SEO with WordPress for beginners

March 24th, 2007 / 27 comments / blogging

seo_wp.gifI’ve been designing and building WordPress blogs for a few years now and I’ve noticed that I always seem to get a relatively high PageRank without much effort. I also notice that I get a decent amount of Google traffic, even when I’m not writing, for terms I never intended to rank well for. I’m not an SEO expert, so I attribute this to the SEO-friendly WordPress habits I tend to practice. Here are my big secrets - and seriously, it’s nothing special.

PageRank isn’t everything

PageRank is nice, it’s a good guide to how important Google thinks your blog is, but it’s not everything. Your goal should be to make the first page for terms that people are likely to use when searching for the topic your blog covers. Easier said than done. John Chow is actually doing an interesting experiment with the term “make money online” right now.

Make sure your <title> tags make sense

If every single page on your site has the same title then you’re making a huge mistake. Seriously. Huge. Chris Pearson wrote a great article that explains how to use WordPress code to make your titles change dynamically depending on which page your on. This will help tremendously with indexing and also getting people to actually click through to your site when it shows up in the search results.

The only thing you have to do next is learn to write great headlines.

Make sense of your permalinks

This is another really, really easy tip to follow through on. When you first install WordPress your URLs will probably look something like “http://www.domain.com/page/?id=6″ or something along those lines. It’s useless. What does a page ID of 6 mean to you, your visitor, or a search engine? It means it’s the 6th post or page you added to the site. Great.

Why not edit your permalink structure so that it looks like “http://www.domain.com/03/2007/the-title”? This means a lot more. It means the post was written in March of 2007 and even tells me what the title is. This is - quite literally - a piece of cake. Login to WordPress, go to Options, and select the Permalinks tab. If you don’t feel comfortable customizing it, WordPress has a few great options and all you have to do is click the box you like.

Narrow down your topic

This is important for a number of reasons, but it also makes sense in relation to SEO. If you’re hoping to rank high for a term in Google, MSN, Yahoo, or any other search engine (are there any others?) it makes sense to have more than one page about that topic. What better way to create hundreds, even thousands of pages about a topic than to write a blog about it?

Each article in WordPress is considered another page by Google. Simply write about your topic and eventually Google will have all your posts indexed. When someone is searching for anything related to your topic, your blog has a better chance at coming to the top because of the number of posts you have about the topic.

What Next?

27 responses so far ↓

Leave a Comment