All In One SEO Pack for WordPress
by Amy Stevens Adams
If you’re blogging on WordPress, then you NEED the All In One SEO Pack Plugin. As mentioned in my article on Increasing Web Traffic, it does about 80% of your SEO needs with about 20% effort on your part. One of our readers emailed me and requested clarification on how to use the SEO Pack, so here it is!
Install the plugin and activate it, then follow these steps;
1. Go to Settings > All in One SEO on the left hand side of your WordPress control panel.
2. Update your site info, paying special attention to the first three fields; Home Title, Home Description, Home Keywords. This is the info that search engines use to determine what your site is all about. Limit your keywords to only 10 (or less, if possible). You want a very focused message that clearly defines what you do/offer. If you use, say, 30 keywords, you are diluting the focus of your website and hurting your chances of being recognized for your specialty.
Save your settings.
3. Open a post to Edit. Go to Posts > Edit on the left side of your WordPress control panel. Scroll down to the bottom of the page until you find a grey divider that is labeled All in One SEO. Click on it to expand the fields.
4. Fill in the required info; Title (this is the title of your post and should clearly describe what your article is about), Description (this is a brief description of your article that will show up in search engines. Make it interesting so people will want to click your blog and read!), and Keywords (again, use no more than 10).
5. Save your Draft. Make sure you enter the info in the SEO Pack BEFORE publishing your blog posts to get maximum benefit from it.
6. Spend some time and update the SEO Pack on all your previous blog posts, to increase your visibility on the web.
7. And finally, don’t forget to update the SEO Pack on all your blog’s PAGES (e.g. Home, About, Contact, etc). Keep in mind that every page on your site should be complete with a title, description and keywords.
Make the SEO Pack part of your regular blogging routine and eventually you’ll reap the rewards of more traffic, higher Search Engine rank and you’ll be much closer to a fully optimized website.
Happy Blogging!
-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding
If you found our information helpful, please feel free to donate. Thanks!
What the Heck is Reddit?
by Amy Stevens Adams
According to Wikipedia, Reddit is a ‘social news website’. Anyone can post an article, and just like Digg, you can vote on articles. Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, declares that Reddit ‘is a news website where readers choose the news, not editors.’
The difference I found between Reddit and other similar sites, is that Reddit seems to have much more eccentric, ‘alternative’ posts. It seems more fun, gossipy and entertaining than other social news sites. As always, my opinion is just my own and I encourage you to check it out for yourself. However, while researching Reddit for this article, I got sucked-in to more than a few ‘interesting’ posts. 
Real quick, here’s how to set up an account and get going with Reddit;
1. Go to http://www.reddit.com/ and click ‘register in seconds’ in the upper right corner.
2. Register an account. This is BY FAR the easiest registration process I’ve ever encountered. You’re not even required to give an email address if you don’t want. It took me 10 seconds.
3. On the homepage, click ‘Submit a link’.
I submitted yesterday’s CCBbuzz article. Again, this was simple and took me less than a minute.
That’s it! If people read and like your article, they’ll vote it up. Voting is easy too, just read an article on the Reddit site and either vote it up or down by clicking the arrows on the left side of the title.
The articles with the most votes go to the top of the homepage. Just like any other site, if your article gains momentum and is read and liked, you have the potential to gain massive traffic to your site. After all, isn’t that always the goal?
Reddit has lots more features, so I encourage you to explore the site… if for no other reason than to find intriguing articles!
Reddit is one more way to share your content and drive traffic to your blog. It’s easy and fun to use.
-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding
If you found our information helpful, please feel free to donate. Thanks!
How to Increase Web Traffic in 10 Minutes or Less
by Amy Stevens Adams
Over the past two months that John and I have had our blog, we have poured a lot of time into researching the best methods for promoting our content. It’s not useful to have a blog if no one reads it, right? So how do you get traffic to your site? In this article, I’m going to share with you the process that we do EVERY time we post a blog. This process has evolved over time, and will continue to evolve as we continue to research, learn and experience new ways to promote our work on the World Wide Web. Right now we have a process that takes us 10 minutes, and we’ve found the results to be substantial. There is a very definite increase in web traffic on days we implement our process, and on days we forget (or are posting on the fly via our iPhones) we see a dip in our traffic. I keep this list by my mac and walk through it step by step in the 10 minutes after we post a new blog. Why do I do it immediately? Because once you’ve posted new content to your blog, you begin to show up around the internet. It’s like the Net has hit it’s ‘refresh’ button and new content is being displayed in front of the eyes of readers everywhere. So it is in your best interest to get everything pinged as quickly as possible for maximum exposure.
It should be noted that of the steps listed below, they all have to happen AFTER you’ve posted, except #1. John and I use the ‘All in One SEO Pack‘ plugin on WordPress. I highly recommend this plugin, as it does about 80% of your SEO needs with about 20% effort on your part. It’s well, well worth looking into.
Here are our steps;
1. Post your blog, making sure first to fill in the info for the All In One SEO, including keywords (no more than 10), description and title.
2. Submit your new post’s URL to Digg.
3. Stumble! your new post.
4. Bookmark your new post in Delicious.
5. Ping Technorati (read how to automate the process here).
6. Update your Twitter.
7. Post a link to your article on Facebook.
8. Submit your new link on your LinkedIn status.
9. (And Finally) Submit your article to a Blog Carnival, and any other submission site you use, such as Zimbio, etc.
Refer to my previous articles for how-to set up Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.
Of the list, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Technorati will get you instant exposure. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn rely on your friends and associates wanting to read your content, and this may take a while to catch on, but once people know they like your information, they’ll be back each time you post a new link.
The Blog Carnival we don’t have any information on yet, because our first ‘carnival’ isn’t scheduled until the 16th of February (2009), but we will update you in the future on how well it works for us. We’re trying it based on the recommendation of Steve Pavlina in his article on How to Build a Hgh Traffic Website.
So there you have it! My 10-minute process. Try it for a few weeks and you’ll begin to notice an increase in traffic, as we have.
-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding
If you found our information helpful, please feel free to donate. Thanks!
