Top 4 Ways to Do SEO for WordPress
Search engine optimization for WordPress involves tweaking your default settings as well as placing keywords in the right places. Only time and lots of data will tell if your efforts are successful or not. While I’m not an SEO guru, I’ve personally used the following techniques, and they have worked well for me.
Use Keywords in Permalinks
For SEO purposes, you should choose carefully what appears in the URL of your posts. Dates and numbers don’t help optimize them, but keywords can. Change the permalink structure so it shows only the post name. Then when you create a new post, edit its permalink so it includes only a few select keywords.
To change the permalink structure of WordPress posts:
- Click the arrow on Settings.
- Click Permalinks.
- Under Common settings, click Custom Structure.
- Enter /%postname%/ in the box.
- Click Save Changes
Enter a Good Meta Description
What, meta tags? You may be saying, “But search engines don’t use metas anymore!” It’s true that Google no longer uses meta keywords in its search engine rankings. But that doesn’t mean all meta tags are useless. In particular, I have found meta descriptions useful for controlling how my pages look in SERPs. A well-written meta description makes a page look good, and can result in higher click rates if they convince the searcher that that page is relevant to his query.
You can hard code meta tags into your WordPress blog, and that’s probably the best route if you want to make sure they work just as you need them to. But I prefer to use a WordPress SEO plugin, namely the popular All in One SEO Pack plugin.
All in One SEO lets you do cool things such as:
- Customize the title structure for posts, pages and home page
- Create unique meta descriptions, titles and keywords for the home page and each post
- Make specific areas a noindex
Make Post Tags Clean and Specific
If you choose to display WordPress tags prominently, you want them to be useful and well-structured. Unfortunately, tags are so easy to mess up. You can type up a bunch of keywords in the Post Tags area and be done with it. But this often results in a messy tag inventory with dozens, maybe hundreds, of redundant tags.
I suggest you keep the number of tags on your blog low (several hundred is too many) and delete repetitive or similar-sounding tags.
To illustrate: If I write a post about Facebook layouts, it would be redundant to make tags about Facebook themes, Facebook skins and Facebook backgrounds. Stick with just one and use that each time. If I were to use “facebook layouts” in some posts and “facebook wallpaper” in others, then the user won’t be able to find all relevant posts when browsing the Blog Lady tags.
See a great article on tags here.
Optimize Post Titles
Page and post titles should always be keyword-rich. You should know that already. But to really optimize titles, make sure the post title appears before the blog title.
Why? Because people will be searching for the topic of your post, not your blog title. Example: Someone might be interested in Gmail login information, but who’d want to look up “Blog Lady’s Internet Guide” (save maybe me should I go ego-surfing)?
All in One SEO can take care of this too. It can modify the title structure of every post on your blog, to give priority to your post titles.
The URL structure of the post is also important. By default, WordPress uses the exact post title in the URL (this assumes you’ve changed the permalinks as said earlier in this post). So for this article, the URL would be how-to-do-seo-for-wordpress.
That’s too long, and contains unnecessary “stop words.” I made sure it uses only two keywords, so the permalink is the site URL plus seo-wordpress.
How do you do that? Click Edit next to the Permalink when editing your post.
More SEO
SEO doesn’t end after you publish a post. Keep monitoring it for traffic. See if it shows up in searches for its target keywords. Edit the title if you think it might help get more hits. Tweak here and there. But don’t overdo it. At some point, you just have to leave your blog entries alone and just keep working.
I’ll post pictures to help with the directions soon. Meanwhile, see a post on best and cheap WordPress hosting.
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Filed under: Blogging, SEO | Tagged: all in one seo pack, wordpress permalink structure, wordpress tags
