I am a part of the Minneapolis-St. Paul WordPress User Group, which is a Meetup group that meets once a month in Bloomington, MN. At the January 2014 Meetup they talked about WordPress and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It was a joint effort from the Minneapolis-St. Paul WordPress User Group and the Minnesota Network of SEO’s. It was a very informative night with Adam Dince and Dan Schendel from the SEO group sharing and then fielding questions about Search Engine Optimization.

Time and time again when I listen to presentations on SEO and how to approach it and implement it correctly, it always comes back to the same thing: write awesome content. It is amazing how many people may try to “beat” the system, but Google is getting smarter and the “beaters” quickly become the losers. So the bottom line is stop trying to beat the system. If you want your website to perform well in the search engines, you start by writing great, authentic content. Here is a summary of some of the key points that Adam made regarding content:

• Do not start by picking a few keywords and then writing content around them. This will result in content that is empty and will perform weak in the search engine results. It is odd, but even though it is a search engine, Google can tell if your content is weak.
• Write from your heart. Write about things you are passionate about. Make it real. People (and Google) can tell if your content is halfhearted, devoid of feeling, and written by a robot, and they will quickly move away from your website. If you are writing content that you are excited about, people will simply want to read more. It’s just like the belief that, “You just can’t put down a good book!” If your content is good, people stay. If it is not, they leave.
• Once you are done writing your heartfelt content, then you can enhance it with your keywords that people will use to find it. However, don’t saturate the page with keywords; simply just add a few potent keywords to give the content the “umph” it needs to been seen in search engine results.

If you don’t follow these initial keys, then everything else is a waste of time. Eventually, Google will determine that your content is weak or you are keyword stuffing and penalize your website, which will move you further down in the rankings.

As you continue to write good, authentic content, Google will start to see that you are a real person and that you care about quality. They will start to attribute more value to your content and to you as an author. Once this happens you will start to see your website performing better in search results. Be patient though. It takes some time (around 4-6 weeks), but you will see results.

Cheers to awesome content!

-the GEEK