If you’re in your mid-30′s or older you probably remember the Florida Orange Juice commercials, “It’s not just for breakfast anymore.” (note: I couldn’t locate an actual ad).  The 6 word tag line told the story perfectly and you don’t need anything else to get the message, drinking orange juice shouldn’t be thought of as only a breakfast drink; it was brilliant marketing by Florida Orange Growers.

It’s really easy to get caught pigeon-holing things that need to be thought of a little more broadly. There was no real reason that orange juice should have only been thought of as a breakfast drink and there is no reason you should only be thinking of keywords in terms of SEO.

SEO, at it’s essence, is about one thing, being found. We use appropriate keywords in our writing hoping to rank well for those words and phrases people are using to find the information we are sharing. But ranking isn’t really the goal, being found is. More specifically, it isn’t about you being found, no one cares about “you” or “me”, they care about the information we are sharing, so it’s really about the information being findable.

More effective keyword/key-phrase usage wherever we publish content will make the information we are sharing easier to find, not only through search engines but everywhere. Even in situations where “ranking” isn’t at issue, using good keywords can help grab a readers attention when they are scanning, using their browser “find” functionality to look for something on a page or when scanning through titles and headlines.

Here are 3 quick places to start using keywords better:

1. Forums, Create Meaningful Thread Titles: Even if you don’t really use forums much, odds are you use them to some degree, even if just searching for the answer to a question on-line or to get support of some sort. Nothing is more worthless than a forum thread headline titled “Please help me.” When people are scanning or searching forums for answers to their questions they aren’t likely to open that thread because it doesn’t tell them anything at all about the content of the thread or what question may have been answered. When you get into a forum with hundreds or thousands of threads the ones with meaningful titles will catch your attention or, will make it easier to skip over if you know they aren’t discussing what you are interested in. Good keyword use is not only helpful, it’s a courtesy!
2. Twitter, Use Meaningful Keywords in Your Tweets: Not only is real-time search becoming a bigger and bigger deal (hence good for indexing and SEO) but with so many people tweeting, the use of meaningful and descriptive phrases will help draw attention to your tweets as opposed to the vague tweets of so many twitter users.
3. Email, Create Meaningful Subject Lines and Use Keywords in Content: Here is a good one that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with SEO. With the volume of email most of us deal with on a daily basis, prioritizing and searching are critical skills to keeping up. Here, search is particularly important since most people archive all of their email. Doing a keyword search on email you know is there but can’t find is frustrating. GMail (for example) has incredible search but it still won’t find with I’m looking for if the keywords I’m searching on don’t exist in the email. Use the right keywords and not only is your email more readable, but easier for me (and you) to find and refer to.

The volume of information isn’t going to go down anytime soon and our ability to search and scan is going to become a critical skill to surviving the information age. The better you are at keyword usage the stronger your communication will be, the easier your life will be and the more you’ll be able to influence (not control) the flow of traffic around you via all of the online mediums we use.

You don’t need to do keyword research every time you tweet or start a forum thread. Just think a little bit and use logical words and phrases anytime you are creating content and you will make your information easier to find.

I can think of a ton of other places where good keyword usage is beneficial but I want to see what you come up with. Where else can you think of that you wish people would make better use of keywords or you could improve their usage yourself?

To cut right to the chase, here is SEO writing done wrong (opens in a new window).

There is an abundance of information explaining how to write well for search engine optimization. Not just how to optimize in the technical sense, but how to write well for people while maximizing search exposure. Tonight as I was looking for information on small business mobile apps I stumbled across an article that jumped out at me as a great example of how not to write for SEO. Let me explain why what you see is so bad… it wasn’t written to be read by a human. Every other sentence starts with “small business CRM.”  It’s so painfully evident that they are just trying to rank for that term that it makes clumsy reading for the person actually looking at it. BTW… they don’t rank well for the term so I guess justice is served.

A few quick stats:

1. In general, acceptable keyword density for is between 1 – 3 percent (not a hard and fast rule, some do put it a little higher). On the article I read, the phrase “small business CRM” has a keyword density of 3.34% and occurs 58 times. While not ridiculously out of the park as a percentage it’s still high, which can look like spam to search engines.
2. “Small business CRM” appears no less than 6 times in the first paragraph and the phrase “small business” occurs 10 times!
3. Between every paragraph (but the last one) is a one line paragraph which always includes the phrase “small business CRM.”

