WordPress SEO Archives - Bourn Creative

Why Keywords Still Matter In SEO

August 8, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

You may have heard that while the keyword meta tag used to be super effective and highly regarded, nowadays pretty much all search engines don’t even give the keyword meta tag another thought! A lot of websites, even some top authority sites don’t even bother to use the meta keywords tag anymore for this exact reason.

But why did it come to this? Why has the keyword meta tag lost its luster?

Because of keyword abuse (also known as keyword spam). Website owners were stuffing keywords into this meta tag like crazy, sometimes even repeating the same ones over and over, thinking that it would make the page more relevant for that specific keyword.

Many sites even stuffed keywords into the web page keyword meta tag that didn’t have anything to do with the actual page content. It got out of control and soon the keyword meta tag was no longer a viable way to assess what a web page or blog post was really about.

Writing an Effective Meta Description

July 11, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

Believe it or not, now you almost have all the basics of natural, organic search engine optimization at your fingertips! I’ve covered how to optimize content, optimize images, and optimize links. We’ve explained what HTML page titles and meta descriptions are, and how to use page titles for SEO — and today, I’m covering how to use meta descriptions for SEO.

Writing a simple, effective, compelling meta description is no harder than writing a simple, compelling, effective sentence or call to action. In fact, your meta description, at the most basic level, is a just short summary of what your web page or blog post is about.

Like your HTML page title, your meta description is very important in attracting new visitors to your website from organic search. Often, but not always, the description shown by the search engines for your web page or blog post is the HTML meta description you write.

What Is An HTML Page Title And Meta Description?

July 8, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

Now that you know how to optimize your content, optimize images, and optimize links, it’s time to tackle your HTML page titles and HTML meta descriptions — two often forgotten, but powerful tools for optimizing your web pages and blog posts.

To get started, let’s take a look at what a page title and meta description look like in HTML:

Writing an Effective HTML Page Title

July 3, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

Yesterday I shared with you the importance of your page titles and meta descriptions and showed you some of the ways they are used. Today we’re going to focus on page titles and get into the nitty-gritty that makes them so powerful.

Creating powerful, client-attracting titles for each of your pages and posts is a low effort, high-impact search engine optimization strategy — as long as you use them the right way — and not a spammy way.

How to Optimize Images For SEO

June 20, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

In my last post, I shared what you should and should not do when it comes to optimizing website content. Today let’s focus on how to optimize website images and photos — it’s actually pretty simple.

At Bourn Creative, we highly recommend that you leverage every free and simple way to boost your website’s SEO and the chances your website has to show up in the search engine page listings when someone is searching for your target keywords and key phrases. One part of that is learning to optimize images for web.

Look at these two images — while they look exactly the same, only one of the images is optimized for search engine optimization.

What Is Organic Search Engine Optimization / SEO

June 13, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

The goal of pretty much every website owner I know is to be ranked number one on Google for their preferred keywords and key phrases — but to someday, possibly claim that number one spot, you’ve got a lot of work to do. You’ve got to maintain the site, update it with new, valuable, and relevant content, market the site, and optimize it.

There are three basic components to a well-optimized website:

Search engine friendly, user friendly, smart design
Compelling content that gets visitors to take action
Optimization to maximize your website’s effectiveness

At Bourn Creative, we’ve got you covered with drool-worthy search engine friendly design, and hopefully our blog has helped and provided resources to create compelling content. Now it’s time to optimize your website and all the content in it.

Genesis SEO Settings Guide

March 13, 2013 Brian Bourn

At Bourn Creative, we build our custom designed WordPress websites exclusively on the Genesis Framework by StudioPress. The reasons behind our choice to develop our custom themes on the Genesis Framework are numerous, but a few we often highlight are that the Genesis Framework is very flexible/customizable, coded extremely well, and has been built with SEO as a priority (SEO — the art and science of being found online through organic search).

After all, a beautifully designed website means nothing if consumers and search engines can’t find you.

Genesis already has most SEO requirements built into the framework. As a result, a separate WordPress SEO plugin isn’t necessary, which means one less plugin to manage, and keep updated.

Adding Google Authorship To Your WordPress Site

March 1, 2013 Jennifer Bourn

Facial recognition is a powerful marketing tool and authors, business owners, and bloggers alike are taking advantage of it. When searching Google, you have more than likely noticed that photos are now appearing next to some of the listed search results on the search engine results pages — and you may have even been influenced by those photos when deciding which link to click.

Getting YOUR Photo to Show Up

Adding your photo to Google’s search results can easily be accomplished in a few different ways with a WordPress site. In fact, the process is nearly identical using three of our favorite WordPress tools:

5 Must Have WordPress Plugins We Use On Every Site

February 22, 2013 Brian Bourn

At Bourn Creative we have a stable of various paid and free WordPress plugins that we regularly use on our clients’ sites, depending on needed website functionality. Out of our collection of trusted WordPress plugins, there are five must have plugins that we use on pretty much every custom WordPress site we build — and this past week I shared these five plugins in a lighting talk I gave at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup.

WordPress Plugin #1: Akismet

Why We Recommend the Akismet WordPress Plugin:

Created, managed, and owned by Automattic
Save time with simple comment spam protection
Low monthly fee (still free for personal bloggers)
Download Akismet