SEO for WordPress blogs

// July 12th, 2007 // photolog

I am writing a manual on how to start your own blog because of the requests I got in the last few months. You can find a complete overview on my blogging page. Today I ‘m giving some search engine optimization tips. There’s a lot of amazing SEO power built into WordPress. Unfortunately it doesn’t all come by the default installation.

1. Optimize your permalinks

The default WordPress installation displays permalinks like this:

http://pietervangils.com/?p=123

A more search-engine friendly permalink includes the post title in the link, like this:

http://pietervangils.com/2007/07/11/this-is-the-permalink-structure/

This is a simple change to make. In your WordPress admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option.

Including %postname% is the most important option because having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it. The second thing to do is to get rid of useless tags. Don’t use %day%, %post_id% , %hour%, %minute% or even %second% in your permalink structure. It will only make it harder to see the URL’s keywords on search engine results. None of these are necessary, monthly posting archives are perfectly acceptable. Want to go really mad with your permalink structure? Try dropping date tags all together for %category% to get a nice extra keyword in your URL. Change your .htaccess file if necessary.

2. Optimize your page titles

According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. The problem in most WordPress themes is that it will first display your blog name like this: “pietervangils.com > SEO optimization for WordPress“. You’ll understand I don’t need pietervangils.com as the first keyword in my blogpostings. You can find the page title tag in the header template, and the default version usually looks like this:

<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>

The best way to optimize your page title is changing this code so it looks like this:

<title><?php if (is_home()) { print “whatever title I want to have on my blog home page.”; } else { wp_title(‘ ‘); print ” : “; bloginfo(‘name’); } ?></title>

This tweak does a couple of different things. First, it allows you to use a more descriptive, keyword-rich title for your blog’s main page. And second, for the individual post pages, it will use the title of your post as the page title.

3. Use some good plugins

Some of my favorite SEO plugins are:

• Related posts. Not only does it enhance your blog’s usability, but it also helps create a good link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.
• Google sitemap. This is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index.
• Ultimate tag warrior (or Jerome’s keywords). Tags are a great SEO addition to your blog. They enable search engines to crawl your website more easily and you can also create specific pages for your tags/keywords.
• SGR clean archives. This plugin makes it really easy to get a nice archive page of all your posts.
• WWW redirect. Helps you to get only one page in the search results instead of different variations of the same domain.

4. Write keyword rich post titles

The post title is the most important part of the blog post for different reasons. From the reader’s perspective, a descriptive and appealing title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into Google to find your post. Your post titles should be as clear as possible. Don’t stuff your titles with keywords you are targeting with your whole blog. Choose your keywords carefully per posting. Try to make several posts about the same subject for a maximum result.