page.

Customize and SEO-optimize the WordPress timeline for comments

I think forsandree had made a great piece of code, but every great piece of code can be developed even more. I found dome things I wanted to change for getting it to look nicer and to be a little bit more SEO-optimized.

1. Change all the Swedish words to English.
2. Make the links to the posts with the “post title” as the anchor text instead of the date.
3. Add nofollow to all outgoing links (names of commenters). This is not necessary, but I get quite a lot of sp@m (Domain registration India), and I have not moderated away all of the comments, but neither I want to reward them, so I just nofolled every link to comment authors.
4. Add a Facebook Cover look-a-like picture to the top of the page (do this by making a image that look like the cover, and upload it when editing the page).

Here are the new files, where all the changes are made: Page-timeline2.php and “paste-into-style.css“. If you want to use them, you just need to change the file ending “.txt” to “.php”, and then upload them to your theme-folder, and chose the “template” Timeline-template from the right sidebar when making the page! Here is my comment-timeline once again.
Thanks for reading the post about how to make a WordPress timeline for comments like the Facebook timeline. I will probably soon post about how to make a template that shows your posts as a timeline also! Feel free to ask questions below!

This post was originally found here: Make a WordPress timeline for comments (Facebook look-a-like)

Yeah, it is that time of year again, time to make new year promises for the new year, 2012. Promises that you probably never will be able to keep..:) But anyway, it is always good to set goals! Here are my new year promises for 2012:

Jonathans new year promises for 2012

1. Be free from work more

I will try to get even more focused and therefor get more things done at work, so that I can relax when not working, and not need to work in the evenings.

2. Work more

Same as in new year promise 1, I will try to learn to work smarter, and do the right things at the right time. Work more does not need to be equal to “work longer days”.

3. Kitesurf more

This is a promise. Kitesurfing makes me relax. I will keep you updated on this topic at my kitesurfing blog.

4. Work out more in the gym

I will probably need it. It would be nice to get in shape again after two years of crazy working, when starting up Genero Digital Agency with Sebastian and Rasmus. For the work-out purpose I ordered the domain Träningsblogg.com (“fitness-blog in Swedish”). My vife will act as my personal trainer weither I want it or not..:)

5. Lose more weight

I will show them it is possible, even if just sitting down at work, eating a lot of trash-food, Pepsi and energy drinks.

6. Sleep more

I will not stay up working in the nights as much as before. This is the new-year promise that probably will fail, because I like working in the nights when nothing can disturb. But I will keep it here as a goal.

7. Have more spare time

At least I will try to.

8. Run more half marathons

This one is easy. I just need to run one for succeeding here, cause I have not been running any before. And I will run the Helsinki City run in May with my colleagues and my vife. Now that is said, I cant take it back anymore.

9. Get more things done

Both at work and off work. At least I will get a new car and a new apartment in 2012. And I wil probably keep registering domains and build WordPress sites like crazy this year as well.

10. Write more blog posts

I will write more here, I will write more on the Genero-blog, I will be guest-blogging at “Forum för ekonomi och teknik” (A swedish magazine about economy and technology), I will be writing in the kitesurfing-blog, I will be writing in my blog about making WordPress templates, and probably on a lot more places, mostly in Swedish and English.

11. Own the result-pages in Google even more

I got it quite dialed in right now, what Google likes. I will do more of that. I will be focusing on some sites in Finnish, Swedish and English, in niches like pet food (Koiranruoka, barffaus, kissanruoka), green energy (Maalämpö, lämpökaivo), consumer packed food and recepies (Snellman), staff recruiting (Henkilöstöpalvelut) and a lot of more that I can´t tell you..:)

12. Drive and sail more boats

I like that! But I sold my boat through my “awesome” home-made boat-selling website “Halpa vene .com” (Cheap boat .com) site last year so either I have to get a new one or then I need to spend more time on the West coast where a lot of my friends are owning boats.

13. Grab the first and the second place on bloggtoppen.fi at the same time

Bloggtoppen.fi is a Swedish toplist for blogs in Finland. I will try to get this blog and Linas blog as the two ones with the most visitors at the same time at least once in 2012.