You get the idea, this is garbage reading at it’s best because it was written to try to rank for a certain phrase and not for easy human consumption. If you are going to write, do so for people first, then implement good SEO practices. You can write elegantly, logically and in an optimized manner without sounding like a machine. Remember, SEO simply exists so they can find you.

If you want to get a better understanding of how to write well for people and search engines read Copyblogger’s article “On Page SEO“.

All too often when we start to build a site (or rebuild one) the inclination is to begin with design. But the content we populate the site with is the true foundation, whether it is purely informational, geared toward selling, entertaining or serving whatever purpose your site has. The video tutorial below is a high-level overview of the process I walk through with my clients to help them to begin to define and understand their content, keep their writing inspired, on message and focused. This content mapping video tutorial will also help you to think about the entirety of your content, not merely the pages and posts that most people think of.

Get started mapping our web content….

Upcoming, related tutorials:

• Using WordPress Taxonomies For Ultimate Content Organization
• Page Based Content Organization (see also Page Navigation in WordPress – Using Sort Order)
• …more to come…

To Download the Content Map Mind Map Enter Your Name and E-mail:

Don’t forget to download FreeMind (free) to view the map.

If you are interested in MindJet MindManager (awesome but a little pricey) you can see more on Amazon: Mindjet MindManager 8

I don’t frequently “plug a plug-in” but I just uncovered one today that I can only classify as absolutely essential and almost life-changing if you live and breathe WordPress… “Additional Image Sizes” by Walter Vos. First off I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know about this sooner (I’ll get over it). In a nutshell this plugin allows you to add additional image sizes to the default WordPress Image sizes. While this might seem basic the implications are huge for automating image management in WordPress. 1) Because a lot of users don’t really know how or have the tools to do proper image management and 2) it can be very time consuming (and very tedious). Using this in conjunction with some of the features coming in WordPress 2.9 (hat tip to Aaron Brazel a.k.a. Technosailor for his excellent post) or in conjunction with another plugin like Get the Image from Justin Tadlock this is going to make the life of a lot of website owners/operators a lot easier.

How to Use It:

WordPress comes with 4 default image sizes:

• Thumbnail
• Medium
• Large
• Full

All of these sizes (other than full) can be set to whatever you want them to be (ex: Thumbnail is 150×150 by default but you can make it whatever you want).

Since a lot of my sites or sites I’ve built also need a smaller size (postage stamp if you will) I have historically had to create that small image I can now automate the process thanks to the “Additional Image Sizes” plugin by creating a new size. In my case I called it “micro” and set it to a square aspect ratio, commonly 75×75, 70×70 or 55×55.

Now, along with the other image sizes WordPress will automatically create an image of the right size for my use. No more manually creating the smaller image. Of course you are not limited to how many you can create but in most sites 5 image sizes is about all I need (WordPress was falling just short by 1 out of the box).

Note: if you create a square image size (ex: 70×70) WordPress will shrink your uploaded image down to that size and then crop it to that exact aspect ratio, so if you start off with a rectangle image and end up with a square you might not get it cropped exactly as you would like. Just some thing to keep in mind (I can live with this) but if you’re doing logos, etc… it might chop off something you don’t want it to.

Over the last week or so I’ve started playing intensely with custom taxonomies in WordPress,  and the geek in me is in love with the possibilities. Now, before you go running off thinking this is only hardcore “geek stuff” let me explain what taxonomies are, why they are important and provide a basic example of how to use them. I’ll expand on all of this is a future series of posts but I wanted to start with the basics since it will give me something to refer back to and will sent the groundwork for understanding taxonomies.

For ease of explanation, let’s pretend we have a website that is about entertainment. (Disclaimer: I’m using the example of entertainment because I want to point you to a live site with info about entertainment by Justin Tadlock, who has written a couple  of very good articles on WordPress Taxonomies, but more on that later).

