People ask me all the time for recommendations on premium WordPress plugins, and I often have nothing to say. With people like Chris Pearson, Sean Jackson, and Tony Clark as partners, if we want WordPress to do something it doesn’t, we build it.

Many times the things we build for ourselves end up becoming products and services for you, like Thesis, Scribe and the upcoming Premise. If we have a need for it, we figure odds are you do, too.

Luckily, the premium WordPress market has matured to the point that excellent developers are building things we happily buy rather than build. Gravity Forms from Carl Hancock of Rocket Genius is one such product, and that’s why I’m doing my first ever WordPress plugin review for you – I’m that impressed.

What is Gravity Forms?

In their own words:

Gravity Forms for WordPress is a full featured contact form plugin that features a drag and drop interface, advanced notification routing, lead capture, conditional logic fields and the ability to create posts from external forms.

Got that? How about once more in English?

Basically, Gravity Forms is software that makes WordPress way better by allowing you to empower people to send you any sort of information, and even publish directly on your site in certain circumstances. The plugin adds a “Forms” section to the left sidebar of your WordPress admin area, from which you can quickly access the multitude of things Gravity Forms allows you to do.

Let’s look at four of those things:

Contact and Support Forms

The most basic use of Gravity Forms is your general contact form, which just about every WordPress site has or needs. Whatever the reason people need to get in touch, Gravity Forms makes it easy.

But it’s the versatility of what you can do in terms of contact and support forms that makes even this seemingly mundane use of forms exciting. You can create any variety of form, collect any array of data, allow for file uploads, set up notifications to route to different email addresses based on rules you define, and place the form on any page or post at the click of a new button that shows in your posting interface.

So think about it. Instead of a lead generation call to action that requires the click of a link to reach a form (2 steps), you place the form itself at the bottom of the post. Conversions go up when the number of steps go down.

Plus you can include hidden fields that transmit data like IP address, use conditional form fields that appear only if the preceding responses are a certain value, dynamic pre-population of form fields, and lots of other stuff that opens a world of possibilities beyond the boring old contact form.

Surveys and Polling

That versatility goes way beyond contact and support forms. Gravity Forms allows you to quickly build surveys and reader polls with open-ended text fields, drop down menus, checkboxes, numerical fields, and multiple-choice questions.

You can create lengthy reader survey forms in minutes that provide feedback on a regular basis. Even cooler is simply popping in a quick multiple-choice poll at the bottom of your post for instant data in a format that in many cases will be more useful than free form blog comments.

And don’t forget the conditional form fields. If someone chooses a certain option from a drop down or multiple-choice question, you can then ask follow-up questions based only on that response. Pretty cool functionality that you usually have to buy separate survey software to get.

Guest Post Submission

Guest posting is one of the best methods of building quality back links for bloggers and other content creators. The win for the publisher, of course, is additional quality content from other sources, but it can become a management pain to keep up with the submitted content, much less format it and post it.

With Gravity Forms, you can create a guest post submission page that allows regular and prospective guest writers to “post” outside of your WordPress admin area. You create a form that contains all the regular post fields (title, image, body, excerpt, category… you can allow all or just the areas you want), and the content submission becomes a draft post inside WordPress.

You get instant guest content organization while also reducing the normal workload that accepting guest posts involves. For many busy bloggers, this feature is worth the price of admission alone.

User-Generated Content

Okay, here’s where things get really interesting. Using the exact same functions that allow you to accept guest posts, you can allow user-generated content on your site that goes way beyond comments. Or you can build a review, Q&A, or wiki-style site using nothing more than WordPress.

This is an amazing site-building breakthrough in my opinion. For example, using Thesis and Gravity Forms, you could build a local restaurant review website without writing a single line of code. The layout of the site and the user posting mechanism would all be built point-and-click, drag-and-drop from inside your WordPress interface.

Time to kick your imagination into high gear. And Gravity Forms allows you to do much more than what I’ve highlighted in this review.

Lifetime Support and 25% Off

I bought Gravity Forms with my own money for my own personal use, with no intention of promoting it. As soon as I understood how powerful it was, however, I asked Carl Hancock if Copyblogger could become a marketing partner.

Carl said sure, but he also told me that they were changing their support offer as of April 1, 2010. The original deal was Gravity Forms came with lifetime support at no extra charge, but they were changing to an offer that limited the initial support period to a year, beyond which you’d have to pay more to continue to get support.

