getting more popular by the day. It enables people to set up a blog, and even a complete website within minutes.
I get asked for specific SEO tips for WordPress very often. Basically all the ‘usual’ SEO stuff is also applicable for WordPress.
But besides that, there are a few special tips for WordPress I’d like to share with you.
1. Use Permalinks
Be sure to use Permalinks on your blog.
By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. These links may be hard to spider for search engines, and your posts may not be indexed as fast and as thoroughly as you want to.
However, WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives.
You can find this option in your Admin panel. Choose ‘Options’ in the menu and there ‘Permalinks’.
This brings us immediately to Tip 2:
2. Place your titles up front in your URLs
In the Permalinks section you can choose the ‘Date and name based’ option.
This will place the year, month, day and post title in your URL.
For SEO purposes it’s better to have your post title up front. So instead you should go for the ‘Custom’ option and put in something like:
/%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/
This will give you a URL like this:
http://www.seo-portal.com/section-targeting-for-adsense/2006/07/06/
3. Tags
Tags are a great SEO addition to your blog. They enable search engines to crawl your website more easily and create specific pages for your tags/keywords.
You can install the Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in on your WordPress blog.
4. Page Titles
Make sure you add good titles to your pages. We discussed putting the post title up front in your URL. You should do the same thing for your titles.
You can do this by changing the <> tag in your header.php (located in wp-content/themes/your theme/)
You can use the following code in order to get your post title in front, followed by your blog name:
<>< ? php wp_title(); ? > : < ? php bloginfo('name'); ? > < /title >
5. Choose your post titles carefully
Your post titles should be as clear as possible, and directly relevant to your post. Don’t stuff your titles with keywords targeting your whole blog.
Choose your keywords carefully per post, and include those words in your post title.
6. Autolinks
Cross link to your own posts and pages. Do this by linking your keywords to the relevant postings.
To simplify this, you can install the SH-Autolink plug-in.
7. Related Posts
Put in links to related posts . This helps search engines crawl your site and may even make your visitors stay a little longer.
You can get a plug-in for this here.
8. Ping Services
Every time you post or edit a post or page, your WordPress blog can notify relevant sites that you have updated your blog.
Be sure to use this feature!
You can set up this feature in Options >> Writing. You can find a list of sites to ping on the WordPress site.
9. Google Sitemaps
Google has a tool for webmasters called Google Sitemaps. This will help Google index your website, and let’s you tell Google which pages are the most important.
If you make use of this feature, you will be able to identify the searches that brought up your site in results.
You can use this plug-in to automatically create a site-map for your WordPress blog.
10. Categories
Categories help you organize your content. If you have permalinks turned on, you can make the category names appear in your URLs.
This is also why it is very important to name your categories carefully. Try using relevant and search engine friendly keywords.
WordPress enables you to make use of subcategories, sub-subcategories etc. etc. In this way you can focus on more narrow keyword phrases.
Consider the following example:
You have a website about selling cameras. You could organize your articles/posts like this:
cameras >> digital cameras >> SLR >> Nikon
If a user would be searching for “digital SLR camera Nikon” the deepest nested category would have a good optimized URL for this search. The URL could be something like this:
www.yoursite.com/cameras/digital-cameras/SLR/nikon/
You can make use of the King Categories Widget to organize your categories.
(via pandla)
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