Top Wordpress SEO Tips for Top 10 Rankings.
This article shows you how to optimize your Wordpress blog for search engines so you can capture those coveted top 10 search results.
SEO Tip for Wordpress Titles
Your PAGE title should include your keywords in order to be optimized for search engines. Your POST title should be catchy and written for your visitors. How do you accomplish this in Wordpress?
Get the SEO Title Tag Wordpress plugin. It allows you to have separate titles for your posts and your pages.
Advanced Tip: You'll also want to check your post template (single.php) and make sure your post titles are using H2 tags and are linking to your Permalink URL.
This will give your post titles more prominence in the search engines. An example code:
<h2 class='post-title'><a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
SEO Tip for your Wordpress blog name.
Make sure your blog name is wrapped in the <H1> html tag.
Check your header.php (Presentation > Theme Editor) and make sure your code looks something like this: <h1 class="blogtitle"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1>.
Don't forget to use keywords in your blog name! If you want to rank for SEO News (like i do :D), then put SEO News somewhere in your blog name title.
Wordpress SEO with Permalinks.
The default structure for your permalinks is: http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123
For SEO purposes, it should be like this: http://www.yourblog.com/your-post-title/
The main reason for this is? You want your keywords in your URL to be bold when someone is deciding which link to click in Google search results.
To change this in Wordpress admin, go to Options > Permalinks, then select Custom and enter
/%postname%/ in the text field.
WARNING: This is for new blogs only. Do not do this step if your blog is already established. It will break all the links coming back to your blog. There are ways around this by editing your .htaccess file to redirect your links correctly using a 301 redirect but it is not for the technically challenged.
Backlinks are votes for your blog.
Getting backlinks to your posts is the most important factor for getting higher rankings in search engines. Think of links as votes for your blog. The more votes you have, the more search engines believe that your page is relevant to the search query. There are many ways to get backlinks, the most important is creating content that people will want to link to. Once you've done that, encourage them to link to it.
You want your backlinks to contain the text that you want to rank for. For example: If I want to rank for SEO News. I try to encourage people to link back to me with this code: <a href="http://www.increased-online-traffic.com/seo-news.asp">SEO News</a>.
Here's a Wordpress plugin I found today that encourages your visitors to link to your posts using your post titles as the link text: Link to Me Textbox Wordpress Plugin.
Follow these steps and I guarantee you will get increased traffic to your Wordpress blog from search engines. If you have any questions about any of these tips, leave a comment and I will try to answer them as quickly as possible.
SEO Tip for Wordpress Titles
Your PAGE title should include your keywords in order to be optimized for search engines. Your POST title should be catchy and written for your visitors. How do you accomplish this in Wordpress?
Get the SEO Title Tag Wordpress plugin. It allows you to have separate titles for your posts and your pages.
Advanced Tip: You'll also want to check your post template (single.php) and make sure your post titles are using H2 tags and are linking to your Permalink URL.
This will give your post titles more prominence in the search engines. An example code:
<h2 class='post-title'><a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
SEO Tip for your Wordpress blog name.
Make sure your blog name is wrapped in the <H1> html tag.
Check your header.php (Presentation > Theme Editor) and make sure your code looks something like this: <h1 class="blogtitle"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1>.
Don't forget to use keywords in your blog name! If you want to rank for SEO News (like i do :D), then put SEO News somewhere in your blog name title.
Wordpress SEO with Permalinks.
The default structure for your permalinks is: http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123
For SEO purposes, it should be like this: http://www.yourblog.com/your-post-title/
The main reason for this is? You want your keywords in your URL to be bold when someone is deciding which link to click in Google search results.
To change this in Wordpress admin, go to Options > Permalinks, then select Custom and enter
/%postname%/ in the text field.
WARNING: This is for new blogs only. Do not do this step if your blog is already established. It will break all the links coming back to your blog. There are ways around this by editing your .htaccess file to redirect your links correctly using a 301 redirect but it is not for the technically challenged.
Backlinks are votes for your blog.
Getting backlinks to your posts is the most important factor for getting higher rankings in search engines. Think of links as votes for your blog. The more votes you have, the more search engines believe that your page is relevant to the search query. There are many ways to get backlinks, the most important is creating content that people will want to link to. Once you've done that, encourage them to link to it.
You want your backlinks to contain the text that you want to rank for. For example: If I want to rank for SEO News. I try to encourage people to link back to me with this code: <a href="http://www.increased-online-traffic.com/seo-news.asp">SEO News</a>.
Here's a Wordpress plugin I found today that encourages your visitors to link to your posts using your post titles as the link text: Link to Me Textbox Wordpress Plugin.