I asked Carl if he would consider extending the deadline to May 1st so I could get you all in on the better deal. Carl again said sure. Then because I’m a slacker busy person, I missed the May 1 deadline too… and had to plead for another extension.

Carl not only said sure once again, he threw in a 25% discount for Copyblogger readers who use a special promo code.

So here’s what you do:

1. Go to the Gravity Forms website and explore all the features and details.
2. Select the plan that’s right for you – the 1-site, 5-site, or Developer option.
3. Use the promo code LIFETIME when you check out.
4. Get this done before May 8, 2010, or the deal goes bye bye.
5. Do a happy dance.

Seriously, I think you’ll get a lot of value out of Gravity Forms.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and wants you to know that Thesis + Scribe = SEO Made Simple. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

When I first started Copyblogger in 2006, I was almost militantly against on-page search optimization. Seems strange, since I’d been a successful student of SEO since 2000.

It was because I saw all these people fretting over keywords like it’s 1999, and yet they had no links. Their content was weak. Their sites weren’t trusted.

You can’t optimize something that’s dead in the water. So my initial goal was to get people to focus on content that attracted attention and links first. Only then do you have something you can make better (that’s what optimize means, naturally).

Fours years later, it seems things have swung in the opposite direction for some. Social media “experts” maintain that SEO doesn’t matter because search traffic just “happens.”

Yes, search traffic “happens” if you produce unique content and don’t make it impossible to find. But the “right” search traffic doesn’t just happen, not unless you’re lucky (which simply means you don’t know what you’re doing).

This article is designed to help you know how to tell search engines what you’re talking about is the same as what people are looking for. That’s all SEO really is.

And yet . . .

I feel compelled to quickly discuss the things you need to focus on first. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz gives us a quick list of the stuff that must come prior to on-page optimization, so I’ll repeat those here with my own commentary:

Accessibility – If search engines can’t see your content within the code, your page can’t be indexed and ranked. This is why Chris Pearson created the Thesis Theme for WordPress, and why he obsesses over making it better. Code matters.

Content – Now that the code structure is right, we come to what people actually want. Create great content and the people, sharing, and links will follow. And then you hit the bonus round: Google gives you even more goodness.

User Experience – The easier your site makes it to consume and share your content, the better you’ll end up doing SEO-wise. People don’t consume or share content that creates barriers, sometimes even if only a little.

Marketing – To paraphrase Rand on this one, spreading the word is often more important than being right, being honest, or being valuable. I like to say promoting your content is a virtuous necessity. Whatever works for you, but do get the word out.

Okay, now let’s move on to the five areas to focus on with your web page, blog post, online press release, whatever . . . they’re all the same in the eyes of Google.

Five SEO copywriting elements that matter

Before we get into this, let me share a few strategic considerations.

When I’m building an authority site, I don’t care about optimizing everything I write. I use a lot of metaphors and pop culture references instead of keywords to get people reading and linking to build the overall trust of the domain. Then when I want to rank well for something, like copywriting, or seo copywriting, or landing pages, my job is much easier.

If you’re a news blogger (or newspaper), things are different. You want to optimize everything as best as possible up front, then move on. Different strokes for different folks.

That said, here we go.

1. Title

Whether you optimize up-front or later, you at minimum need to know what keywords you’re targeting and include them in the title of your content. It’s generally accepted that the closer to the front of the title your keywords are, the better. But the key is that they appear in the title somewhere.

You’ll notice that the title of this post contains the keyword phrase “SEO copywriting,” but it’s positioned at the end of the title. That’s because I go with the more compelling headline first and foremost. But I can serve an alternate title in the title tag (which is the snippet of code Google actually pulls the title from) thanks to a post feature in Thesis (also available with the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress).

So, I can always enter a more search-optimized alternate title later, such as:

SEO Copywriting: The 5 Essential Elements

The emphasis on keywords in the title makes practical sense from a search engine standpoint. When people search for something, they’re going to want to see the language they used reflected back at them in the results. Nothing mysterious about that.

Having keywords in your title is also important when people link to you. When your keywords are there, people are more likely to link to you with the keywords in the anchor text. This is an important factor for Google to determine that a particular page is in fact about a particular subject.

You should try to keep the length of your title under 72 characters for search purposes. This will ensure the full title is visible in a search result, increasing the likelihood of a click-through.

2. Meta Description

SEO copywriting is not just about ranking. It’s also about the presentation of your content in a search engine. The meta description of your content will generally be the “snippet” copy for the search result below the title, which influences whether or not you get the click.

