WordPress SEO
WordPress never failed to excite me as a SEO professional and also a blogger, due to the fact that how easy and flexible wordpress really is to use and optimize to your needs. Being an SEO I thought I would do something useful and valuable to wordpress community and its users, So I am creating this really big guide on how to SEO your WP-Blog. I know there is a similar guide on another popular blog, but I thought what if I release my own version of the same, so here is my version. When I was planning for this article I made sure I am going to make this topic as exhaustive as possible. With consistent update of great contents, SEO link building service will be your next option after completing this checklist. So if you are short of time then make sure to bookmark this topic and get back whenever you find time to cover all the aspects of wordpress seo I am going to explain here.
Index:
1. Basic Optimizations
- 1.1Choosing The Right Theme
1.2 Setting URL Preference
1.3 Optimizing URL Structure (Permalinks)
1.4 Optimizing Images
1.5 Optimizing Categories
1.6 Comments For SEO
- 2.1 Optimizing Title Tags
2.2 Optimizing Meta Descriptions
2.3 Homepage Title
2.4 Homepage Description
3. Increasing Internal Linking
- 3.1 Custom Read More Text
3.2 Using Teasers
3.3 Pagination
3.4 Related Posts Plugin
3.5 Linking To Related Articles
3.6 Using Your Sidebar
- 4.1 Optimizing Feeds
4.2 Optimizing Robots.txt
4.3 Optimizing pingback services
4.4 Static Homepage
4.5 Popular Posts
4.6 Speed Up your Blog
4.7 Use Subscription
4.8 Using Pages
4.9 Use Sitemaps
4.10 Use Trackbacks
- 5.1 Use Twitter
5.2 Use Facebook Fan Page
5.3 Social Media Sites
5.4 Important Blog Directories
5.5 Share Templates
1.Basic Optimizations
Before we move in to advanced optimization methods lets see some of the basic optimizations that will greatly help your blog to perform well in search engines.
1.1 Choosing The Right Theme
I would say first and primary part of wordpress SEO is choosing the right template for your blog that not only looks good, but also you need to make sure whether the template is really search engine optimized and search engine friendly, just have a look whether it has easy navigation features, clean codes. Try to avoid templates that uses really huge number of images for its layout, avoid flash templates and also templates which uses a lot of java script as they would not do you any good in terms of search rankings. I take time to review the templates which I find really good at Seo templates section of this site so just have a look there to get some ideas and also possibly choose any of the template I recommend.
1.2 Setting URL Preference
Just make sure to set your url preference as soon as you install your wordpress its highly recommended that you do it to avoid duplicate content issues and canonical issues. By default wordpress takes care of canonical issues now but I would really recommend that you set your url preference to anyone. I love to have non-www vs www version because its easy that way, you don’t need to type in three extra characters each time you want to get to your blog.
Here is how you can do it. Go to General settings section and change your wordpress address url and blog url.
Also make sure you can changing your url preference in your Google webmaster tools.
You can also avoid canonical issues by including the following code in your .htaccess
If you have chosen url preference with “www” version then use this code in .htaccess
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L] |
If you have chosen your url preference to “non-www” version then use this code in .htaccess
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L] |
Don’t forget to replace the “yoursite.com” to your actual site url. I am mentioning site url because some people might be using their blog on a sub-domain so I don’t want them to use their blog url in the .htaccess, Or just use this code only if you have your blog in your main domain.
1.3 Optimizing URL Structure
Default wordpress url structure is not really that search engine nor user friendly. So you can tweak the url structure a bit to add some seo value to your urls. Here is how you can do it.
Go to Settings —> permalinks
Choose custom option and use this code if you want to display only the post name after the actual domain name
<
1 | /%postname%/ |
If you also want to include category name then use this code
1 | /%category%/%postname%/ |
Some people might also want to include their main keyword they want to focus on for their blog. Then you can alter the url structure like this
1 | /YOUR KEYWORD/%postname% |
But make sure you are not using some ridiculously long keyword that makes your url really long. Search engines only allow 65 characters for the url, so if your url is short and precise it will be really good for the visitors to take a note of it.
