Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of WordPress Blogs

Let’s first look at a list of items of some proven to work SEO tips for blogs. These are required for effective search engine optimization of your WordPress. After which we will see the steps to achieve all of these.

1. Search engine friendly URLs [also known as SEF]
2. Unique title for all the pages [also posts] in your blog site
3. Meta tags for all pages and posts [Applicable to only few search engines]
4. Keywords in your URL and content
5. Sitemap in your site for better indexing
6. Use ALT and TITLE attributes in links and images

1. Search Engine Friendly URLs.

Thanks to the ability of WordPress to use .htaccess and create static URLs. Changing the link structure is quite easy in WordPress. In WordPress admin area, select Options and then select Permalinks [Permanent Links]. Now select ‘custom, specify below’ and paste the following snippet in it.

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

This will make your URLs to appear as http://your-domain.com/year/month-number/postname as in http://your-domain.com/2006/11/effective-seo-optimization-for-wordpress/

Remember to use keywords in your post titles which will make it very effective.

If you already follow a different permalink structure [or do not follow one yet but have pages indexed in search engines] and want to migrate to a new permalink structure then Permalinks Migration Plugin is what you should be looking for. It will tell the search engines that your old links have moved to new links [while returning appropriate HTTP status codes] and in this way your indexed URLs will still fetch the right page.

2. Unique title for all pages and posts in your blog site

Having a common title for all your posts in WordPress is not enough. You must have unique title for all the posts in your wordpress for effective search engine placement. This boosts your search engine ranking to a great extent. Here is how to accomplish it.

Login to your WordPress admin section and select presentation. Then select Theme Editor to edit the current theme used in your site. Edit the header.php file and do the following:

Locate the start of the title tag to the end of it. That would be < title> to < /title>. Copy this and save it in notepad. Then replace it with the following code:

< title> //remove the space between first two characters
< ?php if (is_home()) { //remove space between < and ? for it to work
echo “Your Main Page’s Title here”;
} else {
echo wp_title(‘ ‘).” » Your Site’s Name Here”;
}
?>
< /title> //remove the space between < and /

The above code will check if the currently opened page is the home page and if true, it will display a title applicable to only the main page. The later part of the code will display post name as the title followed by >> and your site’s name.

In summary, this is how it will look in the title area of the browser:

Index page – Your main page’s title
Other pages – Title of the post >> Your site’s name

3. Meta tags for all pages and posts

Though search engines such as Google completely ignore the presence of Meta tags, there are handful of other search engines which still give some level of importance to the Meta tags. WordPress comes with a feature to define custom tags and insert the Meta tags in your posts but I recommend using a plugin which will do the job for you automatically. The plugin is located here. This plugin adds the post’s categories and excerpt to the “keywords” and the “description” XHTML meta tags respectively, while viewing single posts. It also adds the blog’s description and categories to the “description” and the “keywords” meta tags respectively on the home page. [Installation steps are simple and are available in that site]

4. Keywords in your URLs and content

Unfortunately, this is beyond a plugin’s scope to help you with. Think of what people will search in the search engine and the keywords they might use which will make a page [or your site] appear in the results. An example keyword or keyword string could be ‘Effective Search Engine Optimization‘. If you have this keyword string in your content, title and Meta tags then chances are very high that your pages will appear in the search results. See Simple SEO Techniques for more detailed information.

5. Sitemap in your site for better indexing

Though there is Google Sitemap which will help you with indexing all the pages of your site, having a sitemap in your website will help visitors quickly look at all content items on one page and it greatly helps towards your SEO efforts. Not only search engines will find all your URLs at one place for better indexing but also helps your visitors with better navigation.

I use Dagon Design Sitemap Generator to accomplish this. It not only automatically keeps upating your sitemap with newly posted posts and pages but also frees you up from the burden of updating it manually all the time. [You can find the installation and implementation steps in that site]

6. Use ALT and TITLE attributes in links and images

It’s very important to use the ALT attribute [of the a tag] for all your links due to the fact that sometimes the links which you put in your content might be linking to a page from another site which does not has any keywords in the link. Having an ALT attribute tells search engines and visitors what the link is about and where it will take them. Since an image can not be read by search engine spiders, it really helps to have a TITLE attribute of the IMG tag. This will at least tell the search engine what the image is meant for.

One another good SEO tip would be installing the Related Posts plugin. This will show related posts from the categories which are most applicable to your posts. This way it will create cross site links to several pages and search engines will find lot of intra-site links to chew. Related Posts plugin can be downloaded from this website.

[updated 13th Nov'06] It’s highly recommended that you ping as many as sites to automatically notify about updates in your site. My current list of service URIs is as follows:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 [Google Ping Service]

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://www.bloghash.com/feed/

I encourage and request you to share your tips/posts on SEO of WordPress and I will be happy to add your tips on this page [with your name and link to your post/site].