What is a Taxonomy in WordPress?

By default, WordPress comes with 3 taxonomies, post tag, categories, link categories.  Essentially, a taxonomy is a way of classifying data. Typically a taxonomy will have a set of characteristics that is unique to it. To be obvious, if a taxonomy had the same characteristics as another data type, it wouldn’t be a different taxonomy! Example of those characteristics follow:

• Post Tag: acts like a label, attached to a post.
• Category: acts like a “bucket” in which we put posts, are often hierarchical. Posts can live in multiple categories.
• Link Category: acts like a label, attached to a link.

Each tag or category you create is a “term” within that taxonomy. For example, if you create a category “Movies” (in our site about entertainment), “Movies” becomes a term within the category taxonomy.

Now, there are different types of movies so this is where our custom taxonomies come in. If we created a custom taxonomy “Genre”, then we could add “Action” which becomes a term in the “Genre” taxonomy. So we are classifying our movies by “Genre.”

Why Use Custom Taxonomies in WordPress?

In a nutshell, we use custom taxonomies to make it easier to organize our content. While you could attach an appropriate tag or set of tags to a post you aren’t really separating things out as much as you could. By separating things out in a more granular way, and giving our selves a way to classify data, we have more opportunity to display content and create relationships in various and logical ways. Let’s go back to our entertainment site for an example…

How To Use Custom Taxonomies in WordPress

To begin with, we’re likely to have our highest order of organization as our categories. Let’s assume we have Movies, Television, Books and Celebrity News as our categories.

If we think about the characteristics of movies, then assume we have created four custom taxonomies that relate to movies: Genre, Director, Actors and Studio.

I can now enter terms into my “Genre” taxonomy such as “Action” or “Romance” (which of course become terms in the Genre taxonomy).

Understanding why this is important: We can now create a list of Movies in the “Action” genre as well as display the genre of a movie on the movie’s individual page (which also serves as a link to all movies classified as “Action”). If we had just used tags, there would be a lot of other stuff to filter through and display, not just “Action” next to the “Genre:” label which corresponds to the “Genre” taxonomy. (Make sense?). For clarity, if we just used tags how would we show what “genre” it’s in without showing all of the other tags associated with the movie? We couldn’t (effectively) since the “Action” would be just one of many tags associated with the move and we would have no way of distinguishing “genre” from “actor” since they would all be classified as “tags.” Get it!!!

One downfall, as far as I know there is no way to cross-reference custom taxonomies (Actors with Genre e.g. show a list of movies  with actor “Bruce Willis” AND genre “Action”).  I expect this will someday get remedied as people use custom taxonomies more.

Additional Reading

Below are two posts that you should read by Justin Tadlock about custom taxonomies, they are very good and give great examples and explanations of custom taxonomies. To be honest, he knows far more about this than I do and while I’ve never met the man, he’s one of those guys that has probably forgotten more about WordPress than most of us will ever know. Quite frankly, I’m only adding my $.02 because I thought a few of the concepts and some of the terms needed to be a little more “simply” explained, particularly if you are not a pretty technical WordPress user or don’t live and breath this stuff.

In order, read:

Custom Taxonomies in WordPress 2.8

Using Custom Taxonomies to Create a Movie Database

Also visit Pop Critics to see how they are using custom taxonomies.

Custom Fields have a ton of uses and can be a great way for a theme designer to augment the functionality of a theme. Unfortunately, custom fields can feel a little intimidating to “non-techies” and those new to WordPress. The following video provides a simple explanation of what custom fields are, how they work, and common uses (specifically images).

The following video provides an explanation on how to use sort order so that you get a scalable and organized approach to managing your navigation in WordPress. While geared at WordPress sites, this approach should work for any content management system that provides an automated or semi-automated way of creating navigation. This tutorial assumes that you are using a theme which supports multilevel navigation (i.e. drop down menus) and have a basic familiarity with using WordPress to edit and create content. You will also want to note this tutorial reference the function wp_list_pages(); and includes the parameter “sort_column=menu_order” (e.g. wp_list_pages(‘sort_column=menu_order’); ). For more on wp_list_pages and it’s parameters visit the WordPress Codex.