Wordpress SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - Basic & Advanced

Wordpress SEO. Many articles are written about it and this one is a detailed information on how to maximize SEO benefits using Wordpress. Both novice and advanced users can find this post useful.

These are not just ordinary tips, but a complete guide line from A to Z. I am writing it specifically for Wordpress, but it can be used for any other CMS or blogging system or even static sites.

First let me say that Google is in love with Wordpress. Is there anyone that wouldn’t want to appear on Google’s search results first page? Wordpress has built in functions, which notify Google when you publish a new post or page. It is not surprising that most of the search results that appear on google are articles and posts powered by Wordpress.

Now let’s start with the very basics and essentials of SEO.

Domain name

Domain names are the very essentials. There could be a big difference if you use your personal name for your blogging domain versus using a domain which contains words from your niche(brand) that you will be blogging around.

Let me elaborate

Let’s search google for pro blogging. An image may be worth thousand words.

You can easily see that for the search “pro blogging” the very first results are sites which core(first level) domain names contain the words pro blogging. Later on the second, third, fourth and so on pages, are posts and articles on pro blogging which use different domain names.

Let’s summarize

Using www.yourniche-anything.com or www.yournicheanything.com will yield better results than using www.yourpersonalname.com or www.yourverycreativename.com

This is so because the word that is being searched, is already contained in your domain name.

Post names

If your domain name is already purchased, and you are running your blog already, you might not want to go all over again and again. This is where the post and category names come by. These are absolutely free tips that everybody should use.

What do i talk about? You say - What is better for SEO?

www.yoursite.com/?p=52 (dynamically generated url of the post) or,

www.yoursite.com/your-post (human readable URL)

Let’s see what google says for a random search. I searched the words “Human readable url”

Please notice the bolded part of the full url of the search results. It contains the searched words, while posts about the same topic which contain dynamic(computer generated url) will come on the later pages.

By default, Wordpress will output a dynamic url’s of the posts you publish. You can easily change this.

Do this by logging in into your wordpress dashboard, click on settings and then on permalinks.

Here we need to assign a custom structure to our permalinks. Click on custom structure and type in /%postname%/

If you are unsure, check this image:

You are done. Now, instead of the dynamically generated URL, your posts url will be defined by the posts title.
Optionally, you can check how to write titles that will attract more visitors here!

Advanced post names

This is a feature which can add a big plus to your blog’s SEO, but use it at your own risk.

It means defining the custom structure of a post like /%category%/%postname%/

What it does? The url of the post will look like: http://www.your-niche.com/your-category/your-post-name

Normally, this can work great, but why did i mentioned risk.
If you assign more than one category to a post, it can mess up your blog. So if you are using this, never place a post in two or more categories.

I personally don’t use it, due to the nature of my niche - the categories i use are closely tied to one another.

Wordpress plugins that will help you rank better

• All in One SEO pack
• Seo Friendly Images
• Seo Smart links

I will talk about All in One Seo pack, because this is exactly what works as “the best of seo”.

What it does?

- It let’s you assign custom meta title, description and keywords for each page, which is far better than having the same meta assigned by default.

It looks like the following image and it is located at the bottom of the page, when writing new post.

What are meta keywords?

Meta keywords, emphasize a specific phrase or word of your post, page or article, which will help your post get higher ranking on the searches performed by searchers.

Let’s say, what keywords i might use for this post? -

Example of short ones: wordpress seo, wordpress basic seo, wordpress advanced seo, wordpress seo guide,

Example of longer ones: how to maximize wordpress seo, wordpress seo domain tips,

Do note: the keywords must be combined words or phrases which are already written in your post. Inserting words that not appear in your post may result in getting penalized from the search engines.

How many keywords should i write? Not too few and not too many. What i want to say is between 5 and 30, depending on your post. If it’s longer, you should normally have more keywords, if it’s a short one, around 5-10 will be more than enough.

The description part can contain words that do not appear in the post. It is literary a short brief description for the post.

Advanced SEO for Wordpress

Advanced SEO for Wordpress can increase your ranking on the search engines, but is where you need to work with xhtml codes.

I talk about using appropriate heading tags and paragraphs.

By default, every page of your wordpress blog h1 title would be inherited from the header template of the theme you are using.

Let’s say, your page contains the following codes

<h1>Blog name</h1>
<h2>Blog Description</h2>
<h2>Post title</h2>
<p>Here is your use of headings, paragraphs and other elements</p>

With this structure, you are not putting emphasis on the post itself, but also on the blog. Not to mention that you might be ruining your ranking by using inappropriate order of your heading tags and paragraphs.

What should you do?

Replace the h1 and h2 codes located most probably in the header.php template file and style the spans accordingly, so they will look like ordinary headings using css.

<?php if is_home() { ?>
<h1><?php bloginfo('name');?></h1>
<h2><?php bloginfo('description');?></h2>
<?php } else { ?>
<span class="h1-replacement"><?php bloginfo('name');?></span>
<span class="h2-replacement"><?php bloginfo('description;?></span>
<?php }; ?>

Basically, the headings with blog name and description are staying on the home page, but we are leaving space to put emphasis on the single.php and page.php templates.

Now, you should open single.php and page.php. You should look for the following codes:

<h2><?php the_title();?></h2>

And replace them with h1 tags. Also, you should change the widgets headings in sidebar.php and function.php to assign h3 or h4 tags for the sidebars widget titles.

How should you structure your posts when writing posts from the dashboard?

You should divide your posts in steps and use a similar structure to this one:

• paragraph - a brief intro of the post
• h2 tag
• paragraph
• h3 step 1
• paragraph
• paragraph
• h3 step 2
• paragraph
• paragraph
• etc etc…

What i am trying to say is structure it logically.

You should have only one h1 title per page, up to two or three h2 titles and not more than fifteen h3 tags in order to maximize the search engine optimization for that page.

Links

The more outgoing links, the lower ranking your pages will get.
The more incoming links to your site and posts means better ranking.

As previously mentioned, Seo Smart Links Plugin will help your SEO by automatically placing rel=”nofollow” to the links you are making in your posts.

rel=”nofollow” means, while you are still linking from your post, a google crawler won’t follow the link, so you are lowering the amount of outgoing links on your blog.