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Wordpress is a great platform.  We use the Yoast SEO plugin - among others.  We recently added  W3 total cache and integrated it with MaxCDN - site loads instantly.

not possible!

Now William, I hope you understand it was my effort to follow the question about 10 days before: Has anyone noticed how SLOOOOOW Q&A is or is it me...? (Rough approximation). Just felt like if I was going to point out the negative I had to point out the improvement. But, hey, now that its back to rocking, I'm smiling too!! Best

Yea, those inbound links will have helpful long term effects in general. To keep in mind though: large numbers of incoming links from the same website generally start to make each individual link less valuable as ranking signals watch out for unnatural anchor link distribution - e.g. don't use a lot of exact-match keyworded anchor text. Be sure to mix in lots of branded/site address anchor text. Otherwise the pattern will look unnatural to search engines and they'll devalue the links even more. review your overall site performance after 3 and 6 months to decide whether the additional links and referral traffic are more valuable than just keeping the articles for your own site and working to rank them there. Paul

34 tools to help you discover popular content ideas http://www.blueglass.com/blog/content-creation-toolbox/

Ann: I agree that paying for content is only one way of getting it. And I, too, am an advocate of guest blogging when done right. I also think it's unwise to post on your website "We pay for articles." You will get a lot of crap that wastes your time. Since I am a writer and editor,  I usually just write the article myself. If I am too busy to do so, I just commission the article myself with a single phone call to a writer I already know. I appreciate not everyone is in the same position.

FYI - looks like today Yoast pushed out an update, after updating the plugin to version 1.4.1 sitemaps on all of my sites are now correct

You're right about him referring to what is actually a subdirectory, Woody, but then you go and confuse him by calling blog.furnacefilterscanada.com a subdirectory too, when in fact that IS actually a subdomain. Oops! And as I mention in my other comment, what Jean wants to do is typically accomplished using a reverse proxy, so it is definitely do-able. Paul

Thanks Paul. I do agree with a lot of what you have said, however, interestingly enough we created a blog on a separate domain (not even sub-domain, but completely separate) for various reasons late last year - and it already has a PR of 2 (which surprised me). But we are going to go with the sub-directory

A good alternative plugin is All-In-One-SEO. That should take care of most the SEO issues with Wordpress.

Better Design I suggest upgrading the design of your blog so it's more custom. A sharp, custom design gives your blog a visual brand and helps you stand out. Also, make it more personal - use author bios, profile pictures, contact info, etc. Better Content For us little guys, having phenomenal content is of the utmost importance important. Since you don't have a large following, you need to publish content that is completely unique and/or significantly better than any other content available on the topic. Example: I publish an article on 301 redirects. If my article article doesn't present important new information, and it's not better than the articles on 301s already on SEOmoz, SEJ, etc - very few people will bother to read, share, or link to my article. Why should they? There is an equally good or better article on a blog they already know and trust. If you want to see significant success on social media, your content needs to be exceptional. Epic. Head and shoulders above the rest. Groundbreaking. Marketing To answer your question more directly, my suggestion for bloggers is to focus on social media and SEO.  Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Inbound.org can be great traffic sources for exceptional content.  If you want to do paid advertising, Outbrain can provide good traffic at 0.03 per click. Twitter ads can also be effective. I think that the design and content of your blog need to be improved before your marketing efforts will fully pay off, though. It's not that your blog is bad (it's not) but it's not yet exceptionally good. Hope that helps. (All criticism was offered with the friendliest, most constructive attitude possible!)

One of our Associates, Dan Shure, has written about this on our blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success. Hope this helps!

I just wanted to add my views. I don't think there is such a thing as 'Google Images'.  Google is returning a search result of images that exist on peoples websites, with links through to those websites.  The purpose of those images is to drive people to those sites they are attached to, not to take directly from Google. If your posts are along the lines of 'what to do in this city', you'd be better off approaching the people and asking if you can feature them on your site?  e.g. if one of the things you are suggesting is 'visit this theatre, or visit this restaurant, I'm sure the theatre and restaurant would be delighted to get a mention and willingly let you use their images.  You should link to their sites and they may well give you the benefit of linking back to you as you are featuring them as a 'good things to do when you are visiting x'. The bottom line is always ask permission.  Chances are, if you are giving credit to the photographer, or the owner of the images (i.e. the restaurant, theatre etc), they will be happy to let you use them as you are promoting them. You can get into some hot water by just taking them and it's not fair on the owner not to receive some credit for their work.

I agree with having some consistency with blog posts. It will allow your  to know when to come back and look for a post if it is there around the same time on a certain day or days of the week. I would consider having your various social media accounts post at a different time during the day that way you can touch people who may have forgot to check back at the blog. It will even help get new subscribers down the road.

the articles are not evergreen I have a "news" area on one of my sites.  Instead of making the huge investment in authorship, I simply link with a comment to articles on other sites.  This allows me to provide four, six, eight, ten items per day in just an hour.  Writing (at least for me) would take a very long time. If there is enough news in your niche and you can select the valuable stories then your site could become the "go to" location for people to keep up with the news.  In my opinion, the human aggregator with some commentary is better than the robots. If you do a good job and allow people to subscribe by RSS  and email you might build up an extensive list of industry subscribers.  Once you do that the stories will start coming to you instead of you hunting for them.

cheers thanks for this

These articles can hurt you in two ways. If you are republishing articles then this creates duplicate content on your site.  If you have enough duplicate content you can be flagged with Panda which will cause your site to drop very far in the results like you are seeing. If you are posting articles on these sites and linking back to yourself with your keyword as anchor text then this can invite Penguin.  Looking at your backlink profile, this is not your issue. I would stay far away from this type of site! The way to tell if you have been affected by Panda (which is the most likely explanation), is to look at your organic search traffic in Google analytics and see if you have a drop that coincides with a Panda refresh date.  If so, then get rid of the duplicate content and by the time the next Panda refresh happens you should recover. The refreshes tend to happen about once a month.  Some sites may take a couple of refreshes before they recover.

Ok here is my url goo.gl/Ai17f we have tons of products, some with long descriptions some with short. Categories have some content in them and we also have videos, brands, articles section and a blog. I m suffering from google's algo changes in 2012. We received a link penalty in sept 29th and since then have cleaned up our link portfolio got rid of thousands of links, used the disavow tool and working on new links. We are trying to get back on the right track here. I have fired everyone who worked on this site for the past 3 - 4 years. I m now trying to fix all the issue by myself. I would appreciate if you could guide me in the right direction with any advice. thank you

If it's a resource that you pride yourself in creating then yes.  Copyrighting this would only run you about $30 so it is always worth it in the long run.  It's always better to protect yourself.  Or at the very least, put the copyright symbol at the bottom like you mentioned, just to scare off anyone from ripping you off.