plusLINK Blog

Must See SEO Guide for All WordPress Bloggers

Posted on 09. Sep, 2009 by SexySexyJenny in SEO

One of the most impor­tant part of set­ting up a blog is Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO). SEO for a Word­Press blog is dif­fer­ent than SEO for sta­tic web­sites, mainly because of the social nature of blog­ging tech­nol­ogy. It is less about buy­ing links or trick­ing inad­e­quate search tech­nol­ogy. SEO for Word­Press blogs is more focused on the tech­ni­cal infra­struc­ture of your site, and your abil­ity to write cre­ative arti­cles that are note­wor­thy for oth­ers to read and link to. This SEO guide should be your ref­er­ence point for all Word­Press blogs because in here we will men­tion some of the tips that has been proven to work. These tech­niques does not require heavy invest­ment except for few bits of your time. Don’t make this to do list a chore, you can do these trick one per day and not feel stressed out about it.

Why bother with SEO? If you want to get more expo­sure for your blog, Search Engine Opti­miza­tion can make a huge dif­fer­ence. It can bring 10,000 vis­i­tors to your site com­pared to the 100 that you were get­ting. There­fore if you are think­ing about get­ting organic traf­fic from search engines at no cost, imple­ment the tech­niques dis­cussed in this arti­cle to your Word­Press blog and take it to the next level.

On Page SEO

On page SEO is tech­ni­cal aspects within your site that you can tweak to give your Word­Press Blog a lever­age over oth­ers when rank­ing for a spe­cific key­word. These aspects can range from perma­link struc­ture, to page title, to web seman­tics and much more. Before you even begin pro­mot­ing your site, you need to have all of these aspects taken care of in order to achieve the max­i­mum poten­tial ben­e­fit from the search engine rank­ing posi­tions (SERPs).

1. Opti­mize Post Titles

By default your Word­Press post title will look like:

Blog Title » Archive » Key­word Rich Title of Your Post

Sur­pris­ingly, it is exact oppo­site of what you should have in order to increase your SERPs. One thing you must under­stand is that search engines put higher weight on key­words that are near the start when rank­ing a post. So the­o­ret­i­cally you are hurt­ing your chances of rank­ing higher in search engines.

Well since Word­Press is not a sta­tic site, it is dif­fi­cult to gen­er­ate the title in the way we want. Thank­fully there are great plu­g­ins like All in One SEO that lets us do that with a few clicks. First thing you need to do is install/activate this plu­gin and fol­low the set­tings we suggest.

Now as you note that we don’t have our blog’s name in the post title or the page title. We believe the more key­words you add, the more diluted the strength of each key­word will be in the title. Most of the time peo­ple will add Blog Title with the post title, but there is no point in repeat­ing some­thing as obvi­ous as that. You will rank for your main blog title for the most part. For exam­ple some­one can type in the search engine: “wpbe­gin­ner 14 header design” and they will find your site on top regardless.

But you actu­ally want to rank for the gen­eral key­word like “word­press header designs” because to a user who does not know about your site, they will not type your name in the search engine. They will type gen­eral key­words. There­fore we believe it is not worth to dilute your key­word strength in title by adding your site name into the post or page title.

Using this plu­gin, you can also write / mod­ify titles for spe­cific post or page. You can over­ride the default post title and write a cus­tom title for your meta tags.

2. Opti­mize Post Description

Post descrip­tions are often ignored by many users, but they play a cru­cial role in your search engine rank­ing posi­tions. Many users often take short­cuts by cre­at­ing auto­mated descrip­tion, but these do not work because most auto­mated descrip­tions are first few sen­tences of the post. Those can­not pos­si­bly describe the post most accu­rately using the right key­words there­fore you should write cus­tom post descrip­tion for all post and pages. It might sounds dif­fi­cult, but if you start out doing this for all your arti­cles, it will not be a big deal. There is no real short­cuts when it comes to this. You will need to down­load the All in One SEO plu­gin if you haven’t already for the first one. Once acti­vated, you will see a new option box appear when writ­ing a new post or page.

The option will look like this, and you can write cus­tom descrip­tion for each arti­cle. This will help increase your strength in search engine ranking.

3. Perma­links

When you have a SEO friendly struc­ture, you are increas­ing your chances of rank­ing higher in search engines such as Google and oth­ers. Which by default are the largest source of new vis­i­tors to any web­site. In our expe­ri­ence with SEO, we have seen that Google gives extra weight to the URL struc­ture there­fore it is rec­om­mended that you fol­low this instruction.

