According to recent statistics, WordPress accounts for 0.8% of the web which makes WordPress the best choice for any enthusiast blogger. Hundreds and thousands of blogs are created every day which use WordPress as the blogging CMS (Content Management System), but not all of them are optimized for good search engine rankings. In this guide, I will instruct you how to quickly set up your WordPress installation for the best SEO results and make your website more search engine friendly. You might know some of these techniques already, but the following steps will play the role of a checklist for you.
Follow the steps carefully and try not to miss out on any of them in order to acquire the best results for your blog.
Step I – Blog Title & Taglines
I am assuming that you know how to install WordPress for yourself. If not, please refer to http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress. After the installation is completed, go to the wp-admin and under the Options -> General tab, fill out your Blog title and the tagline. Make sure that your Blog title is meaningful and your tagline is search engine friendly. The tagline should basically summarize what you do on your blog and ensure that you target the right keywords for your website. Fill in the rest of the information and we are done with this step.
Step II – Update Services
Under the Options, go to the next tab called Writing and scroll down to the Update Services text box. Here you can input a list of update services separating them with line breaks (pressing the enter key). These are basically websites which maintain a list of all the current weblog updates in different areas. When you make a post, WordPress will ping these websites to inform them that you have updated your blog. Doing this will make your blog more social and also get you additional traffic through these update services. People who browse websites like Technorati and Sphere can easily find the posts that you made recently.
Step III – Modifying the Title Tags of your WordPress Theme
The title tags in your pages matter a lot for SEO purpose but WordPress themes are usually not optimized for them. To make your theme more search engine friendly, go to Presentation -> Theme Editor in the admin area of WordPress. Now open the header.php file and edit Title tag
Step IV – Meta Tags
WordPress does not insert any Meta tags in your blog on its own. Meta tags are very important if you want the search engines to fall in love with your blog. You can use the All in one SEO Pack plugin for all your Meta tags including the titles too. You will get all the help for installing this plugin on the author’s plugin homepage. There are other plugins as well which can be used to insert Meta tags into the blog. Just search for them on Google.
Step V – Permalinks & Mod_rewrite
Search engines will always index your pages faster if your URLs are text-based instead of being long strings of code. Having your keywords in the URL is beneficial as it tells the spiders about your page content. For example, the URL http://mysite.com/?var1=3434&var2=3434 is not search engine friendly, but if the same URL was written like http://mysite.com/my-page.html, it would be easier for the search engines to index the URL. This kind of link conversion is done using a server-side feature called Mod_rewrite which uses an .htaccess file that is placed in your website root folder. WordPress already has this inbuilt functionality to generate pretty URLs, so all you have to do is enable the option. Go to Options -> Permalinks in the WordPress admin, and you will see the common options.
Step VI – Optimization of Keywords
When making new posts or pages in WordPress, make sure that you are targeting your search keywords properly. Try to include those keywords in the titles for which you want to be searched and indexed. If your content is unique and you have chosen the right keywords, search engines will quickly pick up your articles and index them.
Step I – Blog Title & Taglines
I am assuming that you know how to install WordPress for yourself. If not, please refer to http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress. After the installation is completed, go to the wp-admin and under the Options -> General tab, fill out your Blog title and the tagline. Make sure that your Blog title is meaningful and your tagline is search engine friendly. The tagline should basically summarize what you do on your blog and ensure that you target the right keywords for your website. Fill in the rest of the information and we are done with this step.
Step II – Update Services
Under the Options, go to the next tab called Writing and scroll down to the Update Services text box. Here you can input a list of update services separating them with line breaks (pressing the enter key). These are basically websites which maintain a list of all the current weblog updates in different areas. When you make a post, WordPress will ping these websites to inform them that you have updated your blog. Doing this will make your blog more social and also get you additional traffic through these update services. People who browse websites like Technorati and Sphere can easily find the posts that you made recently.
Step III – Modifying the Title Tags of your WordPress Theme
The title tags in your pages matter a lot for SEO purpose but WordPress themes are usually not optimized for them. To make your theme more search engine friendly, go to Presentation -> Theme Editor in the admin area of WordPress. Now open the header.php file and edit Title tag
Step IV – Meta Tags
WordPress does not insert any Meta tags in your blog on its own. Meta tags are very important if you want the search engines to fall in love with your blog. You can use the All in one SEO Pack plugin for all your Meta tags including the titles too. You will get all the help for installing this plugin on the author’s plugin homepage. There are other plugins as well which can be used to insert Meta tags into the blog. Just search for them on Google.
Step V – Permalinks & Mod_rewrite
Search engines will always index your pages faster if your URLs are text-based instead of being long strings of code. Having your keywords in the URL is beneficial as it tells the spiders about your page content. For example, the URL http://mysite.com/?var1=3434&var2=3434 is not search engine friendly, but if the same URL was written like http://mysite.com/my-page.html, it would be easier for the search engines to index the URL. This kind of link conversion is done using a server-side feature called Mod_rewrite which uses an .htaccess file that is placed in your website root folder. WordPress already has this inbuilt functionality to generate pretty URLs, so all you have to do is enable the option. Go to Options -> Permalinks in the WordPress admin, and you will see the common options.
Step VI – Optimization of Keywords
When making new posts or pages in WordPress, make sure that you are targeting your search keywords properly. Try to include those keywords in the titles for which you want to be searched and indexed. If your content is unique and you have chosen the right keywords, search engines will quickly pick up your articles and index them.
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