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.
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
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RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
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If
you have chosen your url preference to “non-www” version then use this code in
.htaccess
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RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
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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.
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
<
If
you also want to include category name then use this code
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/%category%/%postname%/
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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
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/YOUR KEYWORD/%postname%
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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
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/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%/
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Without category
With Your Keyword
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/KEYWORD/%postname%-%post_id%/
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