By default Word­Press URL Struc­ture looks a bit more robotic because it is not user friendly at all let alone not being SEO friendly.

http://wpbeginner.com/?p=25

The goal of mak­ing the URL struc­ture more friendly is that your users should know before read­ing the arti­cle what it is about by just look­ing at the URL. The same goal is to be accom­plished for Search Engines as well.

You need to go to Set­tings > Perma­links and edit the set­tings as shown in this image below:

We are using the url struc­ture as dis­played in the image:

/%category%/%postname%/

But another option that also works is just using the post name in the title so you would change the set­tings to:

/%postname%/

Some of you are prob­a­bly won­der­ing what hap­pens to all of our pre­vi­ous arti­cles that has the dif­fer­ent URLs, they will all be changed. Another ques­tion is what hap­pens to all the incom­ing links that we have from other sites. For that prob­lem there is a plu­gin called Redi­rec­tion which you need to install and then go to Man­age -> Redi­rec­tion -> Options, to make sure that both URL Mon­i­tor­ing select boxes are set to “Mod­i­fied posts”. Now this plu­gin will take care of the rest by set­ting a 301 redi­rect which will send all users and search engine bots to the new post when they access the old URL, so your Pager­ank will be recov­ered as well as your page strength when­ever google updates.

4. Seman­tic Web Markups

This is an old school tech­nique that can make a dif­fer­ence for your site. You should know that Google rec­om­mend XHTML Seman­tics. Good sites are well-organized and easy to surf. When you use the seman­tic markups such as head­ing tags you are specif­i­cally high­light­ing to the search engine bots, which tag is more impor­tant on the page. It makes their job eas­ily as they can appro­pri­ately rank your page for the most rel­e­vant key­word. Most tem­plates, and free themes does not use the head­ing tags wisely. You need to refine them and learn how to use these tags appro­pri­ately. Often you will see side­bar head­ings using <h2> tag which is NOT appro­pri­ate use of that tag. Do you really think that the key­word Adver­tiser or blogroll deserve to have that tag? You should lower all your head­ing tag in the side­bar to <h4> or maybe <h5> even. Design­ers often seem to give the blog title <h1> tag on the home­page which is ok, but on sin­gle post pages the blog title is not the most rel­e­vant sub­ject. You should change your page.php and single.php and make the post title to have the <h1> tag. Remem­ber to never use the <h1> tag more than once on a page. It is wise that you orga­nize your posts with head­ing tags. You can even use it for styling pur­poses in the post, so it is one solu­tion to two problems.

5. Inter­link­ing within your Site

One of the good ways to make your site more avail­able for the bots is by inter­link­ing within your site. If a search engine bot arrives to a spe­cific page of your site, you should make sure that it finds other pages on your site as well. You can eas­ily do that by hav­ing a path of your post dis­played with what we call bread­crumb nav­i­ga­tion. You can down­load a plu­gin called Bread­crumb NavXT to do that.

Another great way of inter­link­ing within the site is by dis­play­ing related posts at the end of each post. This not only ben­e­fits with SEO, but it reduces your bounce rate because your users may also find some­thing inter­est­ing. Lower bounce rate means more rev­enue for you from adver­tis­ers spe­cially adsense. We have writ­ten a tuto­r­ial that shows two ways of dis­play­ing related posts in Word­Press. One is with a plu­gin and other method is with a php snip­pet. You can pick for yourself.

But by inter­link­ing you are giv­ing bots more parts of your site to explore thus increas­ing your pages indexed in search engines.

6. Opti­miz­ing Exter­nal Links

Opti­miz­ing your exter­nal links from your side­bar and oth­ers are always a good idea. You need to add rel=”nofollow” tag to all use­less links such as reg­is­tra­tion ones, login links and the ones that you think does not deserve a fol­low link. Remem­ber when you add an exter­nal link, you are shar­ing your PR juice, and page strength with those sites. So the more exter­nal links you have sitewide, the weaker your site’s rank­ing will be com­pared from if they did not have those links. Another way which we think works are the XFN rela­tion­ship fea­ture in Word­Press. You won’t see many SEO’s rec­om­mend­ing or talk­ing about other rel tags, but we think it makes a dif­fer­ence. It tells the search engine bots how much you value each link, so you can add rel=”me” to your social media pro­files instead of adding a com­plete nofol­low to that link. This tells search engines that you are not sell­ing links, instead you are link­ing to your own pro­file. It is another way of orga­niz­ing exter­nal links and search engines love orga­ni­za­tion. You can see the Word­Press XFN fea­ture when you click to add a new link in your admin panel.

