This week I was preparing my slide deck for a webinar I’m presenting on Tuesday for my friends over at Lurn. The webinar is titled “Ten Best Practices for Writing Headlines, Descriptions and Meta Data That Get Traffic”. The preparation for this webinar reminded me of wrapping paper and my ultimate love for Christmas. Yes you read that correctly, in my mind I think of titles and meta as wrapping paper.

Here is why. Line up two presents of equal size and cost. One is wrapped in a brown paper bag (earth day was this week so let’s recycle) and the other is wrapped in beautiful shiny paper with perfect corners and exquisite ribbon to match. Which one do you want to open? Unless you have mental issues, you’re going for the one I wrapped. That would be the pretty one. Blog entries and website pages are the same. Visitors and search engines lunge at the page or post that is wrapped perfectly. This means well-written content that is accompanied by a fabulous title, concise meta description, and relevant keywords (if you are targeting search engines other than Google). These three elements are the teasers that make you want more. Just like the perfectly wrapped present.

Unfortunately, blogger and “wanna be” webmasters are a dime a dozen these days and everyone thinks they are the next great publisher of content on the Internet. They are not. I am thankful the folks over at Lurn feel the same as I do and they are trying desperately to education these up and coming Internet moguls with some good old fashion SEO expertise. Once you get past Lurn’s glitzy landing pages, you’ll see they have great content on SEO and Internet marketing. So much so that I wish they’d been around seven years ago when I entered into the world of SEO and website design. This isn’t a push for Lurn, it is an education. I 100% believe they provide great content for the SEO newbie. Below is a list of best practices I’ll be discussing Tuesday. Lurn believes in these just as I do, which is why I believe in Lurn.

Ten Best Practices for Writing Headlines, Descriptions and Meta Data That Get Traffic

1. Write an eye-catching, well-written headline
2. Use your headline, descriptions, and tags to gain traction
3. Use your keywords in the title
4. Build keywords into your alt tags
5. Include headlines and descriptions that will resonate with those readers
6. Include information you want your visitors to see when they see your link in search engines
7. Watch your character limit
8. Don’t overdo it
9. Utilize the H1 tag so it helps both the reader and the search engine
10. Pick the right header for the job

So my SEO friends, I will leave you with this thought. When crafting your next blog entry or web page, ask yourself this – is your wrapping job good enough to give to your mother (aka Google)? If you aren’t pleased to attach your name to it, rewrap it and make sure the presentation is as good as the page content itself.

Below is a list of my favorite plugins.  These plugins are both functional and easy to use.  The augment WordPress’ core functionality and require little or no coding.

1. Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button – Help readers share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service.
2. All in One SEO Pack – Supports easy definition of page specific meta tags for search engine optimization.
3. AWS Easy Page Link – Easy interlinking between pages when writing content.
4. Breacrumb NavXT – Generates breadcrumb trails for your WordPress blog or website.
5. Contact Form 7 – Simple and fully customizable contact form.
6. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Generates a fully customizable sitemap.
7. Datafeedr Random Ads V2 – Aallows you to simply and easily show random ads anywhere in your template files or using widgets.
8. Events – Enables a list of events with a static countdown to date in both pages and sidebar.
9. Featured Content Gallery – Rotating images on home page.
10. Fun with Sidebar Tabs – Adds a tabbed sidebar to existing themes.
11. Google Maps Anywhere – Interactive map to locations utilizing Google maps.
12. KB Robots.txt – Creates a standard robot.txt file for regular WordPress and WordPress MU.
13. Link to Post – Supports easy internal linking to post entries.
14. List Pages Shortcode – Introduces the [list-pages] and [child-pages] shortcodes for easily displaying a list of pages within a post or page.
15. PhotoSmash – PhotoSmash Galleries makes it easy to create photo galleries in posts or pages that your users can upload images into for sharing with other users.
16. Really Simple CAPTCHA – CAPTCHA field that supports multiple contact forms.
17. Show IDs – Adds a column to the administrative dashboard to show page and post ID’s.
18. Simple Google Sitemap – Generate a sitemaps.org compatible XML sitemap of your WordPress.
19. Simple Image Link – Sidebar images within existing sidebar format
20. Simple:Press Forum – Easy to configure forum that integrates with the standard version of WordPress.
21. Simple Sidebar Navigation – Adds in a customized menu within sidebar widgets. Support multiple instances and integrated easily with tabbed sidebars.
22. Social Homes – Adds a sidebar widget containing a subtle list of all your social homes as linked favicons.
23. Special Text Boxes – Adds simple colored text boxes to highlight some portion of post text. Use it for highlights warnings, alerts, infos and downloads in your blog posts.
24. Subscription Options – Adds subscription option icons for your RSS Feed URL; your FeedBurner Email Service URL and your Twitter Stream URL.
25. TinyMCE Advanced – Enables advanced features and plugins in TinyMCE.
26. TubePress – Displays professional YouTube galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar.
27. Twitter Friends Widget – Widget to display your Twitter Friends in the sidebar.
28. WP-Table Reloaded – allows you to create and easily manage tables in the admin area of WordPress. A comfortable backend allows an easy manipulation of table data. You can then include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML.
29. WP Easy Uploader – Easily upload any type of content without the need for FTP.
30. WP-DBManager – Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

