Setting Up WordPress for SEO
Mark Thompson
WordPress out of the box comes SEO friendly, however there are many tweaks you can make to further optimize it for search engines. We recently covered 10 important tips to optimize wordpress for search engines, however this post will go more in-depth and offering further optimization tips.
Here are a number of advanced tweaks and WordPress plugins you can install to help with URL structuring, search engine crawling, handling duplicate content, optimizing title and meta tags, images and internal linking.
Setting Up the Permalink Structure
In WordPress: Settings >> Permalinks
WordPress gives you a number of ways you can structure your post urls. By default WordPress sets the urls like www.domain.com/?p=123. This is obviously not optimal because you are not gaining the benefits of having keywords in the url.
They also have options to set the urls organized by year/month/date, for example www.domain.com/2010/02/07/sample-post/. This is getting better, because you are able to add a unique post name in the url, however the post is four directories deep which can cause potential crawling issues.
The most effective way to optimize your urls is by using the custom permalink structure. Choose “Custom Structure” and enter “/%postname%/ “. By setting this custom structure your urls will look like www.domain.com/post-name/. This puts your post directly off the root level and uses keywords based on your post title.
Setting Up non-www to www Redirect
In WordPress: Settings >> General
The newer versions of WordPress make this extremely easy to do. Simply change the Blog Address (url) to http://www.domain.com. WordPress will automatically update your htaccess file to redirect the non-www version to the www version. If you have an older version of WordPress you will have to copy and paste the code provided into your htaccess file. However I would upgrade to the latest version of WordPress before I manually add it.
Search engines treat the www and non-www version of a page as two different pages. If not corrected, this can cause your blog to have hundreds or thousands of duplicate pages. By fixing this you are minimizing potential duplicate content issues.
Optimize Post Titles
In WordPress: Settings >> All in One SEO Pack
By default WordPress creates page titles like “Blog Title >> Blog Archive >> Post Name”. This is ok, but not optimal. Search engines will place more importance on the keywords at the beginning of the title tag so we will want to modify the tags so that the post name is at the beginning of the post and not the end.
To do this, make sure you install All in One SEO Pack. This plugin will automatically set up your title and meta description tags the proper way. Your page titles will now look like “Post Title | Blog Title“. You will have the option to override a specific post title within the post if you would like. Make sure you create a unique description after you have written your post. All in One SEO Pack will not create meta descriptions, so when creating a post there is a section for adding unique titles and descriptions.
Block Certain File Directories in Robots.txt
There are certain directories that you should block from search engines. Check out the Robots.txt guide I wrote that will show you exactly which directories you should block.
This will help with controlling which content you want search engines to crawl and not crawl. There are many directories and files that are unnecessary for the crawlers to spider. This will help the crawlers find the content you want spidered faster.
Install SEO Plugins
This SEO plugin is probably the best and most robust plugin for optimizing your blog for search engines. This plugin will automatically optimize your blog category and post url structure, auto generate title tags, avoid duplicate content issue by restricting search engines from accessing pages that have duplicate content on them, and canonical tag integration.
This plugin will automatically generate a XML sitemap of your wordpress blog that is formatted for Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. Your sitemap will be sent to all of the search engines every time the plugin rebuilds your XML sitemap. Having this plugin, ensures that the search engines are aware of all of your posts and will help with the overall crawling of your blog.
This plugin will add your Google Analytics tracking script to every page on your blog. There are also other options and features which give you more accurate tracking.
- Disable Admin Tracking
- Enable Event Tracking
- Track Outbound Link Clicks
- Track Downloads (PDF, CSV, DOC)
- Google Adsense Integration
- Ability to Modify Tracking Script
Interior linking will help with the overall crawling of your website, along with keeping readers engaged in your content. You can also leverage your content by using keyword-rich anchor text and linking to other content within your blog. This plugin does just that. It will take keyword and phrases within your post and comments and link them to corresponding posts on your site. This can significantly cut down on having to manually search for relevant posts on your site that you can link to within a post.
SEO Friendly Images will automatically optimize all of your images by adding alt and title attributes. If you do not have an alt or title attribute for your images, it will add one for you.
Load time is becoming an important factor in search engine algorithms. Not to mention a page that loads fast makes a visitor much happier and is more likely to stay on your site longer. W3 Total Cache will help speed up the page load times by caching pages, removing white space and comments, and compressing css and js files. Here are a few reasons why this plugin boasts it’s at least a 10x increase in site performance.
- Enable Page Caching
- Enable Minify
- Enable Database Caching
More SEO Quick Tips for WordPress
- Allow commenting for user generated comment and higher engagement
- Use good categorization for usability
- Add compelling graphics and images in your posts
- Ask questions at the end of your posts to encourage comments
- Syndicate your content to your Twitter and Facebook profiles
- Social bookmark your best content
Share your tips and tricks with us via comments section.
