Either you know about SEO, or you ought to. Search Engine Optimization (not marketing) has two real paths: white hat and black hat. “Black hat” SEO are practices which deceive Search Engines (such as Google) into rating your site higher, to get either a higher PR (Page Rank) or more hits from its users.
White Hat SEO has the same goal (longer term), but using allowed techniques, essentially, designing your site in a way that search engines will appreciate and utilize it and its content in the best possible way.
This guide will help you to easily setup and start using some basic SEO techniques on your WordPress blog.
Step 1: Download & Activate Plugins
Firstly, we need to install some plugins we’ll require. Download and install the following plugins, and we will go into more detail later on –
Unzip them all in your plugin directories, and activate them through the Plugins page in your WordPress Admin screen.
Part 2: Utilizing your plugins
SEO Siloing
I’ll start with the SEO Siloing plugin, given that its the simplest of course. SE Siloing is essentially a “post filing” technique. It allows you to create a Page with a group of posts in a category.
For example, on my site here I have a Page called “Web“, which provides a simple listing of posts I’ve put into the category “web”.
In order to create the same effect, create Page names with the exact same name as categories (actually the category slugs) that you post in. In that page put the following code:
That will take care of the rest for you! Create as many pages as you want, but remember this is also for your users. Its essentially a quick, easy to use category system - thats search engine friendly!
All in One SEO
Actually, this is the easiest. Enable the plugin.
What this will have automatically done for you is the following:
- SEO’d titles. Post Titles are rewritten on the fly, with the actual post title coming first, then your blog name. No more ‘Archive’ in your title.
- The categories for a post get output as META keywords. Since you already tagged your posts with your categories this is fairly automatic.
- Your post excerpt gets to be the META description.
- Pages that are just fillers (category pages etc.) get a content=”noindex,follow” to avoid duplicate content.
While you may not understand any or all of this, it will help search engines to understand the content of your site.
Get Recent Comments
For this I will assume you have a theme that supports Widgets, if you don’t you can easily install the plugin from reading the documentation in the zip file.
Put “Get Recent Comments”, and “Get Recent Trackbacks” into your Side Bar, then go to the Options page to configure them. Set it to show 5 - 10 comments, a and least 100 characters. This will provide Search Engines with quick links to almost random (mostly fresh) posts on your site, with custom content written by your users. Its a great way of cross-linking.
Related Entries
Related Entries has the exact same intention and effect as the Recent Comments explanation above: its a great way of cross linking relevant information (which search engines and users love).
Install it under each post, as demonstrated here on my site by adding the code to your theme as instructed in the howto.
Part 3: Permalink structure
Permalinks are pretty (and clever) ways of showing posts in your URL bar. Instead of “http://raven.za.net/?id=4″, you can show “http://raven.za.net/search/seo-guide”. Search Engines love this, and so do users!
Go to Options, then Permalinks (/wp-admin/options-permalink.php). Choose to use a custom structure and type this in:
/%category%/%postname%
You now have sensible URL’s!
Part 4: Maintaining and building
You have now setup your WordPress blog to be sensitive to Search Engines and cross link your content. The important part now is writing good, and sensible copy.
Tip 1: Its not a newspaper! Don’t write witty headings that will mess with your URL and your search engine visibility. People won’t search for “You never would have believed…” - they’ll search for “Britney Spears has no hair”, so call you post that!
Tip 2: Categories - keep these in mind! Your SEO Siloing plugin is going to use them, and you have updated your permalink structure to have them in your URL’s - don’t make silly categories, keep them relative!
Tip 3: If you aren’t sure, don’t do it. There is nothing worse than Black Hat SEO - it does work, but only if you really know what you are doing, and not for very long. Something suspicious will get you banned!
Tip 4: Be wary the sandbox! Search engines are known to put new domains into things known as “sandboxes”. Basically, your results will show FAR FAR away for a few months after launching a new domain with a new site - don’t worry, it will come right!
Part 5: Coming soon…
Later, I’ll be talking about reporting on this - looking at search engine results to see changes, getting stats and more!
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27 Responses
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Posted on April 14th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Nice post. Don’t forget the most important rule of all: post often!
Posted on April 14th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Awesome post Dave.
People must not forget that black seo techniques will often get their sites blacklisted.
Posted on April 15th, 2007 at 10:50 am
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Posted on April 16th, 2007 at 2:14 am
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Posted on April 16th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Just a sidenote - Joe (BlogsBlog trackback) has validly raised that I’ve left out a sitemaps generator - this is because I don’t use one.
Personally (and this has been the opinion of a few comments I’ve read), I find it better to let the search engine dig (results wise).
In addition, I try to optimize for ALL search engines, so that means no real “engine specific” practices.
Thats all my point of view though - and Joe has a link to a good plugin for it.
Posted on April 16th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Great post, and I agree with Darren that it is very important to write, write, and write…
Maybe you could post something about “robots.txt”?
Posted on May 10th, 2007 at 8:27 am
I’m with starkian, it’d be great to know more about the robots.txt file. I’m pretty useless where that’s concerned.
Posted on May 22nd, 2007 at 12:53 am
Thanks for the tips, I will be checking out that SEO Siloing plugin.
Posted on May 24th, 2007 at 1:31 am
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Posted on June 5th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
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Posted on June 5th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Nice Post. Just a note about the permalink structure: I agree that changing it is a must - but if you’re just starting out, be careful about using /%category%/%postname%/. Using %category% isn’t sensible, unless you are very sure that your categories won’t change.
I fell into this trap - as my blog matures, I need to tweak the categories, which would break my permalinks.
Posted on July 10th, 2007 at 3:45 am
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Posted on October 12th, 2007 at 3:42 am
Great post, it sure helped me get my site set up better.
Posted on October 14th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Great post, thanks for the info, I will apply these things to my blog!
Posted on October 15th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Thanks for the tips. I’ve already begun implementing these changes.
Posted on November 10th, 2007 at 8:17 am
I am very interested in Siloing. my blog is http://SECFootballBlogger.com . I am not trying to self promote. Would you please take a look at it and tell me if you think it would help. I am months into getting the blog indexed. I am writing a lot.
Will the siloing hurt my permalinks? Will it hurt my page rank by chainging all the suddon.
My blog aint broke. :-) should I try to fix it with siloing. Please write back thnx.
Posted on January 4th, 2008 at 4:47 am
Awesome post. thanks
Posted on January 6th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
nice tutorial, thanks ;)
Posted on January 14th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I’ve updated the SEO Siloing plugin to work with WordPress 2.3, which made fundamental changes to the way categories were handled internally. So be sure to get version 1.2 if you plan on installing it on a new WordPress blog.
Posted on January 30th, 2008 at 2:18 am
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Posted on March 21st, 2008 at 10:12 am
I see some really good tips of seo linking and i am going to use some of them for my site. :)
Posted on March 21st, 2008 at 4:55 pm
This is a great post. I will be passing this along with a Digg!
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 at 6:36 am
I am into Search Engine Optimization as well and i found this post about SEO very informative for wordpress bloggers
Posted on March 30th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Thanks for the great article.
Posted on May 11th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Nice article.
I would add that one of the best SEO strategies is acutally to write quality content.
Better is the content and more people will cite you and that means incoming links.
Posted on September 16th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
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