Apart from It you can also include post id at end, it avoids duplicate urls, just incase if you are posting two articles with similar title, then post-id will let search engines know that they are not the same and in fact both are different posts, but this is an exceptional case but it won’t hurt you if you can add post-id in your url though.
With Category Name
1 | /%category%/%postname%-%post_id%/ |
Without category
1 | /%postname%-%post_id%/ |
With Your Keyword
1 | /KEYWORD/%postname%-%post_id%/ |
P.S: There are claims that including %category% in the first part of your url has some issues attached to it, but I have been using it on all my blogs without any problems for years. So I am leaving the choice to you to choose the one which you like.
1.4 Optimizing Images
If you are not aware of this optimizing images properly with right keywords will prove to be really worth in bringing hits to your site, though some people feel that those hits are not really worth having as most of those people just visit to steal your images. But whatever is the case or intentions of their visits, I like to have more people visiting my site. So in order to optimize your images you need to alter your title and alt tags in your image codes. I have talked in little detail about this in this article.
Importance Of Image Optimization
But lets assume that you are lazy to do the job yourself every time you upload an image, to alter the alt and title tags in it. Don’t worry there is a plugin that will just do the job for you by filling those tags with appropriate keywords from your title of the post and optimizing your images automatically every time you upload an image.
Download SEO friendly Images here
1.5 Optimizing Categories
This sounds really strange is it? well it is not, you can optimize your categories as well. How can you do that? why not have some of your keywords as your category names? Sounds ridiculous? well it is not. I have already discussed how you can make up category names that are keywords in How to find keyword rich category names for your blogs You can go through that when you have time. But having keywords in your category names can be quite useful in your SEO campaign. Like you can optimize your homepage for a particular keyword and then you can follow on by optimizing the keywords in your category names and with your category urls. It makes your work easier in fact and gives you more focus. Also if you added category in your url structure you might also get the benefit of your keywords getting exposed in your urls.
1.6 Comments For SEO
Again this will sound strange for many because how in the world can you optimize comments which is user generated content. Well this plugin SEO super comments will create dynamic page for each user generated comment. As you might know that comments can be crawled and indexed by search engines. So it will potentially increase your traffic. To know more about this plugin visit this page about SEO Super Comments
2. Altering Meta Datas
Search engines mainly look for meta datas in your pages like, meta description, meta titles and meta keywords, although Google doesn’t take meta keywords in to consideration anymore, other minor search engines still do take them in to consideration. So here is how you can alter your meta datas. I am going to use headspace2 plugin to achieve this and also I would highly recommend you using the same.
2.1 Optimizing Title Tags
Really one of the important part of SEO is optimizing page titles, you need to find the best title possible for your posts and not only that you need to make sure your keywords appear in title. A good title not only has keywords in it but also it will be equally compelling for the user to click through. You can specify the meta title for your pages once you have installed headspace. Just underneath your post editor you will have new section that looks like the one show below in the picture.
Just enter your title there, you can also include your site’s name in the end by adding “|” and entering my site’s name at the end which will advertise and give more exposure to my site’s name in search results.
But just know that you are only limited to use 65 characters in your title tags, more characters in titles will collapse your titles and will result in low click through. You can leave off adding your site’s name at the end if you are short of characters. You can also automate the whole process by changing the posts and pages options in your headspace settings to this.
Posts / Pages:
1 | %%title%%|Blog Name |
2.2 Optimizing Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions play a vital role too, although Google nowadays tend to formulate its own meta descriptions for your pages, if you can write a good and precise meta descriptions for your posts, search engines will still consider using them in their results and as mentioned before you can specify the meta description just below the title. A meta description should exactly explain what your post contains in a very precise and attractive manner that will encourage people to click through, don’t write about which your pages don’t have just to make people to click on your links, that way your bounce rate will start to shoot up which is really not a good sign for your rankings.
2.3 Homepage Title And Tag Line
This is the important part of on-page optimization, you need to be really focused on what you are writing on your blog title and tag line, because these spaces can be exploited for your rankings. Once you get to the general options under settings. You will see two sections called Blog Title and Tag line.
Blog Title can be the name of your domain in most cases and tagline can be filled with the keywords you want to rank in search engines. But you need to make sure they don’t exceed 65 characters rule again and also don’t spam these spaces to dump your keywords in.
