Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress

In this post, we are going to discuss Search Engine Optimization a.k.a SEO for the famous blogging platform, Wordpress. Wordpress can be easily optimized for search engines because of the fact that so many plugins are available for customizing it. Plus the coding of Wordpress is easy to understand and thus you can easily edit it.

PART I - FINDING A SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY THEME

Optimizing wordpress should, in my view, start with finding a Search Engine Friendly theme. What am I talking about? Does a theme determine my Search Rankings ( SERP’s)? Not completely, but yes, it does to an extent. Here’s how :

• A SEO friendly theme ensures that SPIDERS dont have difficulties while crawling your content.

• The first 50-60 words the SPIDER sees should mainly consist of your content and not other HTML/Javascript code.

• The theme you are using should be completely valid. Use this to check it out.

• Your theme should not have any flash/ajax or if it is that necessary, keep it to the minimum you can.

• The themes should be coded in such a way that the h1 tags are used only one time and also in the single posts page, the post title should come first and anything should come afterwards.

Much more can be said, but I am limiting it to here. I think that by now, you all must have realized the importance of Search Engine friendly themes.Now lets move on :

ON-SITE OPTIMIZATION

On-site optimization is another very important part of wordpress SEO. Here we go :

• Title tags - As far as Search engine bots are concerned, they give the most weightage to your title tag. So the text you put between <title> and </title> is going to do it or spoil the party. To optimize the title tags, you may go to your DashBoard > Options > Permalinks and change it to <category><post-title> format. However, you can change it to any format you wish. Another option for doing the thing is this :

a) Go to your DASHBOARD > PRESENTATION > THEME EDITOR and then click on header in the right hand column.

b) Search out for the text between <title> and </title>

c) Replace it with this : <title><?php if (is_home()) { bloginfo('description'); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?> | <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>

d) Click on update the file and then go to your blog and see the wonderful results.

Anyways, I hope that you are enjoying your journey. If you had missed any steps above, stop on and read them again. Otherwise, move on

• Interlinking your blog posts : Interlinking blog posts is a very good option to make sure that none of your pages get engraved and that everything stays alive. After all you’d never want to lose the worthy posts that you spend your time writing.

Now adding the real JOSH to your blog

As people say, write and hear, Wordpress is SEO friendly by default. I agree. But if we do some work and add some “Power capsules” (better known as plugins) to the Wordpress, won’t it come first in the race? It will. Here we go :

• Akismet - This plugin comes inside the Wordpress Package. All you have to do is to go to Plugins and then activate Akismet.You know that the “virtual world” (internet) is full of scammers and people whom you wont like to see around your blog.This is the filter you need.

• All in one SEO - Simply one of the best plugins for Wordpress. If you take my opinion, it should have been there in the Wordpress package as Akismet. It provides you with the option of adding keywords, description and much more flexibility that will help you in getting better Search Engine Rankings.

• Google XML Sitemaps - Google loves Sitemaps because it helps the SPIDER to crawl easy. This is the plugin to make GOOGLE happy .

• RB Internal Links - Interlinking your posts is a good way to get better rankings, though it is not often followed. It is a very time consuming job to link all your posts, remember their URL’s etc etc. This is the plugin that solves 80% of the work.

• BookMarkify - Social Bookmarking sites like DIGG, SU, Mixx , Slashdot etc are becoming a tool for getting huge and instant traffic. This is one of those plugins which will put the small bookmarking buttons below your posts which allows your visitors to bookmark the post in their favourite site.

Well, the above said plugins will add something to your wordpress and really, I can bet for that, you will enjoy blogging more than you ever did!

1 Response

1. Hi
   seo is the best thing for getting the traffic and pagerank.

   Thanks & Regards
   M A Rahaman
   info@seoipro.com
   http://www.seoipro.com/

   Comment by M A Rahaman on March 30, 2008

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