Follow these steps and I guarantee you will get increased traffic to your Wordpress blog from search engines. If you have any questions about any of these tips, leave a comment and I will try to answer them as quickly as possible.
posted by SEO Rob at 1/15/2008 04:53:00 PM
18 Comments:
Good read. I guess this explains why adsense suddenly gives me content ads about turnips instead of entrecard, my blog title.
Oh everyone has to read this! Rob's tips helped me a lot. In fact, as soon as I followed his advice, the search engines started finding my very old articles that never quite got eyeballs.
Rob is the SEO master of the new web.
This sounds like really cool stuff Rob but it's gone right over my head. One day maybe!
I will have to check the H2 tags on my permalinks. Thanks for the tips.
I thought that wordpress could not have permalinks for posts :
http://www.yoursite.com/your-article/
Don't you need something between your domain name and your post slug? Like a date?
If it works, then WP has upgraded this!
This is just what I need! Thanks!
The All In One SEO pack for WordPrss users is an excellent tool as well. I use it, which allows entering keywords for the post, and I have had a huge spike in traffic from not only Google, (which is who the plugin is optimized for), But Yahoo and Ask.com- 2 search engines that were lagging behind Google and MSN at one point. The only issue I have with the plugin- it seems like the guy who wrote it updates it weekly, so you're always having to download a new version.
@beth I did not mention the All-in-one SEO plugin for a reason. Let me explain. As you know, the plugin optimizes your titles tags and allows you to input META tags for keywords and descriptions.
As for the titles, SEO Title Tag accomplishes this better allowing you to have different page titles from your post titles.
As for the keywords META tag, this tag has been abused many times over by keyword stuffing spammers and has lost all of it's value in the major search engines. Search engines pick up your keywords from your page, not the keywords tag. Thus, this tag is virtually useless now. A couple of search engines probably still use them, but the Pareto principle applies here. At least 80% of your search engine queries will come from 20% of the search engines.
As for the description META tag, this will only show in Google (and other major search engines) if Google cannot find a good snippet from your page for the search query.
Quote from Google "We know from user studies that users are more likely to visit your site if the search results show the snippet. Why? Because snippets make it much easier for users to see why the result is relevant to their query. If a user isn't able to make this determination quickly, he or she usually moves on to the next search result."
Google always seems to find good snippets for my pages because I mention the keywords in the posts. Thus, putting time into writing description tags is pretty much wasted time and effort.
@wordpress xarj Yes, Wordpress upgraded, it's now impossible to have duplicate slugs.
@Rob: I wasn't aware of the meta tags for the plugin you're using, but the All In One also allows your post titles to be different- I use it all the time for that very purpose. What a person sees on the post itself will be different than what the search engines pick up- because (if I'm writing something I want optimized), I'll use a keyword rich title, matching the keywords in the post. I'll have to download this plugin to dabble with the meta.
I was a misguided wordpress 2.3.2 user who thought that just because there are tag capabilities on my WP, I dont need the All-in-one-SEO.
Should I include the tags I used on my built in WP tag box in the keywords box of the All in one SEO? Or should I put in different keywords?
Rob -- Just curious about why you would use the H1 tag for the blog name and not the post title.
Semantically, the post is a web page in the the blog (the book, if you will) and H1 should be the heading of the page (not the blog).
From an SEO standpoint even, having your keyword rich post title in the H1 tag will promote those keywords further, for you are putting more emphasis on the fact they are at the highest document level on the Hx scale. I have been doing this for years and with great success.
@ruby The keywords in the ALL-IN-ONE plugin fills in your Keywords META description. I don't bother with this META tag as it outdated and none of the major search engines follow it. Yes maybe some smaller search engines do.. but I don't optimize for them. So, leave it blank and you'll be fine.
@webstractions By all means, yes, you want to use H1 for your post titles on your post pages. I guess I wasn't clear. What I meant was to use H2s for post titles on your blog index page. Thank you for clearing that up for my readers.
Awesome! I followed every step and implemented as I was reading through. After all the necessary changes, in addition to other modifications my site is still Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!
Nice post and great comments. Very helpful.
Hey Rob, thanks for the tip on the "Link to Me" plugin. Didn't know that was out there and I'm going to try it out now. Very helpful post, I certainly appreciate it.
Sort of related: have you used the Technorati tags optimizer? Do you think it matters that we optimize for Technorati?
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/BunnysTechnoratiTags
thanks again!
Great article and some useful information
Great post! Thanks for the insights and enlightenment. Your posts really gave me valuable information.
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