Wordpress SEO

WordPress is one of the more popular blogging programs out there, mainly because it is very easy to create and use your own WordPress theme. However, WordPress also comes with a number of great features that make it easy to get your blog listed higher on search engine results. If you combine these built-in tools with the following ways of making your WordPress blog SEO-friendly, you’ll find your site ranks very highly.

Doing SEO for a WordPress Blog

First of all, WordPress has several features that work with search engine robots. This makes it easier for the robots to move through your entire site and gather all the information they need to properly categorize your WordPress blog and assign it a rating in search results. This is very helpful since none of your SEO techniques are going to be helpful at all if a search engine can’t navigate through your blog for some reason. In addition to this ability, WordPress including things like the ability to create permalinks, and various third party wordpress seo plugins are also available to make your blog more SEO friendly.

But these functions and abilities are available to everyone who has a WordPress theme, so they aren’t going to set your blog apart from others. That’s where you need to know some SEO tricks to make your site friendlier to search engine robots.

First, make certain all of your code is clean. Any errors in coding will not only make your WordPress site display incorrectly, but they may also prevent the search robots from exploring your entire site. This includes making certain all of your links work.

Speaking of links, make certain you have links to every page on your site and that important links (such as to the home page, the archives, etc.) are repeated on each page. These need to be text links, too, not images.

Why not images? Because a search engine robot doesn’t see images on your website—it can only see text. It doesn’t care how nice your images are or what color you use for your background or text. All it sees is the text itself and the coding. If you use a Flash menu for navigation and don’t have text links somewhere on your page, the search robots may not be able to get to the other pages on your site.

However, this doesn’t mean that images can’t contribute to your SEO. Search engines can read any alt text on images, so be certain you always put something there. If at all possible, incorporate your major keywords into the alt text to make more of an impact.

Wait, Tags? Tags like keywords are another very important aspect of doing SEO for WordPress. Tags are basically any word or phrase that perfectly describes your WordPress Post. If you’re writing about events in Paris, for example, three of your Tags may be “Paris,” “Paris events,” and “France.” You need to use these keywords in all of the text you write for your WordPress site, but don’t over-do it. You don’t need them in every sentence, for example. A good SEO rule of thumb is to aim for your Tags to make up somewhere around five to ten percent of the words in your text.

When designing your WordPress theme, think of your site like a folded newspaper. In journalism, the most important stories go above the fold; that is, they’re what you see when a paper is folded in half, and they’re often the stories that make you buy the paper. A search engine robot often only looks at the top third of a web page. Your theme needs to make certain your important content is as close to the top of the page as possible so the robot gets to it.

Finally, make certain to include meta tags. Meta tags are found within the WordPress code and will be all of your keywords for your site. Basically, meta tags describe what your site is about. WordPress, by default, will not include them, but you can change that (and you’ll want to). Be certain you include a wide array of words and phrases in your meta tags so that your site will be listed in every relevant category. In our example of a Paris blog, for example, your meta tags may include “Paris,” “France,” and “Paris, France.” It may seem redundant, but you want to cover all of your bases.

By following these basic SEO rules for a WordPress site, you can take what WordPress already offers and kick it up a notch, making your site rank higher than other WordPress sites that don’t really focus on SEO.