Wordpress SEO No Improvements

Hey all! First post here but I've been lurking for a while now. I've read the guides here as well as other places and have been involved in website creation for a long time now; however, those were for much more static sites as opposed to the one I'm about to talk about.

Quick background, a few years ago a friend and I co-founded moviebuzzers.com. We grew organically, no advertising to 30k-40k unique visitors a month, but our traffic has leveled off. To combat that I've installed a SEO plugin called Wordpress SEO, it was highly regarded by many websites and seemed to do a nice job. That was almost a year ago. We had a little growth but nowhere near where it used to be. I'm talking maybe 100 more hits a month if that.

We have a ton of unique original content which should help us out in ranking but it doesn't seem to be doing as much as I thought it should.

If anyone has any thoughts as to what we can do to increase our visibility I would greatly appreciate any comments or criticism. Thank you!

Hi and welcome

First of all, I think there is a misconception that SEO plugins are the solution to getting more SE traffic. While they are good for making sure you are doing the basics (have a sitemap, submit posts, etc.) they are not going to have a significant impact on traffic on their own. The rest is up to you. SEO today is more about the QUALITY of relevant links that point to your site, content, your online social profile (who is sharing your content and how often is it share, etc.).

That is why guest posting became increasingly popular in 2012. People now are seeking links from quality blogs and sites because they know Google values those kinds of links more.

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Originally Posted by lisa

Hi and welcome

First of all, I think there is a misconception that SEO plugins are the solution to getting more SE traffic. While they are good for making sure you are doing the basics (have a sitemap, submit posts, etc.) they are not going to have a significant impact on traffic on their own. The rest is up to you. SEO today is more about the QUALITY of relevant links that point to your site, content, your online social profile (who is sharing your content and how often is it share, etc.).

That is why guest posting became increasingly popular in 2012. People now are seeking links from quality blogs and sites because they know Google values those kinds of links more.

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I agree I don't think plugins are the be all end all. I've done a lot of manually tweaking on my own. We also do have quality sites linking to us. Granted we could always have more but like I mentioned our growth is slowing down and I don't have any other ideas of what we can do to keep it moving.

We've advertised on facebook with free credit we've gotten and all we've gotten is more visits to our fan page and likes, but that hasn't translated to traffic to our actual website.

I think I want to do a video about the FB promote feature. One thing I think people should do is set a larger goal than just getting FB fans. Unless you know how much a FB fan is worth to your business, it's hard to know how much you should be spending and track your ROI.

Let's say you've done your research and you know that every 100 new fans results in 40 new email subscribers and you are profiting from your list then it makes sense to spend money on Promote Your Post. But I'm not a fan of just promoting a post and measuring the success by # of likes. I've never used it but, if I did, I would setup a specific landing page/offer and target to an audience and track the specific action like "number of new email subscribers, downloads, etc."