Optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines can be extremely difficult, especially if you don’t know where to start. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing and new techniques for search engine optimization (SEO) are surfacing each day. In this post I’m going to briefly discuss search engine optimization (SEO) and introduce some great tools and plugins for WordPress blogs. After reading this post you should have no problem improving your blog’s pagerank and increasing traffic.
Creating Sitemaps
Sitemaps provide search engines with important information about the pages on your site. This includes the last time each page was updated, its update frequency, and its relative importance based on traffic and comments. Sitemaps are great for blogs because of the large number of pages (posts) that aren’t linked together and only accessible through search.
Adding a sitemap provides an additional view into your site and doesn’t replace the standard method of crawling pages. Sitemap files are formatted in XML and contain just one URL with optional tags such as last modified, priority and change frequency.
Creating a Google sitemap for your blog is a simple process thanks to a plugin by Arne Brachhold. The plugin creates a XML sitemap for homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archive pages. It also calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments. The XML sitemap is automatically rebuilt after you publish, edit, or change a post and the plugin immediately informs Google about the changes through Google-Ping.
Installation is simple, you can download the plugin here and extract it to your WordPress /wp-content/plugins directory. Then login to your blog’s administration panel and activate the plugin. Under the “Options†menu you can alter the default change frequencies, file name and other options. Click on “Rebuild Sitemap†to create your sitemap.
Google Webmaster Tools
The Google Webmaster site has a great collection of tools to help make your site more Google-friendly. It provides an overview of how your site is crawled. It also displays information about keywords that other sites use to link you, your top search queries and your search result ranking. This information will help you to understand what is driving traffic to your site.
Once your sitemap file is created you should submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and verify your site in order to gain access to crawling information. While this information doesn’t directly help to improve your ranking, it does provide you with an understanding of how your site looks to Google, an extremely valuable perspective.
Cutting the fat from Permalinks
Permalinks are the permanent links that are created for each blog post. By default WordPress sets permalinks to: http://yourblog.com/?p=1234. Permalinks can instead be used to create more intuitive links like: http://yourblog.com/category/this-is-a-post-title/. By using the later option, search engines can see the post category and title. Search engines run the URL keywords against the content so it’s important to keep post titles short and sweet.
To edit the way your permalinks are displayed, log into your admin panel and select Options -> Permalinks. Enter /%category%/%postname%/†under the custom field and click update permalink structure. You will need to modify your .htaccess file in order for this to work. More information on .htaccess files can be found here. Don’t worry about upgrading your link structure, the older links that are already indexed by search engines and will still work properly.
Pack A Punch With Your Post Title
Keep post titles simple and straight-forward, wrap your post them in H1 or H2 tags and try to use as many relevant keywords as possible. Search engine spiders judge the importance of content by looking at the HTML tag its wrapped in, so use proper tags wisely.
Tidy Up Those Dirty Page Titles
Properly formatted page titles are very important to search engines because they use page titles as linking text for search results. The searched keywords are also bolded in the results so it’s important to keep the page titles as short and accurate as possible. This will also allow visitors to identify the link immediately. By default WordPress formats page titles to “Your Blog Name � Blog Archive � The Post Titleâ€. Change this to read “The Post Title by Your Blog Nameâ€. The post title should always come before your blog title because the title is what people will most likely be searching for. The blog archive is just excess fat that you can remove, it’s not important to search engines or visitors.
To remove the blog archive text modify the header.php file in the wp-content/themes directory. Select your theme’s directory and open header.php in a text editor and locate this line, which appears near the top:
<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>
Replace the title element with the following text:
<title><?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> "<? wp_title(); ?>" by <? bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php } else { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> <? } ?></title>
Contribute to the Conversation
Incoming links to your blog are extremely important. Search engines such as Google don’t just count the number links that come into your site, they also take into account the rank of the pages that link to you. To improve your rank and generate more traffic, comment on popular blogs. Within your comments you may want to include a link to a related post on your blog and a signature with your URL.
WordPress Plugins That Make Your Life Easier
Here’s a list of a some useful WordPress plugins that will help optimize your blog and keep visitors crawling through your pages:
WordPress Related Entries plugin – WordPress plugin that displays related entries to visitors.
WordPress 2 SEO Plugin – Plugin optimizes titles, meta tag information and RSS link feeds for auto discovery.
Search Meter – Plugin stores logs of searches performed on your blog.
Bunny�s Technorati Tags – Plugin for tagging posts throughTechnorati.
It’s important to remember that there’s no quick fix to optimize your blog for search engines. Every little detail counts. Signup on social bookmarking websites such as Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, and blinklist and share your posts with as many people as possible through comments.
by John Wiseman
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