WordPress homework for the Christmas holidays

We have published a lot of material this year to help out clients get more from their WordPress websites. Chances are you've not had time to read and act on it all so here's some homework for you, to fill all of that spare time over the holidays!

Digital Marketing
homework

Depending on the industry that you work in you might be slowing down for the Christmas & New Year break. It’s common for business owners to have a bit of spare time to actually work on your business at this time of year. So if this sounds like you, I’m going to do some of the planning work for you.

Throughout 2013 we’ve tried to publish a lot of tips and tutorials to help our WordPress clients get the most from their sites. So in this post I’m going to give you a quick refresher on some of the main topics. Bookmark this post; it’s your homework to make your website perform better for you in 2014!

Search Engine Optimisation for WordPress

This one should be close to the top of your list.

Google is a contestant state of change, a well ranking web site needs to change too, to keep in favour with the search engines.

I always think of SEO as a two part problem; the first to optimise your WordPress content so that it ranks well, the second is to then look appealing on the search engine result pages.

Start with optimising

Start with reading this post; it’s a quick crash course in the basics of SEO – SEO for your WordPress website – In 10 minutes. Before you go too far you really need to  look at developing a keyword strategy for your site, here is my quick tutorial on how to get started on this – SEO: Develop a keyword strategy.

Finish with these tips for search engine result pages

This post is actually from way back in 2011 but the content is still 100% relevant, check out Look your best on search engine result pages. On the same topic is the more recent post The humble Meta Description, which talks about and links to a longer article that encourages the art of quality meta descriptions.

Once you’ve advanced your Meta Description writing talent, you’ll need to know technically how to do it in WordPress – I’ve got you covered here too. See WordPress SEO for the Genesis Theme Framework.

Learn about Google Authorship and start using it!

Next on your home work list is to get started with Google Authorship. There is not quiet as much reading on this one, the post Google Authorship: a solution for WordPress should give you a quick introduction to why it’s a good thing to know about and use.

Start to track your website’s performance

Every WordPress site that rolls off our production line is hooked up with Google Analytics. This tool hold the key information to know just about everything about how your site is performing.

Start with this one: Your WordPress website – is it working for you? It’s a bit of a rant but I think important to get you in the mind set of why tracking your website performance is important. If you’ve got an appetite for more analytics, check out this  Google Analytics Benchmarking.

Look out for our new webinar in 2014, where we are going to run a new session, free for our clients to get a better understanding of Google Analytics.

Is that all?

Well if you get through SEO, Authorship and Analytics you’ve done pretty well. You probably can have a little bit of time of to relax. There is however a wealth of other content to be found on our blog, so there’s always more reading there.

Have a great break, we’re going to have a couple of week off too. No doubt we’ll be doing some of these activities ourselves!

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