All Basic Steps For Word Press

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

^?Download download.txt

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

^?Download download.txt

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

< 

^?Download download.txt

1	/%postname%/

If you also want to include category name then use this code

^?Download download.txt

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

^?Download download.txt

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

^?Download download.txt

1	/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%/

Without category

^?Download download.txt

1	/%postname%-%post_id%/

With Your Keyword

^?Download download.txt

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

Download 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 useheadspace2 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:

^?Download download.txt

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.