To me SEO has always seemed to follow the FUD Marketing strategy. If you are not familiar with FUDs, it means Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt. As long as there has been Search Engines there have been SEO experts that pretty much use FUD to sell their services.

Optimizing your blog or web site for search engines is not that hard and I am going to use this project to prove it. I am starting a new WordPress Theme and my intention is to let you help me. To begin with, I created an empty WordPress theme. Secondly, I placed that theme in it’s own subdomain at http://theme1.cybercoded.net . I updated that theme to include a sidebar and some plugins. From there, I placed the new copy into another subdomain at http://theme2.cybercoded.net.

The next step was to use that WordPress theme on the main domain for this test at http://www.cybercoded.net I have owned this domain since 2001 and I have used it for different things. A matter of fact, it still has some pages in the Google Index. These pages should drop quickly as they are all going to redirect to a 404 Error page.

Now let’s have some fun. I am not sure how this will work, but I would like to let my readers help me with this endeavor and in exchange you will get credit on the WordPress Theme and a copy of whatever version you want as it develops.

Think of it has the first Publicly Created WordPress Theme.

I spoke with Garry Conn this morning and he thought this idea was pretty cool,

“David, I think modern WordPress themes tend to get very over complicated. Quite a few look super hot, but are a complete nightmare for me to decode… imagine the effects that has on the Googlebot! I think this is a great way to get back to the basics of building pages that are friendly for not only search engines, but most importantly humans. I am going to have fun downloading my code and play with the styling aspect.”, says Garry Conn

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I have 2 clear examples of writing a post that was influenced by my own circumstances and imagination that were rewarded in the SERPS.

• The first was written 2 months ago and included a video. I was just trying to relay my thought on how we each respond to making mistakes and that we need to be open minded while taking responsibility for our own actions. This post is ranked # 2 on Google for open minded vlogging and # 14 for the term open minded blogging. The title was “Making mistakes and being open minded“. And yes I gave some thought to the SEO in the post, but, I was still surprised to see people coming to my site for the above mentioned terms.



• The second post was ” WordPress XML Parsing Error” and landed pretty good for several terms including, WordPress error, WordPress XML Error, and WordPress Parsing error. The post was basically a log of troubleshooting an error I was having with WordPress. Yes I did a little SEO on the post, but the results once again were above my expectations.

As a side note, the only reason I knew of these results is because I evaluate my analytics to get a better understanding of how people find and use my sites. This work is probably one of the keys to my success, as I know it is not my pure writing skills.

The moral of the story…..

Be natural, be organic.

It is good to do the SEO work, but do not JUST let the SEO drive the Content.

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