At WordCamp Mid Atlantic, I attended an excellent presentation by Sri Nagubandi and John Shehata on SEO for WordPress blogs. Those of you who know me well know that I’ve been a fan of using WordPress as a content management system and as a way to gain traction in the search engines for years. I often had the sense people thought I was nuts, and they would ask me why they would want a blog as a website. I can’t blame them, because back then there were not that many instances of a website (not a blog) being run on WordPress. Now, we can find superb examples of using WordPress as a CMS if we know where to look. At times, you can’t even tell a site is running WordPress! They certainly do not have to look like blogs.
Having worked in SEO for more than five years, I wasn’t sure I’d learn much from this presentation. However, I decided to have an open mind and see if I could glean any tips. I’ve found that I can usually learn at least a little something. Much to my surprise, I learned a whole lot from the advanced part of the presentation. I’ll share both the basics and the advanced part so you can start to implement these good ideas on your own blog.
If you don’t know how to do some of the items below, leave a comment. I’m happy to write up a tutorial and place it here for all to use and see.
Basic Search Engine Optimization Tips for WordPress Blogs
- Create XML sitemap
- Add site to Google webmaster tools
- Enable friendly URLs in WordPress
- Redirect http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com
- Use www.domain.com in settings
- Place your blog name at the end of the title tag
- Use site: www.domain.com to see if Google indexes all of your pages
Advanced Search Engine Optimization Tips for WordPress Blogs
- Do not overlap your pages, tags and categories.
- Use tag clouds. The Tag Warrior plugin can create different tag clouds for different pages of your website. For SEO purposes, you want to have a variety of words linking to your pages.
- Use a “related posts” plugin. This will allow contextually related posts to be displayed beneath the post the visitor is reading.
- Use “next” and “previous post” links.
- Claim your blog on Technorati.com.
- Get onto the blogrolls of related bloggers.
Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments section.
