by Christian Van Den Berge
WordPress is getting more popular by the day. It enables people to set up a blog, and even a complete website within minutes. With all the great free plugins and designs out there it is really an easy to use and complete blogging solution.
I get asked for specific SEO tips for WordPress very often. Basically all the 'usual' SEO stuff is also applicable for WordPress. But besides that, there are a few tips for WordPress I'd like to share with you. Here it goes:
1. Use Permalinks
Be sure to use Permalinks on your blog. By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. These links are hard to spider for search engines, and therefor your postings aren't indexed as fast and as good as you want to. WordPress offers you the ability however, to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. You can find this option in your Admin panel. Choose 'Options' in the menu and there 'Permalinks'. This brings us immediately to Tip 2:
2. Place your titles up front in your URLs
In the Permalinks section you can choose for the 'Date and name based' option. This will place the year, month, day and post title in your URL. For SEO purposes it's better to have your post title up front. So instead you should choose for the 'Custom' option and put in something like: /%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/
This will give you an URL like this:
http://www.seo-portal.com/section-targeting-for-adsense/2006/07/06/
3. Tags
Tags are a great SEO addition to your blog. They enable search engines to crawl your website more easily and in addition to that, create specific pages for your tags/keywords. You can install the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin on your WordPress blog. Get the plugin here: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
4. Page Titles
Make sure you set good titles on your pages. We discussed putting the post title up front in your URL. You should do the same thing for your Titles. You can do this by changing the < title > tag in your header.php (located in wp-content/themes/your theme/) You can use the following code in order to get your post title in front, followed by your blog name:
<![CDATA[
<title><? php wp_title(); ?> : <? php bloginfo('name'); ?> </title>
]]>
5. Choose your Post Titles carefully
Your Post Titles should be as clear as possible. Don't stuff your titles with keywords you are targeting with your whole blog. Choose your keywords carefully per posting, and get those words in your Post Title.
6. Autolinks
Cross link to your own posts and pages in your own content. Do this by linking your keywords to the relevant postings. To facilitate this work, you can install the SH-Autolink plugin. http://www.rockschtar.de/wp-plugin-sh-autolink/
7. Related Posts
Put links to related posts under your postings. This helps search engines crawling your site and indexing all your postings. You can get a plugin for this here: http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/
8. Ping Services
Everytime you post or edit a posting or page, your WordPress blog can notify lots of sites that you updated your blog. Be sure to use this feature! You can set up this feature in Options >> Writing. You can find a list of sites to ping on the WordPress site:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services
9. Google Sitemaps
Google has a tool for webmasters called Google Sitemaps. This will help Google index your website, and let's you tell Google which pages are most important. If you make use of this feature, you will be able to see for what searches your site was shown in the results. This helps you optimizing your appearance in Google. You can use this plugin to automatically create a sitemap for your WordPress blog:
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
10. Categories
Categories help you organize your content. If you have the permalinks turned on, the category names will appear in your URL. This is why it is also very important to name your categories carefully; Try to use keywords to name your categories and don't be afraid to make a load. WordPress enables you to make use of subcategories and sub-subcategories etc. etc. This way you can narrow down your focus on certain keyword phrases. Consider the following example:
You have a website about selling photocamera's. You could organize your articles/postings like this: fotocamera's >> Digital camera's >> SLR >> Nikon If a user would be searching for "digital SLR camera nikon" the deepest nested category would have a good optimized url for this search as the url would be something like this www.yoursite.com/fotocameras/digital-cameras/SLR/nikon/
You can make use of the King Categories Widget to organize your categories: http://www.blog.mediaprojekte.de/cms-systeme/wordpress/wordpress-widget-king-categories/
Chris writes daily SEO postings on his weblog SEO Portal on http://www.seo-portal.com