It’s debatable whether keywords in your meta description influence rank, but it doesn’t matter if they do or don’t. You want to lead off your meta description with the keyword phrase and succinctly summarize the page as a reassurance to the searcher that your content will satisfy what they’re looking for.

Try to keep the meta description under 165 characters so the full description is visible in the search result. Again, you can create a meta description in WordPress right in the posting area with Thesis or All in One SEO.

3. Content

Unique and frequently updated content makes search engines happy. But you know that part. For search optimization purposes (and just general reader-friendliness) your content should be tightly on-topic and centered on the subject matter of the desired keyword phrases.

It’s generally accepted that very brief content may have a harder time ranking over a page with more substantial content. So you’ll want to have a content body length of at least 300 words.

It might also help to bold the first occurrence of a keyword phrase, or include it in a bulleted list, but I usually don’t get hung up on that. It’s also debatable whether including keywords in subheads helps with ranking, but again, it doesn’t matter – subheads are simply a smart and natural place to include your keyword phrase, since that’s what the page is about.

Which brings us to . . .

4. Keyword Frequency

Keyword frequency is the number of times your targeted keywords appear on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of those keywords to the rest of the words on the page.

It’s generally accepted that keyword frequency impacts ranking (and that makes logical sense). Keyword density, as some sort of “golden” ratio, likely does not. But the only way to make sense of an appropriate frequency is via the ratio of those keywords to the rest of the content, so density is still a metric you need.

In other words, the only way to tell if your repetition of keywords is super or spammy is to measure that frequency against the overall length of the content. A keyword density greater than 5.5% could find you guilty of keyword stuffing, and your page could be penalized by Google.

You don’t need to mindlessly repeat keywords to optimize. In fact, if you do, you’re likely to achieve the opposite result.

5. Page Links

Linking is the fundamental basis of the web. Search engines want to know you’re sufficiently “connected” with other pages and content, so linking out to other pages matters when it comes to search engine optimization.

Here are some “rules of thumb” for linking based on generally accepted best practices:

• Link to relevant content fairly early in the body copy
• Link to relevant pages approximately every 120 words of content
• Link to relevant interior pages of your site or other sites
• Link with naturally relevant anchor text

Again, these are guidelines related to current best practices. Don’t get hung up on rules; focus on the intent behind what search engines are looking for – quality search results for people.

Yes, there’s other stuff . . .

There are other elements as well, such as URL structure and keywords, keywords in image alt files, tags and categories, and various other minutia (here’s a list of on-page elements and their varied importance). If you focus on the five areas above, however, you’re covering the vital elements of effective on-page optimization.

I know there are a lot of SEO ninjas out there who might be reading. What would you add as a vital on-page optimization element? Let us know in the comments.

Up next: Does Writing for People Equal Good SEO?

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and CEO of Unglued Media. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

There’s a new version of Thesis out that has our customers excited, thanks to some really cool new features. And it occurred to me that there are a lot of new Copyblogger subscribers who might use WordPress, and yet not really “get” what this Thesis thing is all about.

So in this post I’ll tell you what’s brand new in Thesis 1.6, and also bring everyone up to speed on why Thesis makes WordPress way better.

What is the Thesis Theme for WordPress?

Thesis is the flagship product of DIY Themes, a partnership between Chris Pearson and me. It’s the theme framework that powers Copyblogger and many other high-traffic sites.

In a nutshell, Thesis is software that delivers rock-solid SEO website code, plus unprecedented design flexibility for WordPress — without requiring the novice user to code anything.

For sophisticated users, Thesis is a search-optimized development framework that allows designers and web developers to build sites better and faster than ever before.

* SEO

Search legend Danny Sullivan, Google’s Matt Cutts, and Microsoft search engineer Jeremiah Andrick all use Thesis for their sites. So does search and affiliate marketing entrepreneur Rae Hoffman, SEO guru Michael Gray, top bloggers Darren Rowse and Robert Scoble, web-hosting entrepreneur Scott Beale, social media darling Chris Brogan, and thousands of others.

To find out why the Thesis approach to site code results in maximum search engine crawlibility, watch this quick video I put together.

* Design Flexibility

With most WordPress themes, you’re stuck with the basic look and feel that the theme designer decided on. With Thesis, you can choose between one, two, or three column layouts (and the size of each column), change font types and sizes, create a magazine-style layout, and lots more. Again, watch this video for an overview, and then dive into the three demo videos listed below the general video to see what Thesis can do.