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harry
Posted 68 days ago 76really great article, i just worked ur steps..
ScratchCards Queen
Posted 73 days ago 75Hi Mark,
Thanks so much for this Article. I worked through it step by step. I already has some of the plugins installed but there were so many I added and I cannot wait to see some results in my Traffic from the great tips.
In fact you have motivated me to go create a technical credits page on my new wordpress Scratch Cards site to all the articles that are helping me along my new way in the affiliate world.Stay Tuned you will be number 1 on my list.
Ever since I have started the amount of information I have learnt from sites like yours and other technical forums is amazing and its time to give credit where credit is due.
Thanks Again
Jenny
Scratch Cards – Queen
CinGundemi
Posted 82 days ago 74Thanks for this great explanation. It helped me alot.
Bike saddle
Posted 84 days ago 73Ya, i like it too and also interested in learn more and more about seo new techs.
Baburam Bhattarai
Posted 97 days ago 72Informative article for WordPress SEO tips, I have wp site I will try it thanks for sharing
prempal
Posted 103 days ago 71next generation in seo.thanks
Jack
Posted 105 days ago 70Great article – how important do you think the domain name is for seo?
Knight
Posted 107 days ago 69Nice tips. It worl for me. Thank you very murch!
mohammad
Posted 124 days ago 68nice post you are given for us man!
thanks :)
Anuj@SEOTIPS
Posted 159 days ago 67Interestingly, I did read a post by Matt Cutts which suggested leaving them dofollow, although general SEO opinion is to keep them nofollow.
I think it’s definitely down to the individual and the site in question. As always, SEO is about testing, testing and retesting, and what we can learn from that
Rachel
Posted 175 days ago 66I have an ecommerce store and have a blog built into my shopping cart that I am using and also I also have a seperate wordpress blog I am blogging on to promote my business and push it up in the search engines. Something is working or both, just not sure which. Anyone have an opinion on which is best? Built in blog on your site or seperate blog? Thanks!
Jay Andrew Allen
Posted 186 days ago 64Good tips, but you’re going to bog down your site with all these plugins. A lot of SEO tricks can be built into your template. More modern templates (like Lightword, e.g.) ship with SEO-friendly titles built in.
As for Google Analytics, you can put this directly into your template. You can even add a bit of code to suppress Analytics generation for logged-in users. I show how to implement this on my own site: http://jayallenwrites.com/how-to-suppress-google-analytics-code-for-wordpress-administrators
Dainis Graveris
Posted 185 days ago 65Totally agreed, but for some who hasn’t got skills or temptation to learn how to code, plugins are good escape plan, even if it slows down site..:) good points ;)
aWebby
Posted 231 days ago 63Great, concise information.
I use All-in-one-SEO on all mine and set perma links to category/postname
-Stumbled!!
thanks
anandy
Posted 283 days ago 62so all in seo plugin is fine right or should i go for platinum seo?
Mani Viswanathan @ Blogging Tips
Posted 289 days ago 61I use Manual interlinks i.e. from WLW to link to my old posts with the anchor keyword rich text. Have been hearing a lot about SEO Smart Links. Will give it a go.
Martin
Posted 322 days ago 60Great post ;-) Thanks for the fantastic information…
Rick Grimes
Posted 347 days ago 59Thanks for posting this! I’m sure you know what you are talking about since this came up among the top results when I search for WordPress SEO. You made it so easy by listing all of the plugins.
Robert Bloch
Posted 349 days ago 58Thanks for all the great inforamtion that this new kid will be sure to use.
Rajesh Namase
Posted 352 days ago 57Great tips, I am also using most of plugins mentioned here. Thank you very much!
Waheed Akhtar
Posted 373 days ago 56Thanks for this excellent post Mark.
Jp Manching
Posted 458 days ago 55Thanks for the tips and plugins but I have a question, what’s the recommended permalink structure for sites indexed as Google News Source?
Jignesh
Posted 474 days ago 54This was really a fantastic information…
Keep sharing
marco
Posted 483 days ago 53there is a new plugin for wp called extreme SEO and i wondered if anyone had any experience of using it for seo and if they did could they explain if this is supposed to run along side the all in one seo pack and gives additional features or if it is meant to replace the all in one seo pack.
Also if any experience is it easy to use and install and comp for wordpress 3 etc
Thanks Marco
Phillip Dews
Posted 492 days ago 52What a Great post mark! I love writing about SEO myself and have written many articles on the subject!
I love the w3 Cache plugin as I did not know about it and was havving issues with load time on my blog recently! so have it installed now!
Many thanks for the list!
-Phillip
Paul Teague
Posted 504 days ago 51Great post, really useful, I just worked through all these points one-by-one.
I’ve been really lazy with my blog SEO and I intend to change that now :-)