7. Avoid Dupli­cate Content

It is very easy to cre­ate dupli­cate con­tent in Word­Press. Word­Press has a lot of fea­tures but some­times it can work against you. Such fea­tures include hav­ing tag pages, archive pages, or cat­e­gory pages. If you are dis­play­ing full posts in your cat­e­gory pages, then you can cre­ate dupli­cate con­tent, or even if you post a same post in two dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories you are cre­at­ing dupli­cate con­tent. Well you can avoid that sim­ply by cre­at­ing a robots.txt file for your blog.

We sug­gest you use the fol­low­ing code in your file:

User-agent: Google­bot

Dis­al­low: /wp-content/
Dis­al­low: /trackback/
Dis­al­low: /wp-admin/
Dis­al­low: /feed/
Dis­al­low: /archives/
Dis­al­low: /*?
Dis­al­low: /*.js$
Dis­al­low: /*.inc$
Dis­al­low: /*.css$
Dis­al­low: */feed/
Dis­al­low: */trackback/
Dis­al­low: /page/
Dis­al­low: /pages/
Dis­al­low: /tag/
Dis­al­low: /category/
Dis­al­low: /link.php

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Dis­al­low: /wp-includes/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

When you add a $ sign at the end of any file exten­sion, you are telling the server to not allow bots to index that file exten­sion. You can see in the above code we have added dis­al­low code for all .css and .js files. There is no rea­son for search engine bots to go through your CSS or JavaScript files there­fore it only makes sense to dis­al­low them.

You have your sin­gle post page that does well for rank­ing, there is no rea­son why you need to dupli­cate that con­tent on mul­ti­ple other pages. There­fore we have dis­al­lowed the cat­e­gory, tags, archives, pag­i­na­tion, and other use­less exten­sions. You cer­tainly do not want search engine bots to see any­thing in your word­press admin direc­tory wp-admin there­fore you should always dis­al­low that.

You may also see that we have a dis­al­low tag that looks like this: Dis­al­low: /*? the rea­son why we have this is to block all search queries to be indexed from your site. So if some­one searches for perma­links on this site, it will not be indexed in google.

There is also a plu­gin called Meta Robots which you can use in order to man­age these no index options for pages and categories.

8. Site’s Blue­print Plan

Just like the con­struc­tion com­pany needs to know a house’s blue­print plan in order to build the site and know where each things go, search engine bots also need a blue­print plan for your site. If you tell search engines exactly where to find each thing, they are going to find it much faster and you will get much bet­ter results in terms of index­ing. You can cre­ate a blue­print for your site by cre­at­ing a sitemap. Google XML Sitemaps plu­gin for Word­Press lets you do that with few clicks.

9. SEO Friendly Design Structure

Your design plays a cru­cial role in your site’s SEO. We have already men­tioned refin­ing the seman­tic web markups above in this arti­cle, but there is another part of your design that is very impor­tant. It is the struc­ture of your design. You need to make sure that in the codes, your site con­tent shows above all the side­bar links. You should be wor­ried about this if your site has a side­bar on the left hand side because some­time unpro­fes­sional theme design­ers do not code theme right. They make the side­bar links appear above the site’s con­tent, so every­time the bot vis­its the page, they see the links before they see the post content.

10. Site Load Time

Speed plays a cru­cial role in your site’s daily index­ing rate. The faster your site loads, the more pages will be indexed every day, so your goal is to get the fastest load time as you can. There are many ways to speed up your Word­Press and boost per­for­mance which we higlighted in that arti­cle, but there are two major ones that you must have.

One is plu­gin called WP-Super Cache which speeds up your site and boost your per­for­mance sig­nif­i­cantly. It also decreases the server load, so your site won’t crash if you receive high amount of traffic.

