Have you heard the term SEO or Search Engine Optimization? Maybe you have heard of it as SEM, or Search Engine Marketing. You know it has to do with internet marketing (or was that social media marketing), but now sure what the details of that mean. When working with new clients, part of the process is educating them on the terms and procedures. Here in the SEO 101 series, I will provide the readers of Website for Actors with information that shows the steps needed to get high rankings with Google and other search engines. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment, tweet or email me.

URLs, METAs, Titles
URLs can come in many different shapes, lengths and sizes. One wants to keep the URL structure in mind when dealing with SEO. Well written URLs, with potential keywords, will aid in Google ranking that page higher. As you can see below, when the keyword “new york teaching artist” is used searched for Google picks up in the term “teaching-artist” in the URL and also in the Title. The META description would be the third place to put the keyword associated with the specific web page. The order, from top to bottom, as it is seen in Google is Title, META, URL.

When using WordPress, the section entitled Permalinks, under Settings, is where you would go to edit your URL structure. There are five settings:

• Default: http://www.dennisbaker.net/?p=123
• Day and Name: http://www.dennisbaker.net/2010/01/01/sample-post/
• Month and Name: http://www.dennisbaker.net/2010/01/sample-post/
• Numeric: http://www.dennisbaker.net/archives/123
• Custom Structure: /%postname%/

These setting are based on the idea of using a blog. With WordPress being used more and more and a content management system, these settings are not the most ideal when optimizing your URL structure. The default setting, uses your designated post or page numbers as the URL and does not mention the title. The Day/Name or Month/Name can be good choices when using a blog as it automatically gives the reader the date the post was uploaded, but it can be hard for viewers to remember because of the numbers. The numeric option, like the default option, does not include the title. WordPress leaves the user the option to customize the URL structure. As seen above, if you include /%postname%/ then the only thing to appear after your domain name will be the title of your post/page. As seen in the above image, “http://www.dennisbaker.net/teaching-artist”.

To be able to edit the META section in WordPress, you need to download the All in One SEO plugin. Once you install it, at the bottom of post/page you will have the option to add the title, description (META) and keywords. I usually just copy/paste the title that I used as the top of the post/page. From there I write a once sentence description, including any important keywords that are in my title or post. Then I type a list of important keywords that are in the post/page. Do not get too spammy here and think you need to include all the keywords that relate to your whole website, just stick to the information that is on the specific post/page.