10 Search Engine Optimisation Tips For WordPress Blogs
Search engine optimisation for WordPress is essential if you are to gain maximum traction from your efforts. Many corporate or business blogs are started with the intention of using them to;
- broaden the companies information distribution
- provide an easy way to grow the site
- provide an easy way to create fresh content
- increase the “stickiness” of the site
- generate additional qualified traffic
- increase incoming link count
However, what many people fail to understand is that the default installation of WordPress simply does not include even the most basic SEO functionality. The default WordPress installation generates unintelligible URLs, generic Page Titles and neither Description nor Keyword meta-tags. Thus, the chances of achieving the desired goals is severely compromised! That search engines hate duplicate content is a given - and 3 of the key indicators are page URL, Title and Description!
Fortunately, SEO for WordPress is facilitated by the concept of “plugins” or easily installed mini-applications which provide specific functionality. They do so dynamically - in other words, once installed the applications automate the process of generating accurate outputs, with no manual efforts required by you. Here are ten essential enhancements to WordPress that will make a huge difference in the qualified traffic your blog delivers to you!
1. Page Names or URLs
This is controlled by the Permalinks setting - the default produces garbage URL’s which give no indication of the actual page or post content. However, its not particularly difficult to have every page URL show as a keyword-rich plain-English file name with an HTML extension! This can be based on the post title or Slug, so you have precise control over the page name / URL. Achieving this simply requires the use of the Custom Permalink option.
2. Titles
The Optimal Title plugin provides a quick solution - once installed it dynamically inserts the post title into the pages Title tag, in front of the Weblog title you have set. This facilitates keyword-rich titles specific/unique to the page / post. Accurate titles are the single most important on-site SEO element.
3. Description Meta-tag
There are several plugins that dynamically provides good Description meta-tags. The one I like is Head-Meta-Desc as its a no-brainer to install, and by default uses either the optional excerpt if present, or the first 20 words from the first paragraph of the posting. The only thing I change is to edit the number of words it takes - from 20 to 30, which usually produces a Description tag containing 180 - 200 characters.
4. Keyword Meta-Tag
To produce an accurate page-specific keyword meta-tag, I use Ultimate Tag Warrior - a keyword meta-tag is an on/off option within this plugin, and it dynamically produces keywords based on post category + tags used in the post. That’s not all it does!
5. Tag Management
When you see the word “tag” in the blog context, simply think “keyword.” Tags are the blogger’s version of keywords, which are “pinned” to blog post to help categorise them, and find them, or similar / related posts again. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin previously mentioned will manage your tags for you… the ultimate convenience being the drop-down list of tags available on new posts! This speeds up the tagging process, and assists in tag name consistency. UTW provides various options for displaying tags on each post - as a list, as a tag cloud…
6. Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress
A sitemap is a key SEO tool to ensure pages have the best possible chance of being found and indexed by search engine spiders. This plugin creates a Google-compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog, including homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives. This plugin also notifies Google whenever the sitemap gets regenerated - which happens automatically every time a new post is made!
7. Categories
Use them wisely! take care to use keyword-rich, accurate Category names, these will be used in URLs, and in keyword meta-tags.
8. Post Titles
Use them wisely also! Keyword-rich, accurate post titles can make the world of difference to your SE rankings. Coupled with Optimal Title, the post title is going to be the first section of the Page Title. Each post title should include a relevant keyword / keyword phrase…
9. Maximise Blog & Ping Potential
There are services that scan blogs regularly for updates, and publish the recent updates. To derive the benefit of that, you need to add an expanded ping list to the Options / Writing / Update List. By default, WordPress only pings the Pingomatic service with new posts. There are a growing number of other distribution services that you need to be notifying, to get the best results.
10 Blog Search Engines & Directories
You must manually submit your blog to 100+ top blog search engines and directories to gain maximum traction. Registration on those offering ping services ensures that your blog’s update pings will be accepted and processed by them.
If you implement these 10 simple WordPress search engine optimisation modifications to your blog, I can guarantee you will achieve a huge boost in traffic flows! If you need help, its part of what we do…
Suicide in Cyberspace - Your Outward Links Can Kill Your Rankings
Link building strategies have, for most people for a long time, revolved around reciprocal link exchanges. Whilst most people understand that links are important, they generally don’t understand why this is so. In a nutshell, a link to your site has traditionally been accepted by Search Engines as a vote for your site. A link from a topic or theme-related site to yours is better than a link from a site having a completely different topic. An important site’s link to yours carries more weight - for example from The Open Directory, or Yahoo Directory. All pretty straightforward…
BUT… the rules have changed… significantly! All the thinking webmasters worked diligently to build links - willy-nilly - in order to subvert the search engine rankings and gain an advantage to themselves at the expense of everyone else. For a long time, there have been mutterings about this, and comments from Google staffers about possible penalties from linking to “bad neighbourhoods’” and - heaven forbids it - buying links! Google et al simply don’t approve of willy-nilly link-building schemes, and have recently tightened the screws a bit more, in two notable ways…
Bad Links
Some links are bad… for example, if you are a car sales company and you’ve got dozens of completely irrelevant links to international hotel sites… yeah, YOU know the ones! in Prague, Munich, Shanghai etc! That’s a BAD neighbourhood over there! That IS going to put a world of hurt on you! And as for the Free For All link sites, web rings, and 3 way link schemes… that’s just suicide in cyberspace! Why? Coz its a blatant and completely indefensible attempt at cheating the system!