11. Image Optimization

Every blog has images. If you do not add images to your posts, then you should begin to do so now because it is a good tech­nique and it gives your post the life and energy that it lacks when its just words. But many users use images and they do not opti­mize them. Do you know that Google Images can send you a good num­ber of traf­fic if you use opti­mize your images. This is free traf­fic that you should not miss out on. All you have to do is when adding an image, add an alt tag to it. Many peo­ple ignore this tag and some add it and leave it blank. One rea­son to add it is because it makes your site XHTML friendly. The sec­ond rea­son is Search Engine Opti­miza­tion. You should add an alt tag to each image and add the rel­e­vant key­word in there. Search engine bots can­not read the text that is in your image, so it is a good way to tell them what this image is about.

There is a plu­gin called SEO Friendly Images which you can use to ease your job. It auto­mat­i­cally adds either post title or the image name into the alt tag. This plu­gin is a short­cut, and if we had to pick between this plu­gin and doing it man­u­ally, we would cer­tainly do it man­u­ally. You can pick the right key­words when you do it man­u­ally, this plu­gin can’t pos­si­bly get the best key­words automatically.

12. User Optimization

You are prob­a­bly won­der­ing what does this strange term “User Opti­miza­tion” really means. Well what we mean by User Opti­miza­tion is by using the power of your audi­ence to ben­e­fit your search engine rank­ing. One of the best way to get back­links to your site is organic links from your read­ers. Given that you already have qual­ity con­tent, your read­ers will men­tion you on their own blogs, or even in their tweets which can poten­tially get you tons of other links. There­fore you want to opti­mize your users. The fact that one per­son read your blog once, does not mean that they will read it again. Peo­ple have too much going on their life, there­fore you need to give them options to stay updated with your blog. The more options you give them the bet­ter it is for your site. We give our users the option to stay updated with their RSS Feed Reader, stay­ing updated via email, and live stream updates through twit­ter. P.S. If you haven’t sub­scribed to our blog via either one of these meth­ods, you should do it now.

When you have a user sub­scribe to your blog, you are assur­ing that they read your blog reg­u­larly there­fore your chances of get­ting a back­link has increased sig­nif­i­cantly. Next step in user opti­miza­tion is hav­ing your users engaged in the com­mu­nity. When you have users engaged in the com­mu­nity, it encour­ages new users to join and par­tic­i­pate in the dis­cus­sion. The more involved each user get in the com­mu­nity, the like­li­hood of you get­ting back­links, or retweets for your post increases.

One way to increase com­ments and user activ­ity on your site is by stay­ing involved your­self. You need to bond with your com­men­ta­tors by reply­ing to their com­ments, and encour­ag­ing the dis­cus­sion. Another way to bond with your com­men­ta­tors is by thank­ing them. Now you should not thank them every time because it gets annoy­ing, but the first time would be a nice thing to do. In our rec­om­mended Word­Press plu­gin list, we men­tion a plu­gin called com­ment rel­ish, which sends out an email to first time com­men­ta­tors by thank­ing them and invit­ing them to come back. You can cer­tainly cus­tomize the mes­sage and make it more per­sonal. But this way can actu­ally annoy your users. There­fore you should use a dif­fer­ent way which is called Com­ment Redi­rect­ing. Com­ment redi­rect­ing lets you redi­rect your new com­men­ta­tors to a spe­cific page on your site. We have our new com­men­ta­tors go to the Thank You Page. Do you want to see if it works? If you are a new user, sim­ply com­ment on this post and let us know how’d you like it. This is by far one of the best way of thank­ing your user with­out hav­ing them feel that they were spammed.

Now there are more ways that you can get peo­ple to inter­act. If you haven’t already seen in the last para­graph, it is by sim­ply ask­ing your users to com­ment. You can write in a way that you encour­age users to com­ment. Last, but cer­tainly not the least is by chang­ing the text in your index.php where it says 0 com­ments, to some­thing more inter­act­ing. Per­haps some­thing like “No com­ments yet, You can be the first one” or you can even ignore the com­ment count entirely by sim­ply say­ing “Speak Your Mind”. You can also change the text in your comments.php and encour­age your users to com­ment using the sim­i­lar technique.

Off Page SEO

A good major­ity of peo­ple define Off Page SEO is all about increas­ing your back­links, but they are wrong. Off Page SEO is all about brand­ing and increas­ing your chances of get­ting back­links. It is not about increas­ing back­links because peo­ple can buy back­links and increase the count, but that is not the opti­mial way because you will be gam­ing the sys­tem. There is a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion between your site’s pop­u­lar­ity and the chances of get­ting back­links. But the fact of the mat­ter is that you do not have a pop­u­lar site when you start. The tech­niques men­tioned in this sec­tion will help you spread the word out about your blog.

