April Tara » SEO

A planner for freelancers

April — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 03:42:22 +0000

I have come across some great time management and productivity resources, some of which I’ve been able to implement and some that just don’t work well for me. So what I’ve ended up doing is combining some of my favorites.

Here’s what I do:

Yearly Business Planning

At the end of 2008, I had written a blog post about setting goals for the new year. In that post, I mentioned Alice Seba’s Planning Calendar that breaks down your plans for the year into monthly, weekly, even daily chunks to make it easier to lay out your goals and then the actions you need to take to achieve those. I’ve been using it since 2009 started (although not as diligently as I should be) and its making a big difference. It helps me look ahead and schedule projects and ideas a few months from now instead of feeling like I have to do everything now.

Blog Planning

This is one that I still struggle with. Thanks to the Blog Planner I downloaded from Blog Energizer, I can plan my topics ahead of time and even set up a posting schedule for multiple blogs (last count: 4 active and 3 badly neglected blogs). Its a great little tool and I keep it in my binder so I can jot down topics that come to mind. Then at the beginning of each month, I come up with topics to fill in the blank spaces and voila! A month’s worth of blog topics.

But I’ve come to the realization that planning is not my problem. My problem is action. I can plan stuff out but when it comes down to budgeting my time and plugging those plans into a schedule, I can’t find a balance between adherence and flexibility.

Planners for Freelancers

Well today I was reading through all of my RSS feeds and saw that Charlie at Productive Flourishing published a freelancer’s version of his popular planner pages. I’m so excited to try it out! He’s been putting a lot of work into this and I know it wasn’t easy because “freelancer” can mean so many things and we all have very different ways of working. So finding something that will work for everyone is difficult. (I even donated a few bucks to encourage him and let him know his efforts were appreciated.)

So if you’re a freelancer, definitely head over to Productive Flourishing and download Charlier’s planner for freelancers. And even if you’re not a freelancer, Charlie’s original planners are an excellent resource too!

50+ Ways to Improve Your Productivity as a Freelancer (freelanceswitch.com)
Time Management For Anarchists (lifehack.org)
Four Forgotten Productivity Enhancers (kevineikenberry.com)

WordPress SEO Secrets – Its launch day!

April — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:36:22 +0000

Instead of wasting too much time giving you all the details, I’ll just give you the link to Michael Martine a/k/a Remarkablogger’s “WordPress SEO Secrets” product page so you can get started. That link should open in a new window because I want you to be able to come back here easily after you’ve made your purchase.

I’ll wait…..

Ok, now that you’re back, I want to tell you why I think you made a good decision by purchasing Michael Martine’s “WordPress SEO Secrets” products. I can sum it up for in just a few words – Michael is a great guy. Not only does he know his stuff, he’s extremely generous in sharing his knowledge because he is invested in your success. Even if you’ve never spoken to him directly (you can follow him @Remarkablogger on Twitter…that’s where I met him), he knows there are people out there who enjoy blogging and want to be successful at it and Michael wants that for you too!

So if you haven’t bought your copy of “WordPress SEO Secrets” yet, head on over there and grab it before the price goes up. And don’t just skim through the extra offers. Considering that SEO is a time-sensitive, ever-evolving subject, I really recommend reading through the additional offers that will include ongoing updates and changes to the way SEO works.

Update on WordPress SEO Secrets

April — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:09:15 +0000

I’ve got good news! Remember how I posted this morning that I would have more info for you tomorrow about the launch of “WordPress SEO Secrets”? Well I have a sneak peek for you so you can get a better idea of the kind of info available to you as part of the course.

Now this is just the text stuff. Don’t forget about the audio and video that will be included. I’m tellin’ ya, this is good stuff being released. Only 24 hours left!

Word Press SEO Secrets Sample

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Do-it-yourself Tutorial seo blogging

Secrets of WordPress and SEO

April — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:29:39 +0000

Using WordPress may be one of the easiest and most effective ways to maximize your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts. Let’s take a look at some of these WP-specific SEO tricks.

Anatomy of a Post

Here’s what the search engines are looking for when they’re crawling through your site and determining rankings:

Titles: Keywords, the terms people are using when they perform a search, are very important in titles. Titles appear at the top of a browser window or in a browser window tab. The problem with blogs is that your headline automatically becomes the title unless you have a plugin that allows them to differ.
Post slug names: The post slug is the virtual file name of a blog post. For example, the link to this post is http://www.apriltara.com/2009/01/secrets-of-wordpress-and-seo. The slug section of that link is “secrets-of-wordpress-and-seo”. That’s the info search engines are interested in. If I’d named this post “You’ve gotta read this!” or just used the post ID number, the search engines would have no idea what the post is about. Be sure to use “pretty permalinks” so that you have more control over the slug because you’ll need to edit the slug for SEO purposes. You want to use important keywords in the slug, just as you do for the title.
Headings: In your WordPress blog, you can use various heading levels when writing posts to break up the content into sections. Search engines pay attention to keywords in headings. Many people don’t know how to see the controls for headings in WordPress. You have to click on the “Kitchen Sink” button on your WordPress toolbar which looks like a small box with a bunch of small boxes inside of it. Many people have seen it but never clicked on it, mistaking it for some kind of color palette. Unless you have some WordPress plugins that add extra buttons to your post toolbar, the “Kitchen Sink” should be the last button on the right, just above the text area where you enter your post content. Once the second row of toolbar buttons is revealed, use the “Format” drop-down to set headings.
Text content: Of course the content of the post must be relevant to a searcher’s needs. Use the same words in the post the searcher would use in a search (keywords). Use them as frequently as you can while still sounding natural. It may help to read your post out loud to yourself to make sure it doesn’t sound awkward. Think of it this way: if your searcher has a question, you want your post to be the answer.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much to learn about about optimizing your WordPress-based site to achieve excellent search engine rankings.

Tomorrow, January 7th, a study course covering SEO for WordPress will be available. WordPress SEO Secrets: Search Engine Optimization Magic for WordPress Blogs will walk you through all of this, step by step, using text materials as well as audio and video recordings. Stay tuned and I’ll have more info for you at launch time! I’ll be sharing the details on my blog and in my newsletter so be sure to subscribe to my blog via RSS or email and subscribe to my newsletter using the sign up box to the right.