At the end of this story I talk about and review the new SEO Pressor version 5 WordPress plugin and how it can help make life so much easier, but first let me share a story about how my blogs have been going.  This is an honest and open reveal for me so please take the time to read it all as there are likely some useful gems of information you can takeaway from this for yourself.

A couple of years ago, I got my hands on this nifty plugin called SEO Pressor that basically took the guesswork out of on-page optimization (if you don’t know what that is yet, please leave a comment and I’ll get you up to speed on why it’s so important and how to do it properly).

This plugin drastically reduced the time it took me to create my blog posts.  You see, I learned how to do it manually from various courses I had taken but actually doing it was as tedious as pulling feathers off a chicken.  You miss a few here and there, and your roast just won’t taste right…

So anyway, some of the elements of on-site optimization include keyword use, meta tags, and even how you use external links and images.  One of the big things was actually counting all the times I used a keyword and dividing that by the total words in the post to come up with a ratio called keyword density.  This proved to be tedious and a waste of time, I soon learned.

You see, I’m a big believer in costing my time and then figuring out if the stuff I am doing can actually be done cheaper.  Well, this 15 minute process for each blog post, and article was costing me big time considering the amount of content I produce in a year.

So when I found this SEO Pressor plugin that basically looked over my shoulder and told me what I had to do to “fix” my content, it was a no-brainer to pay the 90 bucks or so for a license to cover all my sites (you can get a single site license for $47 but why bother).

All of a sudden I was coasting through my content publishing and even using my WordPress platform to export optimized articles to other sites like Ezinearticles and Traffic Geyser.  I was on fire!

Then in October, something funny happened.  My optimized sites dropped from Page 1 to the oblivions of page 4 and beyond.  Yikes!

After licking my wounds (of my bruised ego) and realizing that the steady flow of free leads and cash into my bank account was drying up like a shallow creek in the desert, I had to take action quickly.

I started doing some research and educating myself even more on the whims of Google, I soon learned that a couple things were missing from these sites:

1. Social signals – I hadn’t really spent much time getting my blogs shared and commented on social sites.  Google has now made this a factor in the search results based on the premise that if peeps are sharing stuff, it must be good and therefore deserves to be at the top spots.

2. Freshness – I have to admit that ranking in the top 10 results for most, if not all of my sites, based purely on on-site SEO, made me a bit lazy.  I became complacent and used to reaping the rewards of high-ranking sites.  I didn’t spend much time on off-site SEO and I didn’t make sure I kept adding new content – because I didn’t seem to have to.  I learned that was a BIG Mistake!

The result was Google decided some of these blogs were “old news” and pushed them down in favour of sites with new, fresh stuff and a constant stream of content.  This is why the wave of curated content is so popular these days – think Mashable and Huffington Post, for example.

So lesson learned here; even if you’re sitting at the top of rankings, don’t sit still because everyone else is still working to get there….I’ll talk more about curated content some other time because this is getting long…

Despite these weaknesses, my onsite optimization kept my sites at least somewhere find-able, but I had to make some changes.

Just so you know, when it comes to SEO and search engine results, a change you make today can take up to 3 months to have an impact.

Here are a few of the things I’ve done so far:

1. For some of my blogs I switched the regular blog commenting function in WordPress off in favor of the Facebook Comments plugin.  That way people can comment and share right into Facebook.  Social proof? check.  Shares? check.  Backlinks? check.  I only did it for some because of the effort involved and I want to test the results – I’m just weird like that.

2. I use video as much as I can.  For some reason, people share video more than text articles. I have no proof of this theory but YouTube is the number 2 search engine right now and that’s a good enough indicator for me.

3. I’ve done a few tweaks on my blogs to bring in live content feeds from other sites.  While this is not curated content per se, my belief is that it will count as the fresh stuff I was lacking before.

4. For off-page stuff, I started getting more backlinks to the sites linking in to my blogs.  I have no results to show for this yet as I started last week but I am looking forward to seeing if it makes an impact.  The logic is that if the sites referring to my blog have sites referring to them, they are given more authority in the eyes of Google and then by relation, my blog gets more authority…

Which brings me to the whole point of this story.  I didn’t realize this at the time but that little plugin I purchased a couple of years ago has lifetime updates.  The next update will include an automatic check of social signals and recommend action to improve it.

—– SEO Pressor Review —–

The SEOPressor plugin will also create links between all your related content and make suggestions for related keywords so your content is richer and findable for more search terms.

It will also be compatible with that Rich Text that people use on their blogs that makes them appealing on the Google search results pages.  You’ve seen those sites that have stars and stuff that draw your eye….

Also, SEO Pressor have added an OVER-Optimization check that warns you if you are over doing it with your use of keywords.  You know this is not good and most people call it keyword stuffing or playing the system. (like if I wrote SEO Pressor review in every paragraph…annoying!)

Basically, the key is to make your content a pleasure to read and not over do it.  But having the automatic checks and suggestions just makes it that much easier to make it just right – like mother bear’s porridge in the Goldilocks story.

Anyway, I really think that if you are blogging, this is SEO Pressor WP Plugin is really worth the investment.  Go check out their very informative page and get it right away and you are set!

Here’s the link to the plugin site : Seopressor