1. Social Media Interaction

Social media inter­ac­tion has always been a huge part of blog­ging. One of the rea­sons why SEO for blog­ging is so dif­fer­ent is due to the social nature of blogs. Basi­cally in this step, you go out and talk to peo­ple. Be active in social media com­mu­ni­ties like Twit­ter, Face­book, and oth­ers that you like. This sounds very easy, but in actu­al­ity it is not. There is a fine line between inter­ac­tion and pro­mo­tion which most peo­ple tend to do in social media net­works like twit­ter. You must have inter­ac­tion with your audi­ence, whether it is through pri­vate mes­sages, replies via tweet, or even retweets. You need to have inter­ac­tion. You can use one of the plu­g­ins like Twit­ter Tools to auto post a tweet when­ever there is a new blog post pub­lished, but we strongly rec­om­mend that you tweet it out man­u­ally and add some cre­ative parts to it. Have dif­fer­ent ways of shar­ing the links, you can’t fool the users of think­ing that you are tweet­ing nat­u­rally by shar­ing the link every sin­gle time say­ing Check out this cool link. You need some vari­a­tion also if you want to be dis­cov­ered by users on twit­ter, you prob­a­bly want to use hash­tags for your niche such as #Word­Press for ours.

For a new site, Social media inter­ac­tion is one of the best way to expand. Gone are the days when you email the top guys in the indus­try and ask them to give your site a men­tion in their future posts. Because now only spam­mers choose that tech­nique. Most celebri­ties in your indus­try have too many SPAM emails which they ignore. You do not want to be in one of those. Instead you can just tweet them, the like­li­hood of them check­ing that is much higher than them check­ing your email. Every­time a per­son shares your arti­cle, it is being shown to every­one on their net­work, imag­ine the power of word of mouth adver­tis­ing at its best. It can bring you a lot of new users to your web­site. Make sure that you inter­act with your audi­ence, acknowl­edge their ques­tions and even have dis­cus­sions in these social media sites. By doing all of this your chances of increas­ing your back­link counts are sig­nif­i­cantly high because from these social media sites, peo­ple will add you to their daily book­mark arti­cles and other col­lec­tion posts that users write.

2. Net­work­ing within your Niche

Net­work­ing within your own niche is prob­a­bly one of the best way to go about get­ting tar­get­ted audi­ence and back­links. You need to build good rela­tions with your com­peti­tors. Believe it or not, but most top guys in the indus­try that might seems rival in front are very good friends in the back­ground. To find blogs in your niche use Google Blog Search and com­ment on their blogs. Con­tact the blog­ger and see if there is a pos­si­bil­ity of you two to work together. You can hold join con­tests, rival com­pe­ti­tions which has seem to work well for oth­ers in the past, pro­mote each other’s prod­ucts and much more. Here is an arti­cle about how you can get other blog­gers to link to you.

3. Linkbait­ing

Linkbait­ing is another great way of get­ting tons of organic back­links to your site. There are sev­eral meth­ods of link bait­ing that you can use such as cre­at­ing con­tro­versy. When­ever you cre­ate con­tro­versy, you are likely to be linked by a lot of users. It is not always a good thing to cre­ate con­tro­versy, but it can cer­tainly get you a lot of atten­tion and back­links. Another link bait­ing tech­nique is hav­ing con­tests or give­aways. Every­one love free stuff, so they will most likely write about it. One of the big things you see now is peo­ple hav­ing con­tests and those who join retweets it. These con­tests can get you a lot of back­links and expo­sure. To read a full guide on linkbait­ing check out Linkbait­ing 101.

4. Paid Links???

The most com­mon method of Off Page SEO is get­ting paid links. Is that the best way to go about it? No! We strongly rec­om­mend you that you do not buy paid links at any site because that would be gam­ing the sys­tem and can poten­tially get your site penal­ized in Google. There are thou­sand of web­mas­ters, and blog­gers are doing this, but we say that do it at your own risk if you decide to do it.

Related Posts:

• Ben­e­fits of Search Engine Optimization
• The Truth About SEO
• Does SEO Still Exist?
• Under­stand­ing Search Engine Optimization
• SEO Tip: Canonicalization

Tags: been-proven, guide-should, reference, SEO, the-tips, tips, will-mention, your-reference