14. Get more likes on every Facebook page

The Facebook pages I work with are already growing like crazy (Musch, Snellman, and more..) so I don´t think this will be a problem. You can like this blog on Facebook as well, if you want to receive updates and interesting info.

15. Get over 2000 followers at Twitter so that I get rid of the stupid limit

Twitter is always telling me that I have reached my following-limit when I try to follow new interesting people. That limit goes away if I have more than 2000 followers. You can follow me for helping..:)

Follow @JonathanBJ

16. Have more vacation

I was free for two weeks in 2011. I will try to be free more this year.

17. Travel more

I was on two kitesurf-trips last year, one to Hurghada, Egypt, and one to Tarifa, Spain. This might be a little hard to top, but we´ll see.

18. Earn more

I wonder how it would be possible not to..

19. Stay more positive than the world-economy

This one is easy as well..:)

20. Live more (2012 is one day longer, right?)

Yes! One extra day! #Win!

This was the new year promises

I will put a check-sign before every line when I succeeded with the tasks. Stay tuned!

This post was originally found here: My 20 new year promises for 2012

Let’s telk about useful toolbars today. Useful SEO toolbars for Google Chrome, to be more specific. Most of / all of the toolbars I present are also avialable for Mozilla Firefox, but I can’t stand updating my browser everytime I starts it and still have to wait a long time before accessing the internet, so I have got used to use Google Chrome, and therefor I present the toolbars for just Chrome

What do we want to know  from SEO-Toolbars when browsing the internet?

I want to know a few things for being able to all the time keep track of competitors, and find opportunities for own sites. Mostly the later. Therefor I want to see some info about the site I am visiting right now.

1.     Pagerank

Yes I know, pagerank is nothing important anymore, but it still shows kind of good what amount of links the visited site have. And the pagerank toolbar takes no space at all, this is one you need to have.  Download PageRank here.

2.     MozBar

The mozbar is a tool that tells you the data you would get from opensiteexplorer right away, already when searching for websites or when visiting sites. You see how high ”MozRank” and ”Trust” the websites have. Really nice overlay in search engines. Download it here!

3.     Nofollow

Nofollow is a really simple tool. It just makes a dotted line around every link that is nofollowed on every page you visit. It is then easy to see right away if you want to get a link from that site or not. It is really good in different social medias and web 2.0 services where you can make own pages and get links that are followed. Get it here!

4. Chrome sniffer

The chrome sniffer is not really a SEO-toolbar or plugin, it just tells you what technique is used on every website you visit. I think it is really handy to see right away how a website is built. And you will realize that there are a lot of WordPress websites out there after using this for a while..:) It also shows which javascript libraries is used, if the site have Facebook connect, if it has Google Analytics activated, and much more. Download it here!

There are a lot of more plugins, but start with these, these are the ones I use the most. Later I will talk about booklets useful for SEO as well. I hope you have fun using your new toolbars. And if you know better Chrome toolbars for SEO, do not hesitate to drop me a comment and tell me!

This post was originally found here: SEO tip 10: SEO toolbars for Google Chrome

Before you start writing, there is always good to do a keyword research for knowing what to write. Because you do not want to write a 100% onpage optimized text that appears on spot one in Google if nobody is searching for the text, right? That would be waste of time and money. So before writing, make sure to do a keyword research.

What tool to use in keyword research?

There is one good free one, that is the Google Keyword Tool. That is more or less the standard tool for keyword research, from which everyone starts. And you have probably tested it already, but here is some more texts about how to really find the words to write about.

Start with a broad keyword research

When you are at the keyword tool page, start with writing a topic you are interested in writing about.

I started my keyword tool really broad with searching for "Facebook covers"

Now when the new Facebook layout is launched, nobody wants to read my posts about how to make Facebook profile banners anymore, so I have to write a new one about Facebook covers soon. It would be impossible for me to rank well with a blogpost about Facebook covers, there are too much competition, but I start with searching for that anyway.