2.4 Homepage Description
You can describe about what your blog is all about under 150 characters. you can specify the homepage description for your blog under homepage section in your headspace options. Again please do not dump your keywords under homepage descriptions, search engines take them seriously and might penalize you if they think you are stuffing keywords.
3. Internal Links
Some people do under estimate the power of internal linking, we think links from our own site don’t add up much value in search rankings but in fact they do carry a lot of value, not everyone optimize their sites for all the available keywords in the world. There are still a lot of keywords which are not exploited. So how can you exploit those? you can do it through internal links. Linking from one post to another within your blog will tend to give you surprising results as you start to rank on page one of Google for many less competitive keywords out there. We will see how you can harness the potential of internal links in the coming sections.
3.1 Custom Read More Text
Its a good practice to break your post at some point in your homepage by including a more tag and by default wordpress displays some link like continue reading. But you can alter that link with headspace. I have explained about the process in the more detailed fashion in article How to optimize your custom read more text link Be sure to go through it and optimize your read more text links with some keywords which you would like to rank for. For example if your page is about “how to protect your smart phones” and the key term you want to rank for is “protect smart phones” then you can make up the read more text to like “read more on how to protect smart phones”
3.2 Using Teasers
It does the same job as above but this option is for lazy people like me. I don’t want to keep writing my custom read more text link for all my posts I want to automate the whole process so I use this plugin.
Post teaser for wordpress
You can see the demo on this blog, I use it here.
3.3 Pagination
You might have noticed this that many blogs do have their homepage displaying the posts in pages, this blog is a good example of that, why its necessary? you might have noticed by now that many blogs do have a complex navigation structure that its even hard for you to find the appropriate section of the site which you want to look at. when a user finds it difficult to find the different sections and different posts in a blog then you can directly relate it with search bots as well. Search engines may find it difficult to find all of your posts and index them, also its bad for page rank distribution across your site. Pagination helps you to over come those problems by linking all your posts together in the homepage in pages. Now search bots can find all of your pages and also index them and also your pagerank will be distributed equally.
you don’t have to dig in to the wordpress codes to enable pagination, just install this plugin and it will take care of the rest.
Download wordpress pagination plugin
3.4 Related Posts Plugin
Related posts plugin is an excellent way not only to increase internal links but also keep your readers engaged in your blog, potentially reducing the bounce rate which search engines take in to consideration while ranking sites. There are lots of plugins available which does the job for you. One which I use in this blog and also one which I would recommend is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. But the choice is open to you to use the one which you like.
3.5 Linking To Related Posts
I came across a plugin before called smart links from Vladimir Prevolac which links the keyword to the url you specify across your blog, but its unfortunate that he hasn’t updated the plugin for a long time now and it has some bugs for latest wordpress releases. So if you are writing an article and you stumble across a part where you can link to another related article of yours, then don’t hesitate to do so. Also when you are free just make a note of all your posts and urls and write down the keywords for each post, then use search in your blog to find out the posts which has those keywords in it and link to them appropriately. I know its a hectic job to do but its a really good practice and also really healthy for your site’s rankings.
3.6 Using Your Sidebar
You can also use your sidebars really well, don’t waste the space on your sidebar for blogroll links to other sites of your friends or even yours, search engines don’t give much value to those links now. Instead use it to link to other posts of yours. Try to use popular posts plugin, try to display posts of categories that you think is important over the sidebar. I use a simple single sidebar on my blog here, I don’t want to use two sidebars and confuse my users. Using a single sidebar with linking to your other posts is something I would highly recommend instead of displaying blog archive, calenders etc..
4. Other Optimizations
Apart from the optimizations we have seen so far you can also make other optimizations in your wordpress blog that will prove to help you a lot in your SEO efforts.
4.1 Feed Optimization
Feeds are the thing of future and I know that even now there are a lots of people out there who don’t know about feeds and how powerful feeds can be. But on the other hand there are also people who want to misuse feeds and steal your contents. you can optimize feeds in such a way that it only shows a extract of your posts, this can be helpful because, if your feed subscribers are interested in reading more about any of your post they can click your link directly and get to your blog, instead of giving them away your entire content, you can provide only a partial content for your users. Also it can be helpful when you are doing RSS submissions. But I would suggest to avoid RSS submissions because, I had this problem with a very popular blog directory which takes away your contents through RSS submissions and posts those contents on their site, problem is Google indexed the syndicated content first as the site is popular and the link which pointed to mine from their site is no-followed passing no link juice to me. So they were practically stealing my contents and my works. Avoid RSS submission sites like plague in my opinion because there are lots of other really effective ways to build links rather than RSS submissions.
