SEO Principles for WordPress Blogs

coffeeWordPress is a relatively SEO friendly blogging tool to begin with. It offers a linking structure that makes it relatively easy for spiders to crawl your pages, and the code contains very little validation errors if any at all. However, there are a few additional steps that you can follow in order to make your WordPress blog even more SEO friendly, and most are so simple to implement that there is absolutely no reason not to.

1 – You need to make sure that the URLs on your pages contain your blog’s post name, rather than simply a post number.

This can be easily accomplished by using the permalinks page in your WordPress settings, typing “/index.php/%postname%” when asked about custom structure. Alternatively, you can write a rewrite rule directly into your .htaccess file in order to have an increase in control over the syntax of your URLs.

2 – Change your page title order so that your blog post name appears before the name of your blog or the date of your blog.

The first words in your title are always given more weight than anything else, and they will also catch the attention of your readers more effectively. This can be done by editing the header.php file, swapping the order of the PHP tags so that wp_title appears before bloginfo.

3 – Make excellent use of your heading tags.

You may find that your blog entry title is insert automatically into a tag, or that your blog name is in a tag. You can edit these tags in single.php as well as header.php in most WordPress templates. You can choose a format that suits you, but the best solution is typically to put your blog entry title in, swapping your blog name for an image instead. Also make sure that you make good use of other heading tags, using a good heading structure any time that it is suitable.

4 – Avoid duplicate content issues by using “index, nofollow” tags on your tag pages, archive pages and category pages, allowing search engine spiders to follow the links on these pages but not to list them in the index.

There are a number of plugins that can make this a really simple process, and one of the best is called robotsmeta.

5 – Pay attention to the linking structure in your blog, making sure that all of your blog entries can be properly accessed with as few clicks as is possible.

Remove unnecessary links from your blog pages and remove unnecessary pages from your blog as well. You are going to want to consider using a pagination plugin to help you remove unnecessary clutter from your blog for ease of use and increased access.

There are a number of other techniques that you can use to maximize your SEO for WordPress, but this is certainly a good place to begin.

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-02-06 08:35:13. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Google SEO for WordPress Blogging

googlesearchIf you have been in the internet marketing scene at all, even just for a short time, then you are already probably aware of the fact that blogs that are search engine optimized properly tend to achieve greater and faster rankings in search engines like Google than other websites and blogs. The question remains, though, how can your blog best be optimized for Google?

The best blogging platform that is out there right now is called WordPress. It is completely free to use, simple to install, and Google tends to really love it. Here are some of the things that you can do to optimize your WordPress blog in order to achieve high rankings in Google.

1 – First and foremost, do your keyword research.

If you are not doing proper keyword research, then you are going to stand a very small chance of ever ranking high in any search engine, let alone Google. Developing a working list full of viable keywords is absolutely a must. The best tool that you can use to optimize your keywords for your WordPress blog is the free keyword tool that Google offers. While conducting your keyword research, there are some things that you need to consider including the number of monthly searches, the number of optimized websites that are already using that keyword, and how much competition you will be facing.

2 – Next what you are going to want to do is to customize your WordPress blog specifically for search engine optimization in Google.

You can log in to your dashboard, for example, and change the default permalink structure to something that Google much prefers to see. Click on the radio button for “custom”, and type in /%postname%/ — What this will do is change the default structure for the addresses for your posts so that the name of the post will be in the URL rather than the post date or post number. This allows you to optimize your blog posts by putting keywords in your titles, and having those keywords appear in your URLs, which Google pays attention to when determining how to rank you. This structure is definitely much better when it comes to SEO purposes, so if you are not following this permalink structure already, then you need to change it as soon as possible.

3 – The next thing that you need to do is to download and install the “All in One SEO Pack”, which can be found on Google and uploaded to your Plugins folder in your blog.

Activate it from the dashboard, and you will begin to see new ways to improve your rank in Google. This is a neat plugin that can really help out your SEO endeavor if you are willing to download and install it. Make sure that you go to your Settings area and update the ping list under Writing so that every time a new blog entry is posted, the blogging services will be automatically notified.

Photo Credits: jeffmcneill

Originally posted 2009-05-04 05:24:05. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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