* Support

Even with everything Thesis makes easier, we know people don’t want to be hung out to dry. Our support forums have evolved into a truly supportive community of over 10,000 of your fellow webmasters and bloggers. You’ll have help from DIY Themes support professionals, Thesis Certified Designers, and tons of your peers who simply enjoy lending a helping hand.

What’s New in Thesis 1.6?

Now, here’s the new goodness. Thesis 1.6 offers a lot of improvements throughout, plus two major innovative capabilities – you can now change colors throughout the theme without getting into the CSS markup, and you can create drop-down interactive navigation menus right from the control panel in the WordPress dashboard.

* Change Colors Throughout the Theme Without Code

This is huge for someone like me, who would never mess with CSS in order to change background colors, column colors, etc. I only know enough code to be dangerous, but now if I want to throw up a new site with a varied color scheme, I can do it without bugging Chris or Tony.

Watch this video to see how to build a site with Thesis 1.6.

* Create Killer Navigation Menus

This is another awesome feature for people who don’t code. Now you can create interactive navigation menus with drop-down subpages for each choice, all point-and-click from the Thesis design panel. It was cool the other day when Mark McGuiness proudly emailed me to check out his new interactive navigation menu (Mark’s a poet and a creativity consultant, not a coder).

Watch this quick video to see how the navigation options work.

What About Thesis 2.0?

The buzz is already building about the highly-anticipated Thesis 2.0 – a complete next generation approach to an already innovative theme. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s hard to believe this is the natural evolution from what we started with a year-and-a-half ago.

But don’t think you have to wait. Our current model and pricing provides all Thesis customers with every future update and unlimited access to support… so you can get started with Thesis today and never miss out on what’s coming next.

(And if you caught the hint by my use of the word “current,” you understand that this will change in the near future. Come join the Thesis community today).

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes, creator of the innovative Thesis Theme for WordPress. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

At the beginning of the month, I released a free report called Authority Rules: The 10 Rock Solid Elements of Effective Online Marketing. People seemed to really appreciate it, especially since:

• No email address is required
• You can read via PDF or the web
• There are no affiliate links
• There’s no pitch (other than subscribe to Copyblogger)

This led to a lot of speculation. Why did I do it this way? What was the strategy behind this approach? Has Brian finally lost it?

While that last point is debatable, there was indeed a plan. This post will share what I was thinking, because you may find that my motivations combined with the information in the report itself can help you build your own authority site.

The Background:

I’d wanted to write this report for quite a while, simply to help tie together a lot of the stuff we talk about on Copyblogger. I started in early spring, and then dropped it for a bit.

Surprisingly, I started writing again at a beachside bar in Puerto Rico while sipping tequila (remember Hemingway’s advice on this… write drunk, edit sober). After pausing again for a month or so, I finished the report mid-summer in Durango, and handed it over to Chris Pearson for design goodness.

That’s when things got interesting.

I had originally intended to make the report your normal “ethical bribe” for people who subscribed to Copyblogger. That’s a tried and true method for increasing your subscription numbers.

I checked back in with Chris on a Saturday morning, and discovered he had just started building a website at authorityrules.com on Thesis. This led to a change in approach that Chris completed that weekend.

We decided to offer the report without requiring an opt-in. Better yet, we created a web version for those who didn’t want to read a PDF, while still keeping the printable option.

Here’s why.

1. Demonstration

Long-time Copyblogger readers know we like to teach by demonstration. In other words, many of our posts are doing what we’re telling you to do.

Authority Rules followed the same approach. It told you how to build an authority website, while demonstrating how to launch one.

Think about it: you build authority websites by creating exceptional content that gets you noticed, promotes social media sharing, and attracts links that builds your authority with Google.

By making the report into a website, we did all of that. Maybe you should too.

Now, the obvious objection is “Sure Brian, that’s easy for you. You have an authority site to launch off of and powerful friends.” Fair enough, but consider this.

When I launched Copyblogger in 2006, I was completely unknown. I first created Copywriting 101 as my cornerstone content, and then a couple months later, released the Viral Copy report.

I then worked to get the word out. I emailed every relevant blogger around, and it worked. (I accidently annoyed Steve Rubel in the process, but we made up later).

The point is, that approach worked for me as an unknown back then. If I were in the same position today, I’d launch my site just like I launched Authority Rules… because things change and this latest approach seems to work well.

With this approach, the report is the cornerstone content, and for a time, the entire website. You then start adding content and growing your subscriber base even further from there.

2. Sharing

This ties in to the previous point, but it’s a major consideration. I broke from conventional wisdom back when I released Viral Copy without asking for an email address, and it was the right move for the 2006 blogosphere.