Keyword tool gives you suggestions

So, I get a whole lot of suggestions of phrases to write about. I choose 10-20 of them and also adds some from my mind and puts them into the search box again.

So, now I have a couple of headings to chose from. I will now write two or three blog posts about some of those “keywords”. And I will write it optimized like in my SEO checklist. And hopefully my blog post then ends up somewhere quite high in Google.

Which words to chose in the keyword tool result table?

That is always a good question. You have to chose the keywords with less competition and a lot of searches. Searches you see to the right. Competition is a little harder, but try to search the words in common Google search engine and see which sites appears in top 5. If it is small sites or blogs, then the competition might be quite low. If it is big brands and corporate sites, the competition might be a little higher. And if there is a lot of sites with the exact phrase in the title (The blue line you can click on for every spot in the search results), then the competition might be quite high as well, because that shows that someone else are trying to get the spots as well, by writing texts about exactly the same.

Some more keyword tool tricks

If you are not writing in English, remember to change the “location and language” in keyword tool to your language, and then just look at the column to the right, where it says “Local monthly searches”.

Put the “Match type” to “exact” in the left sidebar. Then you will only see how many are searching for exactly the phrase you are targeting. But I am also targeting a lot of long-tail words in every blogpost, so for me the “broad” or “phrase” is enough data.

If you find keywords with more than 1000 local monthly searches in “exact” mode and there are low competition, do not hesitate, write about the keyword! Like NOW!

If you find keywords with more than 10000 searches in “exact” mode, buy a domain including that keyword and make a whole site about it. :)

Remember that the numbers are not 100% reliable, and often just about 0ne third of the monthly searches presented. Thanks for reading about how to do keyword researches in Google keyword tool!

This post was originally found here: SEO tip 9 – Do a keyword research for knowing what to write

I hope you have tried to add a blog for gaining more traffic to your site? I will today relieve a little about blogging for trends and seasons. You know, things that happens all the time, some every year, like Christmas and Spring break for example, and other’s that are harder to plan for, like earthquakes and your country winning the football world cup. But anyway, you can always use seasons and trends for gaining some more traffic. Let’s talk a little about how.

Writing for getting traffic from trends and seasons

You have probably already seen my SEO Christmas calendar. That´s one of my ways of getting more traffic now when it is Christmas. I just added a page where I gather 24 blog posts in a style of a calendar, and release one every day. Blog posts that I would have been writing anyway. That’s one way, rewriting the content you would have been writing anyway, so that it fits the season.

Examples of company blogs writing special posts for the seasons

If you want to see a more concrete example, from a website that does not belong to a brand selling stuff online, you should check out the Snellman.fi blog. That is also one of our customers, and here is one example of them making special kind of content for this season, Christmas: Joulukinkun paistaminen. That means something like “how to cook the christmas ham”. “Christmas ham” is a kind of food everybody eats in Finland and Sweden at Christmas.

The trend for “Joulukinkun paistaminen”

I thought I should take a real example, so that you easier can see how to do. First, go to Google Trends (the picture) and find a phrase that is trending every year the same time, like this, you can see that it is being searched for in the end of the year every year. A no-brainer really, the word contains “christmas”. But it is a good and easy example. You might as well be able to make some content before Christmas still, or at least before new years eve.

Find a few phrases that is trending the same time then search for them in Google for checking if the competition is hard or not. Then chose the one with the most traffic (Check keyword tool for this as well) and the least competition (this is hard, I know, but you learn by doing), and write a long blog post about that. Like the “Joulukinkun paistaminen” one. Then take a few of the other phrases that are trending the same time and write blog posts about them as well, linking to the one that is “most important”. If you have a strong enough domain, and your site is built in the right way, you will probably find a lot of phrases for which your site will be found on the first page in Google for, just by writing the blog posts.

And the best part, they will be there next year as well, when the phrase is trending again!

