Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress
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By 1. Write keyword rich post titles – it almost goes without saying, but the post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into a search box to find your post 2 months from now, and use those words or phrases in your post title. For maximum benefit, try to avoid titles that are cute, clever or cryptic.
2. Make your post titles live links – many of the WP themes already do this, but if yours doesn’t, you can add the necessary code pretty easily. In your Main Index Template and Page Template, find the code for the post tiltle. It’ll probably look like this:
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
To link your post titles, you’ll want to replace that code with the following (be sure to leave out the “#” symbols):
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
3. Optimize your permalinks – the default WP 2.0 installation displays permalinks this way: http://www.savvysolo.com/?p-123. A more search-engine friendly permalink includes the post title in the link, like this: http://www.savvysolo.com/2006/01/16/keyword-rich-post-title/. This is a simple change to make. In your WP admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” sub-tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option. See the WordPress Codex for more on permailinks.
4. Optimize your page titles – According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. In most WP themes, you’ll find the page title tag in the Header Template, and the default version ususally looks like this:
<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>
The best tweak I’ve seen to optimize this tag comes from Stephen Spencer, who suggests using the following code for page title tag (omit the “#”):
<title><?php if (is_home()) { print "whatever title I want to have on my blog home page."; } else { wp_title(' '); print " : "; bloginfo('name'); } ?></title>
This tweak does a couple different things. First, it allows you to use a more descriptive, keyword-rich title for your blog’s main page. And second, for the individual post pages, it will use the title of your post as the page title, which is another reason to follow the advice I mentioned in #1 above.
5. Use the related posts plugin – Alex Malov’s Related Entries plugin is a neat little addition to any WP blog. Not only does it enhance your blog’s usability, but it also helps create a dense link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.
6. Use the Google sitemap plugin – According to Google:
“Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google.”
WordPress user Arne Brachold has made the sitemap creation and submission process fairly simple with his Google Sitemap plugin, which was recently updated for WP 2.0. This plugin will create a sitemap for you and submit it to Google.
Additionally, Elliot Kosmicki offers a script that will convert your Google sitemap into a Yahoo compliant sitemap that you can submit to Yahoo.
7. Add meta keyword tags and Technorati tags to your posts automatically – although it’s questionable whether or not meta keywords are still valuable when it comes to SEO, ultimately, they can’t hurt. As far as Technorati tags, they have little impact on SEO, but they can help increase your traffic directly from Technorati, so it’s a good idea to use them.Rick Boakes created the Autometa plugin that will add both tags to your posts automatically.
Another simple and effective Technorati tag generator I’ve used is Broobles’ Simple Tags plugin.
8. Validate your code – Use the W3C Markup Validation Service to ensure the code behind your pages is clean and valid. If you find your pages have errors in the code, hire or make friends with a savvy web developer to help you clean it up. See Google’s Information for Webmasters for more info on creating a technically valid site.
If you have further SEO tips for WordPress blogs, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
About the Author
Michael Pollock is the marketing and product development guy for Solostream. He's also a blogger, a web marketing trainer and an entrepreneur. When he's not evangelizing Solostream, he trains other solopreneurs on how to use the web to reach more people, earn more money and live a bigger life. Michael's Website.
SEO plays a very important role with the search engines. If you do it correctly, you can pickup on lots of free traffic from the search engines.
The foundation is to have good content and then add SEO to your articles, so it is written more for human readers than search engines.
I have search a very big jump in web traffic, since I have started using ethical SEO methods on my blog. Now, the next step is to get more people to comment.
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for Wordpress 2.0 [...]
thx for your useful information
really a good acticle!
Great tips! Thanks to the author!
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for Wordpress 2.0 [...]
Hay Thank you very much for these tips, they will help me a lot as I have started using wordpress recently.
Keyword density is another important factor to consider and although it was popular at one time to have a density of as much as 5%- 10%, I have recently found that my SEO efforts are far more effective when using a density of 1%-3% in combonation with Latent semantics.
a very good article, i like it
a very informative article,I’ve tried #3,lets see how much it helps.
Nice Article, I was looking for wordpress SEO tips
Very nice tips. I just redid my urls and am in the middle of adding some plugins. Thanks.
This blog is a great source of SEO info for wordpress blogs.
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress: WordPress Themes. WordPress Themes Tutorials. B… (tags: wordpress seo tips blog blogging plugins) Filed under Links by hyperlinkguerrilla [...]
Good list, I am also trying to optimize my blog as good as possible
Well, quality content is always the most important point. What also matters is a good layout and a minimal loading time. People on the web move very fast. If your website takes too long to open, people will move on and not link it
Maybe not completely SEO, but a decent theme along with your good content will make the site more appealing to visitors and could keep visitors at your site a little longer. Some people are automatically turned off when they see the default or a horrible theme. Why spend all that time optimizing if someone will leave due to a poor theme choice?
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[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
Hi,
that is what I’ve been looking for. I just started my blog but haven’t yet know all the tricks. Im using Joomla for this purposes but that CMS has little or no built in SEO. So I decide to resaddle on WordPress for my first site http:\\wwww.playingod.com .
Yours tips are a good shot for beginners like me.
Thank you,
Alen
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
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[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress 2.0 [...]
Great post, the wordpress plugin directory has a lot of good stuff at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ take a look.
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I am just getting into WordPress and these are very informative links for me. Thanks.
Thanks for the great tips. I have been trying to find out how to add a separate keyword rich title to the home page of my blog for ages – now I know how. Thanks.
Great post and great to learn there are others like yourselves who have gone through the ringer. Title tags and meta description tags are great ways to increase your clickthrough rate. They should be informative, natural, and contain relevant keywords ,all of this in a balance to benefit both search engines and users. SEO Articles
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Michael – thanks for this excellent post. The information here is really helpful.
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Hey !!
This is definitely a well compiled article and thnx for sharing the usefull info . I am kinda looking forward to get into blogging and these informative posts are really helpful . Thnx !!
Regards ,
Nikhil
http://www.frazzlet.com
Excellent SEO article with very helpul SEO tips
http://supaz.wordpress.com
hey jon:
thanks for writing. here are my 3 brief pieces of advise beyond what’s in the article.
first, do more research. there’s alot of great info out there on SEO for wordpress, so start with a Google search. also research sites that are similar in content as your own.
second, just start writing. nothing builds traffic better than great content. and be sure to link to other bloggers in your niche.
third, make a ong-term commitment. building traffic takes time, so plan on at least a 6 month commitment before you start to see results.
hope that helps.
best – michael