Organic Traffic: Web traffic which comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories is commonly known as “organic” traffic.

When I started, only 4% of my web traffic was organic and now it’s up to 45%.  People are actually finding my content in searches. Yay!

Considering how little work I’ve actually done to see these initial results, it’s pretty exciting.

I’d like to share the 4 WordPress plugins that I rely on to make this possible.

1. SEO Title Tag *UPDATE: Not compatible with WP 2.7*

Use the SEO Title Tag plugin to hand craft titles for blog posts that appear in the <title> of your page.  If you read the post Easy SEO ips and tricks for blogger from Stephan Spencer at WordCamp 2008 it explains how absolutely invaluable this is.

2. All in One SEO Pack

I use the All-in-One SEO Pack to make sure my category, tag and author pages have great SEO titles and meta data.  Changing WP themes can change the way your titles are shown in the code, so using this plugin is a great way  to keep titles consistent regardless of themes.  Use it to add unique meta data (keywords, description) to EACH blog post. This also makes your search listings come up with a great recap underneath them.

** Note: I don’t use this plugin to format my title tags because I like to handcraft each post’s title using the SEO Title tag plugin above, but this is not yet compatible with WP 2.7 so this is a great alternative!

3. Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator makes it insanely easy to add your Analytics tracking code and not have to worry about hand coding it into whichever WP theme you are currently using.

4. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

Google Sitemaps Generator creates XML sitemaps from your site structure. You can customize how the priority of pages occur (for example, give higher priority to the most commented posts).  I just used this with its default settings right out of the box.  Make sure to evaluate your sitemaps at Google Webmaster Tools.  It also submits your changes to yahoo, msn and ask.com.

Face-to-face service can make all the difference in how your brand is perceived by your customer. You might have the greatest offering in the world, but one bad experience with a cranking customer service rep can change that customer’s opinion in a heartbeat. In this age of new media, one bad experience can be a big deal for your brand. Information spreads like wildfire on the web.

Service industries (restaurants, photographers, doctors etc) check Yelp.com and see what people are saying for you. If you are in a smaller city, without Yelp, then monitor local forums for ratings on your service.

A poor rating on Yelp isn’t the end of the world. Use it as valuable incite as to what you can improve. I’ve seen tons of companies on Yelp respond to a customer who gave them a bad review to apologize and ask what they could do to fix it.  Nine times out of ten, the unhappy reviewer returns to update their rating and explain how awesome it was that they were heard and what was done to make it better.

Companies and techies make sure that you are on Satisfaction – People Powered Customer Service.  Make sure you are listening to what your customers want from your product. Encourage feedback and open dialogue and encourage your employees to interact with the people who use your product.  If your users are techies and bloggers they can have a huge impact on how you are perceived by the blogoshpere and the technophile masses.

2. Monitor how users tag and keyword you outside of your own site.

One of the beauties of tagging and social media is how easy it is to see the tags and categories that your customers give your content.  I recently read a post by Jeremiah Owyang called Use Delicious to uncover your brand (and improve your SEO). He explains how to use delicious to see how people have saved your posts and pages.  He shows how sometimes we, as bloggers or content authors, categorize our post in the way that we feel is appropriate for the user… or maybe, in some cases, the way we want to “spin it”.  But using delicious, the truth and appropriateness of our own tags can easily be compared with how your users actually tag it.

This can also be extremely valuable keyword research for SEO and figuring out a more organized user friendly information architecture for your own website.

3. Monitor all of the web’s channels.

Monitoring your brand on the “web” is no longer a simple as maintaining your corporate website. In fact it’s more important to manage your brand on OTHER people’s websites.

There are so many different channels that make an impact on your overall online presence. This graphic called People Streams from Elliance SEO Services is a great illustration of the many ways people can find you online and thus can influence by your brand’s rep.

The technologies in this graphic will constantly evolve (for example, the channel of Microblogging like Twitter isn’t on this graphic).  However, the principle is still the same: Go where the people are talking.

(Read the book Groundswell for more info on how to keep up with the technology curve.

Do this for each channel:

• Investigate if your brand is already being talked about in the channel by
  • Searching comments and tags for your brand name and your URL
  • Monitor referring links in your web stats
• Determine if it’s a viable channel for you to be involved in regularly by researching the demographic most involved in that channel. PS. If people are already on there talking about you, posting about you and commenting about you, then that’s a pretty big hint that you should be there too.
• Come up with a plan for measuring each channel on a regular basis. Try to increase communication through a particular channel and monitor the results.

Remove the barrier between your employees and your clients – the barrier being “the company”.

Let conversations happen between real people. Stop with the rhetoric and the protocol and let employees take ownership of their relationships with clients.  You’ll be surprised how much creativity can occur with a few small changes.

A few ideas:

• Get Basecamp and use it freely with every client. Don’t edit anything. Don’t hide stuff. Be transparent.
• Don’t monitor employee email or employee IM.
• Empower your employees with decision making power. If that means giving them a budget to work with do it! Stop stifling creativity by making yourself the go-to decision maker on everything.
• Reward your employees for having conversations with clients.  Make it OK for an employee to take a client’s side on an issue.
• Encourage your employees to criticize your internal processes – how else will you grow and change?
• Put your product(s) or your company on GetSatisfaction.com and get your employees in there joining the conversation. This gives everyone a name and a face and really shows you care.

Well hopefully you were able to nab their baseline web stats. But even if you didn’t, all is not lost. Use this handy checklist to cover all your bases. I suggest you keep an excel sheet for each site you operate so you can add new items to the list as new services come available.

Enjoy! (Get the Analytics ready checklist in spreadsheet format now!)

• Run websitegrader.com on the current (yucky) site to get a base grade. Write it down
• Upload everything to the live server.
• Point DNS to the live server
• Insert a permanent 301 redirect for all domains (this is important for web stats – read here)
• Create a Google Analytics account for the client with your gmail address but add your client as a user
• Place Google Analytics tracking code into the live site.
• In Google Analytics, add IP filters for your computer(s) and your clients.
• Submit the URL to Google.
• Submit to DMOZ.
• Submit the URL to Yahoo.
• Add the site to Yahoo Site Explore.
• Place the Yahoo verification tag into the home page
• Add new site to your Google Webmaster profile
• Place the Google Webmaster verification meta tag into the home page
• Upload robots.txt file to block paths to any admin directories or areas you don’t want spidered
• Tell Google Webmaster where the sitemap.xml file is
• Generate an initial Web Grade on your live site using websitegrader.com
• Fix obvious issues if they exist (missing alt values etc)