To alter feeds only to display only summary, under reading settings change the feeds to summary.
4.2 Optimizing Robots.txt
First thing which a search bot looks for when it comes across a site is robots.txt file. Almost every site uses a robots.txt file, that includes Google itself. You can tell search bots which pages to index and which pages are not to be indexed through, you can also keep away yahoo pipes away from stealing your contents and a lot more with robots.txt
In order control robots.txt file from your wordpress admin panel then you need this plugin KB Robots
but just know that it will be of any use only when you have installed the blog to the root of your server, if you have your blog installed on a sub domain or in some other directory then create your own robots.txt file and upload it to the root of your server.
you can access my robots.txt file in this location
http://www.seoyourblog.com/robots.txt , also you can practically access the robots.txt file of any site by just specifying the domain name followed by robots.txt. Yes even Google.com just check out the robots.txt file of Google here http://google.com/robots.txt
To know more about robots.txt follow this link
4.3 Optimizing Pingback services
Some people think pinging is dead, some people say pinging is useful, but I would say whatever might be the case, wordpress just comes with a feature which automatically pings all your posts once you publish it. All you need to do is just add some list of pinging services under writing options.
Here is the list of pinging services I use on my blog and I noticed it attracts some spiders to crawl down my post as soon as I make a post for real.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 | http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://1470.net/api/ping http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b http://api.feedster.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://api.moreover.com/ping http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php http://bitacoras.net/ping http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2 http://blogmatcher.com/u.php http://www.blogoole.com/ping/ http://www.blogoon.net/ping/ http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1 http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php http://www.blogsnow.com/ping http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc http://coreblog.org/ping/ http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/ http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php http://ping.amagle.com/ http://ping.bitacoras.com http://ping.blo.gs/ http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/ http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/ http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc http://ping.feedburner.com http://ping.myblog.jp http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://ping.weblogs.se/ http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2 http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/ http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2 http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2 http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php http://topicexchange.com/RPC2 http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/ http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/ http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/ |
4.4 Static Homepage
For some reason I am not using static homepage on this blog, but that doesn’t mean static homepage is bad, in fact static homepages can hold more value than you might think. Like you can make a great post with all the keyword you want your blog to rank for in the homepage and make it static to be displayed in your homepage and you can build links based on it. Its a great way to optimize your blog in search engines. So to make your blog static just go to reading settings and set it to static and set the page you want to be displayed in your homepage and save it.
4.5 Popular Posts
You might think what popular posts has to do with SEO? well actually it does for couple of reasons, you will know which kind of articles people like to read from your blog, so that you can start to create more similar articles which people might be interested in, secondly it indicates you if you want to update any of your articles which are there on for a long time.
There are many plugins available on wordpress for identifying popular posts I just found this one first Googling plus this popular post plugin is compatible with the latest version of wordpress so the developer really takes time to update this plugin for wordpress releases.
Download popular post plugin
4.6 Speed Up your Blog
Site speed is something that Google will take in to consideration while ranking your pages in future and I don’t see that as a distant future, may be Google is already considering site speed in to account already. I have written a little brief article about improving your site speed already in 6 Tips On How To Speed Up Your Blog. But don’t worry I will give you some tips here too.
1. Use templates with less number of images.
2. Avoid flash based templates.
3. Use multiple host for images used in your posts
4. Use speedy host
5. Use firebug plugin for firefox to detect the site speed and get suggestions to minify your java scripts, CSS files etc..
6. Use wp-supercache or wp-cache plugin which will make you blog super fast.
Also just know that when you have speedy host chances are that search bots will crawl more number of pages in your blog.
4.7 Use subscriptions
Enable subscription option for your users, so that you can deliver your posts through mails and also give them an option to to syndicate your feeds in to their popular reader. Feed burner service from Google does an excellent job.
