WordPress SEO

WordPress is a great content management and blogging platform  with enormous potential to add new content to existing websites or online stores. The enormous range of plugins makes it  extremely versatile. If you are new to blogging or WordPress what can you do to make your WordPress blog more search engine friendly?

At the time of writing, the latest installation is 2.7.1. One of the major features other than its new interface its automatic upgrade feature, which allows you keep your system up-to date. This is the first rule of keeping a secure blog.

Rather than go for the default theme, you will probably want to consider a new look for your blog. There are many ready-made themes available for free from the WordPress site.  If you are thinking about making the content as easy as possible to access for the search engines, you should go for a theme which allows the content to come before navigation.

I used the Quick-Press theme as the basis for SEO the Game and I modified it to suit my needs. Editing themes is fairly straight-forward using CSS if you have had some experience of web-development. I would recommend that you spend some time on the design to make your blog your own.

Just as you cannot judge a book by its cover,  you shouldn’t  judge a blog by its theme. It is the content that counts. However, even the best content can be lost in blogosphere with a little help in the form of a plugin to make the titles and descriptions for your posts more search engine friendly. The most popular is the All in One SEO plugin, although others are available including HeadSpace2 which allows even greater control.

The basic function of these plugins is to allow you to create unique titles and meta descriptions for each post. Meta descriptions can be created automatically, but you should probably spend some time writing your own as these are likely to be shown in the search engine listings. The same SEO rules apply for writing a blog post title as far as keywords are concerned.

WordPress can organise posts according to category and by identifying tags. You should organise your categories and tags very carefully for best results. Categories should be reserved for the big subject ideas. Tags are more specific and focus on the individual post. For example, this post is going to be in the WordPress category but it might have tags of WordPress SEO, All in One Plugin, Headspace2, blog titles and so on.

Blogs have a URL which is the known as the permalink, this is the URL that is created when you write your post and this is the URL that you would like to visitors to reach your site by and to link to. This will lead to the posts in your blog begin filtered as duplicate content or devalued to the extent that they do not show at all. This ability to be able to reach content in many ways creates one of the greatest problems that of duplicate content.

Nofollow pages can be used on these category, tags and date URLs so that these links are not followed by the spiders. The new canonical tag is also very useful for making it clear which URL should be indexed.

In the default installation, when you publish a blog post, the title will appear within <h2> tags. This can be changed within the appearance/editor to make it <h1>. As you write your post, think about the logical structure. Often the post can be broken down into sections which can have their own headings written between <h2> tags. Images should have alt tags which describe the image content.

When you have written a few posts, you will find that you can refer to an existing posts. It is good to take the opportunity to link to these posts. It is good for the passing of PageRank throughout the blog and it is good for your readers. Internal link should use anchor text that is relevant to the content rather than a generic click here or follow this link. In this post, I have referred to an article for the canonical tag and linked to it. This is highlighting this post as being important for the reader; the passing of PageRank to that page is a bi-product but useful nonetheless. There are plugins such as KB Linker which automatically links chosen keywords each time they are mentioned but for best results I would recommend that internal links are placed by hand.

Social media is the latest thing and there are plenty of plugins to allow your posts to gain more exposure. Twitter is the medium that is undergoing the greatest expansion at the moment and it will allow you to build up a following of readers for your blog. How social media can be utilised is a subject area which I will expand on in a future post.

Turn your most important posts into pages. A useful post can be buried in the blog as more articles replace the content. If a particular post has great content that it is a good idea to turn it into a page on the site so that it can be easily found by anyone coming to the blog. The original post being 301 redirected to the new page to maintain PageRank. Even these simple changes can make a big difference to your chances of creating a competitive blog.