So, if you have not been checking Google trends yet, be sure to check it. And remember to write the texts search engine friendly and totally onpage optimized, even if you of course is writing for the visitors, not for search engines. But remember to be aware of the search engines as well, otherwise you will not have any visitors to write for..:) Here is another blogpost of mine where Google trends is used: Search by drawing in Google Correlate. Are you still not sure of why you should have a company blog? Then check my blog post about reasons for having a company blog (On Genero.fi).  Thanks for reading. Back to the calendar.

This post was originally found here: SEO-trick 16 – Use a company blog for getting traffic from trends and seasons

When you start working with a site, you havet o know what you have to work with, right? You may want to know what kind of links tou already have pointing to your site, and of course, you want to know what kind of backlinks your competitor have pointing to his site or subpage. Let’s check!

What kind of online tools are avialable for checking backlinks to websites?

We are focusing on online tools, because they are faster and easier to start with. There was one good, Yahoo site explorer, but that is now shut down by Yahoo, unfortunately. But luckily we have a few others.

Opensiteexplorer for checking backlinks

There is one tool that is quite good, that is the opensiteexplorer by SeoMoz.. You find it at www.opensiteexplorer.com. You can go there for testing it, just type in your site url and click explore. Without signing in, you will see the amount of links, and the anchor texts and url’s from which the five strongest links come (according to opensiteexplorer, they does not need to be the strongest for real). If you make a free account, you will see anchor texts and url’s for all the links pointing to your site. And, you can as well check the tab ”compare link metrics” for comparing your own site with up to four of your competitors. There is a paid account as well avialable at Opensiteexplorer, which you can use for getting even more data and ranking reports. That costs $99 a month. But for only link-checking, the free but signed in –account is good enough to start with. Negative things with opensiteexplorer is that it does not have as much sites in its register as Yahoo site explorer had.

Ahref.com, a new resource for checking backlinks

I recently stumbled upon ahrefs.com, that also has its own register of sites, just like opensiteexplorer. This is a new resource and I have not had time to explore the quality of the register fully yet. But you can check backlinks for free at www.ahrefs.com, and if you make a free account, you get some more data.

Yaheoo “link:” for backlink checking

Yahoo has another way of checking backlinks as well, you can search for link:yoursite.com in the common Yahoo search engine. It is not as good as the old siteexplorer, but it works, it is free, and you do not need a login.

Google webmaster tools

Google webmaster tools is quite good for checking backlinks to your own site. Here it is impossible to check links to other peoples sites like in the other ones. But it is still quite good, it is Google’s own data you see, and it is still Google we are optimizing for. Register your site at www.google.com/webmasters and verify your site for getting started. Tip: Sync your webmaster tools data with analytics, for getting all the info from one place.

Checking backlinks in common Google search engine (bad)

Google allows you to check backlinks to sites in the search field as well, you just type in link:yourdomain.com and hit search. It is really bad, it does not show anything that makes sense. Sometimes you find some links there, but it is often just a percent or two of every backlink that there is.

Why should I check backlinks to competitors sites?

First, it is interesting to see what kind of competition you have. Second, you can probably steal a couple o flinks from them, because if they have got links from a site, you can prbably get links from the same site with some work.

Thanks for reading about tools for checking backlinks, this was a post in the SEO Christmas calendar as well.

This post was originally found here: SEO-trick 8: Tools for checking backlinks to own and competitors website

Here is another WordPress based trick for you. I know that most of you are using WordPress anyway, and everybody that does SEO will sooner or later have to get used t oWordPress, so I think that I can focus quite hard on WordPress in my SEO tutorials. For example, if you are going to build campaign sites on keyword domains (trick 6), you will probably use WordPress. There are a lot of plugins for WordPress SEO, a lot of plugins that all do the same, and a lot that is unnecessary, and a lot of common plugins that improves the onpage optimization even if the plugin description does not say so. Let’s check some plugins!

The number one WordPress SEO plugin you need to have

I will tell you about the best WordPress SEO plugin and tell you how to configure it for getting the best possible optimization for your WordPress site.