4.8 Use Pages
This post if you don’t know is a page. Why? because I wanted to optimize this post for a specific keyword I focus on. Also I disabled comments on this page, for two reasons, already this page is too long, secondly as more and more number of comments start to appear on this page, it will take more time for this page to load which may cause people to leave this page. Also its easy for me to optimize a page, I can make this post to appear on my static homepage that will ease my seo works.
4.9 Use Sitemaps
Sitemaps are really essential when you have a complex navigational structure in your blog with too many sub categories where search engines finds it difficult to find all your pages. By giving out sitemaps to search engines you are enabling the search bots to find all the pages in your blog which it might not find otherwise. You don’t need to worry about how you can create a sitemap for your blog as there are plugins which does the hard job for you. xml-sitemaps plugin is something I would recommend because its updated on a consistent basis and also it notifies search bots about sitemap updates as soon as it creates one for your blog.
You can also include your sitemap in robots.txt by just mentioning
sitemap:http://yourdomainname.com/robots.txt
4.10 Using Trackbacks
Wordpress comes with an excellent feature called trackback, it can be used wisely to develop a friendly relation with other bloggers and also it can help you to drive some traffic and some times a possible inbound link to your site. All you need to do is look for the trackback url at the end of a blog post which you want to review or mention about in your blog and mention that url in your trackback section. Usually trackback urls end with “trackback” at the end. For more info regarding how to use trackbacks in your blog visit this page on optiniche blog.
5. Off-page WP-SEO
We have so far discussed what you can do to your wordpress blog directly to optimize it better for SEO. I will now briefly touch over a bit of off-page SEO in this section. I am not going to elaborately discuss about every off-page optimization methods out there because there are tons of ways through which you can build links. I am just going to point out some well know methods and ways.
5.1 Use Twitter
Twitter has recently made a big revolution in the online world and also it proved to be really essential and worth to develop your site or blog or your business online, because it enables you to directly interact with your blog visitors, your fans, your customers etc.. Also you can tweet each time you make a post and there are number plugins out there which automates the process for you. When you post an interesting article in your blog and post it over twitter there is a chance that it might possibly go viral and gain you lots of backlinks and traffic to your site. One best thing about twitter is that its free and anyone can register an account and start tweeting. So if you don’t have one so far just make sure that you are holding one account for each of your blogs.
5.2 Facebook Fan page
Just like twitter facebook fan page helps facebook users to get notified about your updates and also they can interact with you through facebook. You can share interesting resources that you find useful too with your fans. Also there is no restrictions with number of characters you can use with each post like in twitter. I would highly recommend creating a fan page for your blog once it starts to get popular.
5.3 Social Media Sites
There are lots of social media sites out there where you can share your blog posts to the users of these sites. Sites like digg.com, reddit.com have proven to be of great use to drive some traffic to your site when used properly. I have discussed in little detail on how to use these social media sites properly on my following posts. So just make sure to check them out, if you are interested in using social media sites to advertise your blogs.
5 Truths That You Need To Know About Social Media Sites
5 Tips On How To Effectively Use Social Media Sites
Free Online Tools That Will Ease Your Social Submissions
5.4 Submitting To Blog Directories
Some people say directory submissions do not hold any value any longer, but that’s not actually true when you dig deep in to the issue, Google still values blog directories to be excellent resource and values your links on blog directories when they are do-follow. Some paid blog directories are really worth the price so if you are in a position where you can pay for an inclusion on a best blog directory then I would say don’t hesitate. You can find the list of top 20 blog directories where you can submit your blogs to here . I will also recommend submitting your blogs to stumbleupon and claim your blog at technorati.
5.5 Share free templates
Wordpress has been used by millions of bloggers across the globe and lots of people tend to use themes that are shared for free in wordpress official site. If you can develop a wordpress theme yourself or hire someone to develop an excellent theme for you then it can be of great help to build a lot of valuable back links to your blog. You can include the url to your blog in the footer area with the keyword you want to focus on, it can greatly boost your site’s rankings and inbound links to your blog.
I have tried to cover as much possible information I can with regards to optimizing your wordpress blogs for SEO. If you think its way too much for you to optimize your wordpress blog yourself you can always feel free to contact me and also hire me to do all the work for you.
