It’s generally accepted by users that Wordpress blogs produce highly effective websites that through dynamic page content can be used very effectively to enter niches in search engine results. But how and why are these scripts and the related plugins such an effective platform? This article deals with the technical points on why Wordpress is so effective and how you can apply a simple yet proven format to take over your own search engine niche market.
Wordpress is a one click installation of uniform PHP script that forms a platform on which users can then select an attractive website look or ‘Theme,’ that influences what the visitor sees. It is therefore a template, that allows anyone with some basic HTML and PHP code knowledge to adjust the visual look of the pages and their navigation to suit the site designer’s own tastes.
In order to focus on a particular market however, you must first consider the importance of the choice of domain name and hosting location. In this example we have a client with a golfing holiday apartment in Southern Spain. After there research in to keyword strategy, the principle target on search engines for the web site will be the branded golf resort ‘Roda Golf’. The regional market that is considered will produce the most sales is the UK marketplace. The first step therefore is to register a domain, in this case www.rodagolfstaynplay.com and pick a hosting provider in the UK who offer resources that meet the requirements of Wordpress installation.

Installing the script

The next step is to download and install Wordpress according to the instructions found in many other articles. Many hosts now offer a one click operation from the control panel. There is no difference in the end result, so it may be easier and quicker for the novice to contact a hosting supplier with this option available as standard.
Once installed, we will need a theme or template to control the visitors’ side appearance of the script. These themes can be found on many template directories by searching Google. We have chosen a theme called Demar by webdemar as it has adaptable navigation and the page layout allows for the substitution of a full page header at the top. The new theme is uploaded to the server in the /wp-content/themes directory, then applied by logging in to the admin area of Wordpress and in the design, selecting the new theme.
We will not deal with the adaptation of the look of the theme in this article since it is not important when targeting search engine placement.

Adding the Tools

The next stage is the installation of the necessary plugins what assist in the site optimisation for search results. Plugins, after being downloaded and unzipped, are uploaded and activated similar to new themes except we instead upload to the directory /wp-content/plugins. Here is the list of the plugins we will apply to this site:

• All in One SEO pack
• Google Analytics for Wordpress
• Google Sitemap Generator
• Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin

All in One SEO Pack

This tool allows for a high level of manipulation of the search engine site title, site metatags and the addition of personalised page/post tiles and metatags. All an essential part of a well optimised page.

Google Analytics for Wordpress

Whilst not essential for high search engine placement, this tool is being applied in order to monitor the success of the campaign to capture key phrase results, once the site has reached its top result. The range of keywords used by visitors arriving on the site will then be clear and can then be analysed to measure the effectiveness of placement against sales.

Google Sitemap Generator

This tool is essential for Google to index dynamic websites and hence rank well. It creates not only a dynamic XML sitemap it also pings, or notifies Google when new content has been added to the site, calling the search engine spider back to index. The result therefore of daily posts can often be a daily indexing of your web sites new content. An advantage many PHP developers and SEO’s would be happy to have on their domains.

Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin

This plugin creates a feed of your sites pages and posts and allows you to add that feed easily to a network of other feeds on Social and Blog Network sites. Yahoo Explorer uses these feeds and the resulting increase in real visitors has the effect of improving search engine visitor satisfaction, holds visitors on the site longer and contributes to high search engine rank.

Filling the site with content

Now we can start to add content and structure to the blog in order to form a theme or group of themes, often call the SILO effect , the buzzword SILO is applied to the fact that although a farm may keep many different types of grain on a farm, the Silos NEVER hold more than one type of grain in each. So our new site must have 2 or 3 areas of the site which contain different themed content, but we will not mix the content between area in order to allow both search engines and visitors to clearly navigate a storage area that they are interested in. We will use the Categories area of Wordpress to control this.
To mirror the master site www.spanishgolfstaynplay.com I will next create new pages that form the navigation on the header. Each new page will be optimised using ‘All in One SEO’ on the following guidelines:

• Page title and SEO page title where possible will include a target set of keywords, be no longer than 6 words in total and be written so as to be likely to attract clicks when visitors find them on a target search engine results page. Why? Because this element of the content is what the Search Engine displays as the first line of the 10 search results on the results page.
• Keyword Description. This is a sentence or group of phrases, loaded with the target keywords yet written well enough to encourage click-through. This is normally the second row of the search engine result. This field should ideally be 160 characters long because that is the length of the field displayed on Google.
• Meta Keywords is the last editable field. Lately the industry tends not to put much emphasis on the page metatags, but this SEO is of firm opinion that different and themed keyword metatags on individual pages enhance the indexing and hence placement. You should target between 4 and 5 comma separated words in this field.

That is the basic structure of the site prepared. Now we can look at the SILO structure using categories. www.rodagolfstaynplay.com offers the opportunity to form 3 individual themes. The first is RODA GOLF, in which we can add content about the background, features and characteristics of the Golf resort. The second is the LOCATION of the Roda Golf resort. Since the aim of the site is to encourage visitors to the resorts accommodation through the site, one of the most important factors is likely to be location. Lastly the main original selling point of the site is the opportunity to stay and play golf on a pre-packaged basis. We will therefore use the last category to talk about GOLF. There are facilities to display unlimited categories on Wordpress but we do not want to spread the content too thinly, the result would be a weak SILO structure and therefore be disadvantageous for SERP’s (Search Engine Results Position).
The sidebar is the area of a Wordpress blog where dynamic menus, links and widget tools are displayed on all pages of the site. Using the Widget area of the Wordpress design we can add a text box to the sidebar. This can be filled with keyword content and headed ‘About Us’ to add a friendly hint to arriving visitors. The Categories widget can also be added below the text box and the title changed to sound less blog like. We will use ‘More About’ as an invitation to click.
Now we can start to construct posts for our site. We will apply exactly the same principle to posts as we applied to new pages, using the ‘All in One SEO’ feature to focus the titles and keyword descriptions to exactly match out target keywords.
There, that is the first part of our campaign finished. The site is complete pending additions. If you had the foresight to prepare some original content in a file before you created the blog, the whole operation up to now may have taken less time that a 9-hole round of Golf from start to finish.
See part 2 of this insight in to search marketing next week, when I talk about propagating your site articles around social network sites and link building forums in order to guarantee fast Google indexing and produce the niche SERP’s that we are aiming for.