Reciprocal Links - Almost a Waste of Effort
Reciprocal links are still of some value, providing the link titles are explicit, and if the page they link to you from has a higher Page Rank than the page from which you link to them. The concept of a link to you being a vote for you, and being added to your site’s Total Vote Count has a flip side. A link from you to someone else essentially deducts a vote from your total vote count… meaning its value is minimal when compared to a 1-way incoming back-link!
1-way Outward Links Are Toxic
Ok, lets assume you are a service provider, maybe a health clinic, and you deal with hospitals, other doctors, specialists, nurses, laboratories. So, as a benefit to your visitors, you place direct links to their web resources on your links page. Is that clever? Most certainly it is NOT! Transfusion time, because you’ll be haemorrhaging Page Rank with nothing in return! Do it, but be smart about it, because there is NOTHING to be gained (by you) from linking to any site that does not link back. So make sure your links include the “nofollow” attribute that tells SE’s that the link is NOT a vote by your site for that site!
Link Content Is Mission Critical
This is mission critical because Google and other have decided that they can’t trust you to be honest about your site! Basically, it seems like there are two web tribes - those who know not so much about how things work, and those who know more than they should. There should be a flourishing third tribe, who just build great sites with lots of terrific content that automatically ranks highly - but nobody’s seen nuthin’ from those guys for ages!
The tribe who know more than they should ruthlessly manipulate every available loophole to dominate search engine rankings, at the expense of those who have yet to read SEO For Dummies. Therefore, Google decided that its essential that there is some external correlation between what YOU say your site is about, and what OTHER people say your site is about… This is done by analysing the words in the Link Title on all links pointing to your site. Bottom line here is - if a keyword phrases does NOT appear on links to your site, you ain’t gonna rank for that phrase!
For many established sites, this is the main reason they might have experienced a noticeable decline in rankings in the last few months. Most older sites will have a majority of incoming links based on their business name, and NOT on their activities / products / services / location etc. To use the common “widgets” analogy - if you are selling “widgets” and all your incoming link Titles have your only business name e.g. Smiths Manufacturing Co Ltd, its now very difficult for you to rank for “widgets”!
Backlink analysis reveals this shortcoming rather quickly and, lucky for you, it is possible to remedy this by building 1-way incoming back-links using multiple Title / Description combinations that contain a good spread of relevant keywords. It does require some keyword research, and it is tedious - but if you don’t do it, you are certainly not going forwards! But your competitors might be…
Yet Another SEO Article by;
Ben Kemp, aka The SEO Guy
Web: www.comauth.co.nz
Email: SEO
Contact us for a Free SEO Site Review….
Google Supplemental Index - aka - All The Other Crap We Found
Google Supplemental Results Index is NOT a place you want to be! The way you end up in there is if your pages are so badly described or categorised, Google could scarcely decide if there was a difference between them. Bottom line is, if you don’t take the time and effort to make your pages unique, with page URLs, Titles and Descriptions that accurately describe the contents of the page, why on earth should Google even bother indexing them at all? That they do so is a credit to them, even though they no option but to park them in the “Other Crap We Found” bin…
Everyone who bothers to read the Search Engine Guidelines would know that Search Engines loathe duplicate content with a passion bordering on paranoia… Three of the key “uniqueness” indicators on a web page are its URL, Title and Description. If all pages have unfriendly URLs containing “&, = or ?” and not a keyword in sight, that is a very bad start. Compound that with generic Titles and Description meta-tags, and you’ve gone a long way towards obfuscating the reason that the page exists.
Do a Google search for “site:www.mysite.com” (replace “mysite” with YOUR site’s domain name) for obvious reasons… This will show you what they have found and indexed on your site… You will see the individual page URLs, the Titles and Descriptions… All different, are they? If not, you have a problem! Not only must they be different, they must be accurate!
Bear in mind that in the event that one of those pages actually finds itself thrust into prominence in a Search Engine Results Page, it needs to capture the interest and attention of the viewer… and if they click through to your site, its important that they find what they were looking for! If not, they left already! That is twice as bad as you might think, because Google actually takes note of how long they stayed… and factors this into your sites relevancy for whatever term your page was found for. If people are going to you and staying for a while, the “stickiness” of your site can increase your rankings for that search term! Conversely… if they are leaving immediately, your page will decrease in value as a consequence.
As a general rule, your goal should be to make sure that every page on your site is unique / different. It should focus on 1 - 3 specific keyword phrases that will draw people in via search engine results pages, and it should provide information, entertainment or something of value related to that term or terms. If it does not do that, there seems little point having the page on the site in the first place!
Optimisation of a site is all about accurately describing the contents so that its obvious to both automated Search Engine spiders AND human viewers. That brings the “qualified traffic” flow of visitors who know what they want, and that your site probably has it!
Yet Another SEO Article by;
Ben Kemp, aka The SEO Guy
Web: www.comauth.co.nz
Email: SEO
Contact us for a Free SEO Site Review….
