WordPress SEO Tips

Posted on May 6th, 2010 by admin Tags: search engine optimization, wordpress seo
in Domain Development, Domain News | 1 Comment »

Most people will agree that using WordPress for blogging purposes is optimal as WordPress was originally created with only this purpose. When it comes to using WordPress as a CMS people are a lot more divided with at least some people claiming it is not very SEO efficient.

I am of the opinion that regardless of what you use WordPress for, or any other CMS for that matter, it is down to you to make sure your setup is SEO optimized, from the html output as a result of your WordPress theme, to the not so small matter of duplicate content issues.

As an avid WordPress fan and user I have gathered quite a bit of knowledge on all configuration aspects of WordPress including optimizing your WordPress installation for SEO purposes.

Outlined below are steps I take every time I install and configure a new instance of WordPress.

Basic SEO Configuration

1. Make sure you are allowing search engines access to your site. A lot of people make the basic mistake of disallowing search engine indexing which in turn means all other SEO efforts are in vein. To make sure you are allowing search engines to index your site/blog, go to the “Privacy” menu item under the “Settings” menu item in your WordPress administration and make sure that the following option is selected.
“I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers”

2. Install the WordPress All in One SEO Pack. This plugin as the name implies does a lot of SEO stuff for you. It allows you to set Meta tags for your home page, other pages as well as individual posts and many other things.

3. Use human readable Permalinks. Configure your WordPress post urls to contain keywords compiled from your post titles by setting the right options under Settings->Permalinks in WordPress administration. If your site is news oriented use a date / keyword combination but otherwise avoid the date subdirectories since they may reduce keyword relevance with some search engines.

4. Integrate Social Media buttons. You can help your visitors to spread the word about your site and individual posts by making it easier for them to do so via plugins like SexyBookmarks which integrate social media buttons into your site.

5. Use tags when posting. Tags give you internal backlinks since each tag gets its own page on your site. This helps with your deeplinking efforts.

6. Install the WordPress Xml Sitemap generator and submit your sitemap to Google webmaster tools. The plugin automatically updates your xml sitemap with new content as you post it. By submitting your xml sitemap to Google webmaster tools you help keep Google up to date with your content and speed up indexing.

7. Use images and header tags in your posts and pages. Images help your posts and pages appear in image search directories while nicely worded alt tags help with keyword weight. Correctly used header tags and html elements in general are important for SEO. For example, make sure your theme uses h1 for post titles, and h2 for subtitles.

8. Make sure your theme puts your content div ahead of the sidebars. Help make the content of your posts and pages more prominent by making sure the div that contains your content appears above your sidebars in the source of your pages and posts. Arrange the sidebars to their right positions appearance-wise via css.

9. Validate your XHtml output. Validate the XHtml code produced by your WordPress installation via a XHTML validator to make sure it provides valid code. The more error-free your code is, the better.

10. Make sure your theme’s single.php template links the post title to itself as this is appreciated by search engines.

11. Allow and encourage commenting. Comments are a source of fresh content for your site/blog and will encourage engine bots to keep coming back to your posts.

Advanced SEO Configuration

1. Avoid duplicate content. Make sure you are only providing your entire post/page content in one location. Show post excerpts on category archives, category listings and other places where your posts are listed to avoid a duplicate content penalty.

2. Use content scrapers to your advantage. As your site/blog grows, you will find that people are scraping your content via autoblogs – duplicating it in effect. There is not much you can do here as complaining won’t make them go away, however you can use this to your advantage by backlinking to your posts within as many posts as you can. On top of that, since the scraping is done your RSS feed, use a Related Posts Plugin to add related posts to your rss feed for each post, effectively creating more backlinks to your site from any scraped posts.

3. Don’t leak link juice. Make sure your theme uses nofollow rel tags appropriately to avoid leaking link juice on sidebar links that appear on each of your posts and pages. Use nofollow and external rel tags when linking to other sites too unless the site is a really reliable source of information.

4. Use traditional SEO techniques. Use nicely worded, targeted keywords for titles. Use bolded text where appropriate, header tags where needed, deep link to posts and pages within your site, develop links and create viral content. Do link exchanges.

5. Use Social Media to your advantage. Use Facebook and Twitter to build links and get followers and fans by installing integration plugins that easily let you post your blog content to your FB, Twitter etc pages and vice versa.

6. Spread your posts time-wise. Rather then posting 5 posts one day and no posts the next week, spread your posts across a week to show search engines that you post regular content. If you are building a site of a more static nature, write extra content and spread it so that one post is posted every week.

Hopefully you found these tips useful and will implement them on your WordPress installations. If you are looking for more tips on building traffic to your blogs, check out my ebook Blog Adrenaline.