A ping list is a list of websites that will be notified automatically each time your website posts a new blog entry. It is simple, effortless, and a critical aspect to obtaining website visitors. You post a new entry or update an existing entry and these websites will automatically be notified of this activity.

Now that I’ve told you about pinging, you may ask how do I know who to “ping”. A complete list of ping URL’s is provided below. If you are using WordPress, all you have to do is input these URL’s into the box labeled “Update Services” in the “Writing” section of your “Settings”. Next you post a blog entry and WordPress will do the rest.

Happy pinging my fellow bloggers!

Ping List

• http://1470.net/api/ping
• http://api.feedster.com/ping
• http://api.moreover.com/ping
• http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
• http://bblog.com/ping.php
• http://bitacoras.net/ping
• http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
• http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
• http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
• http://coreblog.org/ping/
• http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
• http://ping.amagle.com/
• http://ping.bitacoras.com
• http://ping.blo.gs/
• http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
• http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
• http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
• http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
• http://ping.feedburner.com
• http://ping.myblog.jp
• http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
• http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.weblogs.se/
• http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
• http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
• http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
• http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
• http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
• http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
• http://rpc.newsgator.com/
• http://rpc.pingomatic.com
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
• http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
• http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
• http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
• http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
• http://www.bloglines.com/ping
• http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
• http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
• http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
• http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
• http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
• http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
• http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
• http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
• http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
• http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
• http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
• http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
• http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
• http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

While many smart and intelligent businesspeople question the purpose of blogs, they do server a tangible purpose and they are important to the overall success of a corporate website. The most common misperception is that blogs are solely written and read by the teen set or worse, by unsocial computer nerds who blog about topics no one ever reads. This thought process is 100% incorrect.

Quality blogs provide information to website visitors. Such blogs help communicate a company’s brand, product, or service offering in a less formal manner that is very similar to a discussion or conversation. They are snippets of content that help educate and communicate to potential prospects or existing customers. They are extremely valuable to overall Internet marketing if written in the correct manner. That being said, they are not a platform to write unending examples of how your product or service or company is the best thing since sliced bread. If you do this, no reader will stay with your blog for more than a few seconds.

In addition to providing website visitors with relevant information, blogs help provide fresh website content for Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. Google likes blogs – plain and simple. Blogs help drive search engine traffic and they are worth every effort put forth into the writing and posting of content. 

I have officially been a blogger for the last few years. I will admit, I was also skeptical of blogs. Not long after starting my humble blog, I was amazed at how quickly my subscribers (people who sign up for automatic updates on your blog entries) went from zero to thousands. I was even more amazed when I went to an industry event and someone I did not know, thought he knew me. He was positive he knew me actually. After a few hours of interaction, my new/old friend realized how he know me – or at least the virtual me. He was a faithful reader of my blog. Then to my complete and utter surprise, he then proceeded to inform me of his favorite blog posts. I was bewildered and baffled. And at that fateful moment, I became a true believer in blogging.

So for various reasons, I have continued to blog and continued to see the benefits of blogging. I have found prospects and true qualified leads through my blog. It has helped my Google ranking and it has helped create a virtual persona for me amongst my peers.