How To SEO Your WordPress Blog
WordPress is by far the best SEO blogging software available but you can further SEO your WordPress blog to get more targeted traffic from various search engines. Although blog SEO depends a lot on how you write and structure your blog post content and how many incoming links you can obtain for particular posts, you can tweak your WordPress so that some SEO tasks are performed automatically. Here are a few things you can do to SEO your WordPress blog:
Have search engine friendly URLs
It really amazes me that even those blogs that talk about SEO don’t have search engine friendly URLs. A search engine friendly URL is:
http://www.yourblog.com/your-post-title
And this is not an search engine friendly URL:
http://www.yourblog.com/index.php?p=456
By default WordPress generates URLs mentioned in the second example. You can change the settings by logging into your WordPress control panel. After logging in, first click "Options" and then "Permalinks". Then, under the Common options you have the following choices:
http://localhost/howto/?p=123 http://localhost/howto/index.php/2007/10/07/sample-post/ http://localhost/howto/index.php/archives/123
Custom
Select "Custom" and there edit the following string:
/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
to
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
Some suggest you just keep /%postname%/ but it doesn’t really matter (although it does shorten your URLs) and in fact it helps if you end up writing multiple posts having the same title.
Click the "Update Permalink Structure" button.
From now onwards you’ll have search engine friendly URLs.
Put your keywords in your title
Try creating titles that let you use keywords and phrases that people may use to find your blog posts on search engines. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! attach lots of importance to web page and blog post titles. This automatically puts your keywords in your URL too.
Put your blog post title first in the title tag
Since WordPress uses themes to show the layout of your blog, every theme has its own header.php file and you’ll need to change this file. If the PHP code gives you the creeps, don’t worry, you just need to change a single line. If you are comfortable with uploading and downloading files using FTP then you can simply change the file on your computer and then upload it to the appropriate theme folder, but in case you are not, you’ll need to change the header.php file through your WordPress control panel itself. It’s a breeze.
Log into your WordPress control panel and click "Presentation" in the menu. Under "Current Theme" you’ll see your current theme. Click "Theme Editor".
On the right hand side you can see all the files used by the current theme. Click "Header".
Find a line starting with <title> and ending with </title> and replace that line with
<title><?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { ?><?php wp_title(”,true); ?> | <?php } ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>
This needs to be done because by default WordPress puts the name of your blog in front of every title and since search engines read only a certain number of characters in your title tag, if you blog name appears first, they assume your every post contains the same title. With your blog post title appearing first, even if the search engines don’t read your entire title, they find at least the name different for every post.
Tackle the duplicate content problem
Google often penalizes (not actually penalizes but picks up the wrong pages sometimes to index) you for having duplicate content. A common problem is when http://www.yourblog.com and http://yourblog.com (without "www") containing the same content. Google considers these two different domain names and if you don’t take corrective measures Google thinks duplicate content is appearing on two different domains.
To tackle this problem you’ll need to change your .htaccess file. If this file exists in your root folder on the host server then you’ll need to download it and then modify it (if it doesn’t already contain the required lines) and if it doesn’t exist you’ll have to create it using any text editor like Notepad. In the file you have to add the following lines:
RewriteEngine On
Rewrite Cond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourblog\.com
Rewrite Rule (.*) http://www.yourblog.com/$1 [R=301,L]
301 is the permanent redirection number used in the .htaccess file which tells the search engine crawlers that a particular URL has been permanently redirected to a new URL. This way whenever the search engine crawlers try to load http://yourblog.com they are redirected to http://www.yourblog.com. Upload .htaccess back to the root folder.
Let your blog post appear first
If on one side there is your navigation containing links to your recent posts, archives and other paraphernalia and on the other side is your blog post, then adjust your theme in such a manner that in your source code your blog post should come above your sidebar links. This way the search engines can easily access your blog posts without encountering much code.
Use a sitemap
Put a sitemap link at the top of your blog and make it appear as the first item on your blog. There are many WordPress plugins available that help you generate an update sitemap whenever you make changes to your blog content or add new posts.
All these steps help you SEO your WordPress blog to a great extent.
Posted by Amrit | Tags: Uncategorized
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March 8th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Helpfull,thank you so much!