More and more big companies and individuals are using WordPress as their web-site CMSs, or for their company/personal blogs. Out of the box, it still needs some minor modifications and tweak, but with the right plugins, you can have a SEO friendly wordpress install in less than ten minutes.
There are a number of reasons for using WordPress:
- WordPress is Free.
- WordPress takes a few minutes to install.
- WordPress is standards compliant
- WordPress is very functional out of the box (RSS support, Ping support)
- WordPress is easy to use for novices (WYSIWIG editor) and experts to set up/customise (templates, HTML, CSS) alike
- WordPress has a massive community of contributors, who develop free plug-ins to cater for your every need.
- WordPress is open source, so you can edit it and customise it until it does what you need it to do
WordPress is pretty good SEO-wise, out of the box, but there are a number of steps you should take once you have installed WordPress in order to optimise your install for the search-engines.
Permalinks
The default permalinks in wordpress don’t contain search-engine-friendly keywords from your post or page titles (pages and posts are referred to by default using their ID, e.g. http://yoursite.com/?p=12345).
To make your URLs more friendly for both humans and the search-engines, go to Settings->Permalinks in your wp-admin control panel, and set your permalink structure to one of the following structures:
- /%postname%/
- /%category%/%postname%/
This will result in a more readable url, such as http://yoursite.com/hello-world or http://yoursite.com/uncategorised/hello-world>.
You will then be prompted to update your .htaccess file (simply paste the displayed text into the .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress folder, or if the file is writeable WordPress can do this for you).
Stop Words
Stop-Words (such as at, to, the, in) are usually ignored by search engines. Having these words in your post or page URLs is not good. Using a plugin such as SEO Slugs will remove these stop words from your permalinks/post slugs.
Page Titles
Page titles are an important factor in search engine listings.Since the page title is one of the few elements search engines can show search engine users before they visit your site, significant weight is placed on the words in the page title. If your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get a click from a search engine user. The Headspace plugin allows WordPress users to customise their page titles to include the site name after the page title, as well as other title orders (including tags, categories etc). HeadSpace enables you to override the Headspace settings on a per-post/page basis in order to write optimised titles for each specific post, giving you full control over your title tags. Headspace also allows customisation of the “Read more” text, allowing you to add a more search-engine friendly anchor text to the read-more link.
Descriptions
Categories should be given a reasonable description if you use category pages (so that the category page itself has some unique content, rather than links to category pages and snippets of the page contents). Using the HeadSpace plugin to add the description to the meta description is also a good idea.
You should also add descriptive text for each post or page that you add to your blog or site, rather than using autogenerated descriptions (which usually grab the first few lines of a post as the description, not good considering the first few lines won’t adequately convey the content of the page, nor contain the keywords which you want to rank for). Descriptions entice people to visit the page, so make sure your description field conveys what’s in the page, and gets the user to click on the link!
Images
Images should be marked up with suitable alternative text attributes. If you have an image of a blue poker chip, add alt=”blue poker chip” to the image. Search engines cannot read images, so make sure to specify good alt-text descriptions for images in your img tags, this includes images of text which you might use for graphically styled headings/sections on your site!
Using Alt tags not only assists those users using assistive technology such as braille displays, screen-readers and text-only browsers – but also gives valuable information to the search engines, and may help you get targeted visitors to your site via image searches (on sites such as Google Images).
Templates
Some of the template files in your WordPress theme make a number of database queries when they are interpreted. If you site / blog gets a lot of traffic, minimising the number of queries generated by templates is an important part of optimising your site for speed.
Examples of optimising the header include inserting the lang attribute into your header will save on 1 query (getting and inserting this information from the database), similarly you can specify your html type, stylesheet location and make other information static to save on processing. The header template also contains some calls for data which can be explicitly specified, e.g. your blog / site title.
Caching
Installing a WordPress caching plugin like wp-super-cache will assist in reducing the work your WordPress installation must perform.
SiteMaps / XML sitemaps
Autogenerated Sitemaps are useful for your visitors, and using a plugin means you have access to the source to customise it as you please. The WordPress Sitemap Generator Plugin is highly customisable from the WordPress admin panel.
Summary
Out of the box, WordPress is highly functional and can be optimised in every aspect via some minor edits and the installation of a selection of SEO Plugins. Above I outlined a number of useful plugins and considerations for web-developers / SEOers to optimise their sites for visitors and search engines.
Please feel free to share any SEO tips, useful plugins or template modifications which you use to improve your WordPress seach engine optimzation.
Related posts:
- Linkbuilding: How to get great do-follow links for free on PR-9 WordPress.org How to acquire permanent, high pagerank links on authority PR9...
Great beginner’s guide! I definitely wish I would have had something like this when I first started my blog. The one plugin I didn’t see mentioned is Platinum SEO. It’s an all-in-one SEO plugin that helps you customize & manage nearly every aspect of SEO on your blog. I use it and love it.
Kyle
there are tips you find around the net to have better strategy to gather more diverted people to your landing page just like this one..having great site structure and content has many benefits and a good way of building organic links which google loves.
Those are some good tips – I found the one about combing the template’s PHP and removing unnecessary database calls to be a real performance booster.
Thanks for the article.
thanks for the comments folks.
@ david, yes if you have a site with mega traffic, i guess it can make a significant difference. I see Betfair are using WPress for many of their domains and subdomains, I bet they are optimised to the max.
Great tips on this post. One thing that is worth mentioning however, is that WordPress suggests not using /%category%/%postname%/ for permalinks because this taxes the database in trying to the database.
More specifically, WordPress claims permalinks starting with /%category%/ slows down the load time.
“Starting Permalinks with %category% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons. “