WordPress ultimate seo guide – This post is about making your wordpress perform better in search engine result pages. WordPress is pretty good, but its not perfect. this will tell you how to make it stronger.
Making sure that your pages have the best chance of ranking well in google for searches.
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. your placing in the search results pages (SERPS) can be manipulated, you can make your pages appear higher in the results based on a range of factors.
Some of these things are easy to do, some are more tricky, some are cheating the system but you shouldn’t try these things, called black hat techniques (like the baddies in cowboy films who wear the black hats) it only harms your rankings in the long run once you get caught.
instead, go for long tail results
tag clouds, categories with landing text
good permalink structure if you set it up properly
decent editor that means you can alter your posts as needed to make them better
no xml sitemap
default permalink structure is poor
not w3c valid, not wcag valid
lots of hard work.
Make sure post titles are h1 tag. you will need to edit your theme, or get a plugin to help.
Don’t stuff posts with html tags, it dilutes the importane of the proper ones. instead keep all your content as paragraphs, eg, just write it as it comes from your brain (via your fingers)
Try for only one of each type of html tag, ie one h1 on post title, one h2, etc
Make sure you are w3c valid for every post and every page type.
Check your google webmaster tools and fix all of the html suggestions. it doesnt take long. its very beneficial.
Find a good wordpress theme that has things like: header tags on post titles on post pages;header tags on post titles on categories pages.
Use a ‘top ten posts’ type plugin and put it in your side bar.
Write naturally. Take time writing your posts.
Write category landing text.
Watch your stats, see what draws people to your site
Refine your articles to include these terms, but don’t over do it.
Dont do things like picking some keyword terms from your stats and linking to pages in your site using those keywords. its obvious to search engines when they look at all the incoming links and see that they are all stuffed with keywords.
Dont stuff your content with keywords either, once or twice per keyword is enough.
Get the google sitemap xml plugin, submit your sitemap to google webmaster tools, bing webmaster tools and yahoo site explorer.
Fix all errors that appear in the google webmastertools consoles
Unstall gregs seo plugin, or YOAST SEO. both are very good if you need a helping hand and writing is your calling, not coding
Submit your rss feed to feedburner
Put noindex, follow (not noindex, nofollow) on category pages and tag pages
Fix short titles in webmastertools
Fix meta descriptions, etc in webmastertools
Use seo tools to check your site
Use nibbler to see how well your site compairs to others
Use total validator to check your site for valid html and accessibility issues. fix them all.
Remove the category base in permalink post – this will help you sort out your link structure
link to 301 rewrites post – this will help you sort out your link structure
link to yslow post – this will help you make your site faster
make sure you are w3c and wcag
analytics, tracking
analytics plugin
top ten plugin
kstats
monitor your analytics over time and you will be able to see the content that performs well.
you can also make your poorer posts perform better by editing them
you can track all the incoming links from social networks
you can track all the organic search results too.
write good content. get links to your site =)