I almost second-guessed that success with Authority Rules, but realized how important Twitter had become to our marketing mix. People share openly-available content much more than “gated” content.

I went with open to encourage maximum sharing.

3. Quality

Having a bunch of subscribers is great for the ego. Having any amount of quality subscribers is great for the wallet.

It’s tough sometimes, but the smarter choice is to focus on attracting quality subscribers. That means people who really want to hear from you on a regular basis.

So, if people are given the Authority Rules report without restriction and don’t bother reading it, they’re probably not a good fit. And if they do read the report and don’t feel compelled to subscribe to Copyblogger, they’re definitely not a good fit.

Stick with the quality people. They’re the ones who become part of your fan club.

4. Reciprocity

So let’s go ahead and challenge conventional “internet marketing wisdom” head on. Is it really smart to require an email address before you deliver the promised content?

Turns out studies show that twice as many people will take the action you desire if you ask after the promised content has been delivered. Let me explain that a bit.

The whole idea of promising content in exchange for an email address or RSS reader addition is based on reward – essentially I’ll give you this stuff if you do what I want.

Reciprocity is a much stronger psychological motivator. If you deliver great content and then ask for the subscription, the research shows that twice as many people will go ahead and subscribe at that point.

I don’t know how much better it worked in this case because I didn’t split test it. But I’ve never been let down by following the results of actual psychological research rather than “conventional wisdom.”

5. Teaching Sells

As far as free reports go, I haven’t written one better than the Teaching Sells Report. I think that’s because I wrote it for myself as much as for you.

It was mainly a happy accident, because Authority Rules should have been completed months earlier. But due to my procrastination, the report became a valuable indicator that helped with the pending reopening of Teaching Sells.

Essentially, if you were previously unfamiliar with my work, Authority Rules demonstrates that I give away valuable free content. Since our entire approach to “selling” Teaching Sells is also by giving away valuable free content, perhaps that explains why we’ve never had so many people interested in finding out more.

“Wait a minute,” you may be saying. “Why do you require an email address to get the Teaching Sells report?”

Here are two distinctions:

• The new Teaching Sells video is designed to be informative and entertaining. Essentially, the idea is to invoke reciprocity while promising reward all at once.
• Teaching Sells is a paid program tied to Copyblogger. So we actually give you hundreds of free articles in advance of ever asking you to opt-in for anything… which is another major benefit of building an authority site.

But who knows? Maybe after a year of updating and expanding Teaching Sells for our members (everyone has a lifetime membership and gets all the new stuff free), I’ll take a different approach. I’ve already got some ideas.

The point is to keep learning, testing, and experimenting. What worked previously might not work as well now.

What’s Next for Authority Rules?

This is the part I have no clue about. At the moment, the report is doing what I intended — organizing many of the topics we write about and introducing new people to Copyblogger.

Due to the way we launched, it’s nicely positioned for something else. Or maybe not… we’ll see.

Anyway, I hope this helped clear up the speculation and confusion. So now I’ll shut up and let you get back to building your own authority site.

On September 12-13, Chris Pearson, Missy Ward and yours truly (along with our other wonderful team members) will be walking 40 miles in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer in Los Angeles.

Not only that, Chris and I are donating $20,000 on behalf of DIY Themes.

Can you help us raise even more?

The money we raise allows medically under-insured women and men (yes, the disease strikes a small percentage of men) to receive the screening, support, and treatment they require. And leading-edge research teams will be provided with the funds they need to fuel their quest for a cure.

Yes, there are many other worthy causes out there. But Missy is a tireless advocate for breast cancer awareness, and a longtime fundraiser who’s helping to find that cure… so we’re right there with her.

Here’s how you can help:

You can simply make a direct online donation through my personal Avon Walk for Breast Cancer page. Any amount is appreciated, but as you know, higher amounts bring extra good karma.

Even better, you can participate in our walking team’s Not So Silent Auction and get really great stuff in exchange for your donation.

I’ve just donated two hours of telephone consulting for you to bid on. Since I don’t usually do consulting, I hope someone bids lots of money on this so I’m not embarrassed.

But there’s a ton of other tempting things to bid on, so go with what works best for you.

Thank you in advance for your help!

I’d also like to thank the DIY Themes community for supporting the Thesis Theme for WordPress. It’s because of all of you that we’re able to support worthy causes like the battle against breast cancer. You rock.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of Teaching Sells and DIY Themes. Get more from Brian on Twitter.