The best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tricks out there are the ones that don’t require a lot of work. We all have other things to do than to go to a bunch of different sites all day long, composing messages. The benefits of doing all the posting are large: Each post increase your visibility enormously, so many people are going to all the trouble to do exactly that.
One of the beautiful solutions is the circular posting capability involving WordPress, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s like hiring a sign-shaker to dance on every corner.
In WordPress, it’s relatively easy to add a plugin that allows people, with a single click, create a link to an article in your blog, or one of your pages from FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. Sociable is a good WordPress plugin for this. In addition, you can add a Twitter ‘Follow’ button, and links to your profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. All that is important (in fact, why haven’t I finished doing it on my blog..? oh yeah, it’s awaiting the re-design I never get around to doing)… but it’s just the start.
The next step is a bit more involved. Twitter Tools is a multi-part WordPress plugin that allows you to do round-trip posting. It can show your tweets automatically in a sidebar, or as a post, it can turn your posts into tweets automatically (using the post title, and a link back to the post), and it can do things like bit.ly url shortening, and more. One key feature is the hash (#) handling part of Twitter Tools. By adding #li or #ln to this plugins settings, each post also goes to LinkedIn.
In addition, a WordPress plugin called “WordBook” allows cross-posting between Facebook and WordPress. At the moment I was writing this, however, there was some conflict keeping it from working. The author was trying to solve it, so by the time you read this, it may be resolved. However, if you’ve installed a Facebook ‘share’ button using Sociable (mentioned above) you can just click this, when your post is complete, and quickly share the WordPress post to Facebook.
If all this seems a bit confusing, it is. But once you get it set up, it’s magic for getting your site out to the search engines, and to get people seeing it through Twitter and Facebook. Every blog post you do is multiplied with a single click to the Publish button. None of these benefits are available if you have a static website, or a cheap ‘build it in a day’ site.
As a web developer, I’ve seen a lot of site-building tools come and go. This is the most powerful combination I’ve seen for businesses to compete for the best search engine results. If you’re ready to rebuild your site to take advantage of all this, or already have a WordPress site but don’t know how to implement all these cool tricks, contact me.
