A Search Engine Optimization Guide for Wordpress by Jai Nischal Verma
According to recent statistics, Wordpress accounts for 0.8% of the web which makes Wordpress the best choice for any enthusiast blogger. Hundreds and thousands of blogs are created every day which use Wordpress as the blogging CMS (Content Management System), but not all of them are optimized for good search engine rankings. In this guide, I will instruct you how to quickly set up your Wordpress installation for the best SEO results and make your website more search engine friendly. You might know some of these techniques already, but the following steps will play the role of a checklist for you.
Follow the steps carefully and try not to miss out on any of them in order to acquire the best results for your blog.
v Step I –
Blog Title &
Taglines
I am assuming that you know how to install Wordpress for yourself. If not, please refer to http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress. After the installation is completed, go to the
wp-admin and under the Options -> General tab, fill out your Blog title and the
tagline. Make sure that your Blog title is meaningful
and your tagline is search engine friendly. The tagline
should
basically summarize what you do on your blog and ensure that you target the right
keywords for your website. Fill in the
rest of
the information and we
are
done with this step.
vStep II – Update
Services
Under the Options, go to the next tab called Writing
and scroll down to the Update Services text box. Here you can input a list of update services separating them with line breaks (pressing
the enter key). These are basically websites which maintain a list of all
the current weblog
updates in different areas. When you make
a post, Wordpress will ping these websites to
inform
them
that
you have updated your
blog.
Doing this will make your blog more social and also get you additional
traffic through these update services. People who browse websites like Technorati and Sphere can easily find the
posts
that you made recently. Given below is a list of such ping services which I got from the
official Wordpress website. Just copy and paste them
in the update
services
box.
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping http://api.feedster.com/ping.php http://api.moreover.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping http://bblog.com/ping.php http://bitacoras.net/ping http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
v Step III – Modifying the Title Tags of
your Wordpress Theme
There is a factor here which has to be taken
into
consideration. Whenever
you make a
new post
now, Wordpress will try to ping all these websites one by one and that process will waste a lot
of time before you can make another post or do anything in Wordpress. In order to avoid this, you should use a plugin for Wordpress called No Ping Wait. This plugin actually puts the process of pinging in the backlog and allows you to continue working seamlessly by removing any kind of delays. Download this plugin, install and activate it on your Wordpress blog.
The title tags in your pages matter a lot for SEO purpose but Wordpress themes are usually not optimized for them. To make your theme more search engine friendly, go to Presentation -> Theme Editor in the admin area of Wordpress. Now open the header.php file for editing and replace whatever is between <title> & </title> tag with the following code:-
<?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo('name'); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo " - "; bloginfo('name'); } elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?>
Step IV – Meta Tags
Wordpress does not insert any Meta tags in your blog on its own. Meta tags are very important if you want the search engines to fall in love with your blog. You can use the All in one SEO Pack plugin for all your Meta tags including the titles too. You will get all the help for installing this plugin on the author’s plugin homepage. There are other plugins as well which can be used to insert Meta tags into the blog. Just search for them on Google.
Step V – Permalinks & Mod_rewrite
Search engines will always index your pages faster if your URLs are text-based instead of being long strings of code. Having your keywords in the URL is beneficial as it tells the spiders about your page content. For example, the URL http://mysite.com/?var1=3434&var2=3434 is not search engine friendly, but if the same URL was written like http://mysite.com/my-page.html, it would be easier for the search engines to index the URL.
This kind of link conversion is done using a server-side feature called Mod_rewrite which uses an .htaccess file that is placed in your website root folder. Wordpress already has this inbuilt functionality to generate pretty URLs, so all you have to do is enable the option. Go to Options -> Permalinks in the Wordpress admin, and you will see the following common options.
The title tags in your pages matter a lot for SEO purpose but Wordpress themes are usually not optimized for them. To make your theme more search engine friendly, go to Presentation ->
Theme Editor in the admin area of Wordpress. Now open the header.php file for editing and
replace whatever is between
<title> & </title> tag with the
following code:-
<?php
if (is_home
() ) { bloginfo('name'); } elseif
( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo " - "; bloginfo('name');
} elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif
(is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo
wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title('',true);
} ?>
vStep IV –
Meta Tags
Wordpress does not insert any Meta tags in your blog on its own. Meta tags are very important if you want the search engines to fall in love with your blog. You can use
the All in one SEO Pack
plugin
for all your Meta tags including the titles too. You will get all
the help for installing this plugin on the author’s plugin homepage. There are other plugins as well which can be used to insert Meta tags
into the
blog.
Just search for them
on Google.
vStep V –
Permalinks &
Mod_rewrite
Search engines will always index your pages faster
if your URLs are text-based
instead of being long strings of code. Having your keywords in the URL is beneficial as it tells the spiders about
your
page content. For example, the URL http://mysite.com/?var1=3434&var2=3434 is not search engine friendly, but if the same URL was written like http://mysite.com/my-page.html, it would be
easier for the search engines
to index the
URL.
This kind of link conversion is done using a server-side feature called Mod_rewrite which uses an .htaccess file that is placed in your website root folder. Wordpress already has this inbuilt functionality to generate pretty URLs, so all you have to do is enable the option. Go to Options
-> Permalinks in the
Wordpress admin, and you will
see the
following common options
Click on the fourth option (Custom) to enable it, and type %postname%.html in the text box. This will make your URLs include the titles of your posts/pages and format them accordingly. If you have a post with the title “Hello World”, this will convert the URL to yourdomain.com/hello-world.html for that particular post.
Note: You should have Linux based hosting for the Mod_rewrite function to work properly. If not, you can choose the
second option which is date
and name based.
vStep VI –
Optimization of Keywords
When making
new posts or pages in Wordpress, make sure that you are targeting your search keywords properly. Try to include those keywords in the titles for which you want to be
searched and indexed. If your content is unique and you have chosen the right keywords,
search engines will quickly
pick
up your articles
and index them.
Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool is a good way to look for popular keywords related to your niche and then optimize accordingly. Use variations for your keywords and include them in
different phrases.
Search engines rank
your
pages by keywords in the
following order:-
üProminence and accuracy of the
keywords
üFrequency of the keywords
üConcentration
of the keywords
üCloseness within the
keywords
üPlacement of the keywords in
the content
So, be sure that you have a balanced article before publishing it to your audience and please do not spam your keywords because everyone hates it, including the search engines.
Step VII – Google Sitemap
Google Sitemap is a file which contains URLs and some
supplementary information for
all the public pages or documents of your website. There is no proof that a Google Sitemap will
directly affect your ranking in any way. However, it can help Google to crawl your blog better
which
may result in a more complete
index
of your page.
You may use a plugin which will automatically generate XML sitemaps for your blog. Download here ->
Google Sitemaps Generator
for Wordpress
Step VIII – Social Bookmarking Plugins
You should download and install a social bookmarking plugin which will enable your visitors to bookmark and submit your posts to various bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc. The most popular plugin for social bookmarking nowadays is AddThis. It has support for adding the bookmarking widget at the end of every post in your blog and I would definitely recommend that.
That concludes the “Wordpress SEO for Beginners”. I hope that people starting out with Wordpress will benefit from this guide.