WordPress SEO / Yoast SEO

If you only want one plugin for your whole WordPress installation, this is the one you should choose. You can download it here. This is a SEO-plugin that is a combination of a lot of earlier plugins. It is made by Joost de Valk, and only about a year old now. You can read more about it on Joost page WordPress SEO. ( <– That’s btw the kind of links you want to get from other people, links that tells you what your site is about already in the link-text. Yoast plugin is so good that I gladly link to him that way and helps him to stay on top for the phrase “wordpress seo”. He is btw already number one for that, so he knows what he is doing!). The WordPress SEO plugin is completely free by the way. The Yoast SEO plugin totally replaces the two earlier hyped plugins “All in one SEO” and “Headspace 2″. So forget them. :)

Configure WordPress SEO by Yoast

Download the plugin, upload it to your plugin directory and activate it. Or just search for it and install it through the WordPress dashboard.

When you have activated it, you will find a new nice sidebar on the bottom left of your administration panel.

Start by clicking the “Titles” link. There you are able to add a title to the front page of your blog, the page where all the posts are gathered. Write  a nice title and description for that.

In the fields “post”, “page”, “category” and “post_tag”,  add this: %%title%%. Or if you want a more “branded” site, add %%title%% – Your site name.com.

In the description fields for the “post” and “page”, add %%excerpt%%. In the description field for categories and post_tag, add %%category_description%% vs %%tag_description%%. This will add the category description that we wrote here to the meta description as well.

Then, save it and go check a post you have written and see if your title looks like it should. If not, you can fix it in two ways (Some templates does not support this very well). Option one: Go to your template editor and replace whatever you find in header.php that looks like this: <title>***</title>. Replace it with this: <title><?php wp_title(”); ?></title> and it will start working. Option two: Do this if you cannot do number one. Go back to the titles tab, and check the box “Force rewrite titles”. This will do the same as number one, but slow down your site slightly. You will probably not even notice it, but option one is still better.

Then, go to the tab “Permalinks” and check some boxes. If you have a new blog with not a lot of posts yet, check this box: “Strip the category base (usually /category/) from the category URL”. That will do exactly what it says. Check the next one as well, ” Enforce a trailing slash on all category and tag URL’s”. And if you have a lot of images on your blog and have by mistake been linking them all to an “attachment page”, then be sure to check the box “Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL”. That will help you get rid of a lot of duplicate content.

Then, go to the tab “Indexation” and check a lot of boxes for excluding a lot of pages with duplicate content from the index. Check the following:

• This site’s search result pages
• The login and register pages
• All admin pages
• Author archives (in most cases)
• Date-based archives (you do not want a lot of date-pages in the index)
• Tag archives (if you have not came up with a good idea of making the tag-pages unique). The Category pages can be indexed if you have made them unique like this for example: Use categories right for better onpage SEO.
• Check every box in the area “Internal nofollow setting”.
• In most cases you can check both the boxes under “Archive settings” as well.

Writing posts with Yoast SEO plugin active

Writing posts with this plugin activated is fun. Because it tells you if you do it right all the time. It makes your posts almost as good onpage optimized as i described some days ago. Below the box you can add a keyword or phrase, and the plugin will then tell you what to do:

Just add a keyword to the “Focus keyword” box and start writing your content. Click “save draft” now and then for updated status in the green “Yes”-words. (They are “no” to begin with).

The page analysis tab in Yoast WordPress SEO:

In the page analysis tab you will see a more detailed view of your text. Try to get every point green. They are red to begin width. What you see above is the analysis for this text that I you are now reading.

Alternative WordPress SEO plugin

I know one other plugin that does the same as this, and even more detailed, but that costs a little. If you want a more detailed view you can test that as well, it is called SEO Pressor and is made by Daniel Tan. I have reviewed that earlier here: SEO Pressor plugin for WordPress optimization. You can buy / download a test version here.

Thanks for reading my seventh post in the SEO Christmas Calendar. This was all about WordPress SEO plugins, or mainly about Yoast SEO, a great plugin to use for learning SEO with WordPress.

This post was originally found here: Seo tip 7 – The WordPress SEO plugin you need to have installed