Feb

28

Top Ten WordPress SEO Tips

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There is a lot of amazing SEO power built into WordPress. Unfortunately it does not all come by default, and you might not know what is best when it comes to templates and options. Follow these simple rules for search engine optimization and your blog will rank much higher in Search Engines.

1. Optimize WordPress Permalinks

The most search-engine friendly permalink MUST includes the post title (%postname%) in the link,having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, In your WP admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” sub-tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option. My suggest permalink structure is /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html .

2. Optimize WordPress Post Titles

The post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into a search box to find your post, and use those words or phrases in your post title.

3. Optimize WordPress Page Titles

According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. In most WP themes, you’ll find the page title tag in the Header Template, and the default version ususally looks very poor SEO. I suggest you to use a WordPress plugin so call “All in One SEO Pack” to fix that problem.

4. Optimize WordPress robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed. Most websites have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) therefore creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation. Here is an SEO optimized WordPress robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /trackback/

5. Use Google Sitemaps Plugin

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. WordPress user Arne Brachold has made the sitemap creation and submission process fairly simple with his Google Sitemap plugin. This plugin will create a sitemap for you and submit it to Google.

6. Use Wordpress Anti-SPAM Plugin

Akismet is the best automated spam killer that actually gets better as it learns from the whole community marking new spam comments as spam.

7. Use Related Posts

Amaury BALMER’s Simple Tags plugin is a perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3 tags, which can show related posts on your post and rss feed. Not only does it enhance your blog’s usability, but it also helps create a dense link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.

8. Use Ping services

Use the Update service function, to inform tracking services that you have updated your weblog. By default, Wordpress pings rpc.pingomatic.com, which is good (if you don’t want to change this, you don’t have to).

9. Make your content searchable

Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.

10. Update your blog frequently

Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.

If you have further SEO tips for WordPress blogs, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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Comments

30 Responses to “Top Ten WordPress SEO Tips”

  1. lunarelf on March 5th, 2008 9:18 am

    Thanks for your advices.

  2. lunarelf on March 5th, 2008 9:57 am

    Your blog is very beautiful, could you tell me how to display most viewed posts and most comments posts?

  3. Michael Anderson on April 8th, 2008 9:33 am

    Nice post. One thing I have noticed is that SEO is a continuous process. It

    cannot be done perfectly in one shot. You have to be on your toes and try out

    different things to get ahead of your competitors. There have been instances

    where my site’s search engines rankings have improved considerably with few

    small tweakings.

    - Michael

  4. willy on June 16th, 2008 10:00 am

    thank you for your advice.

  5. Vidyut Kale on June 27th, 2008 10:23 am

    Extremely useful post. I have a wordpress installed on my blog, and I’m getting into action ASAP

  6. CrownCart on July 14th, 2008 1:26 pm

    Wow very informative post. I learned so much in just a few minutes. I will be doing all of this stuff to my blog asap. :)

  7. sarahatan on July 21st, 2008 7:00 pm

    Nice post. I agree 100%. here’s some more info on social bookmarking

  8. Myriam on July 24th, 2008 9:44 am

    trying to create a tab for favorite posts. Any suggestions?
    Thanks for your help

  9. Directory Submission on August 11th, 2008 8:29 pm

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  10. backlinks on August 16th, 2008 5:36 pm

    First of all congratulation for such a great site. I learned a lot reading article here today. I will make sure i visit this site once a day so i can laern more.

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  12. SEO India | SEM Services India on September 11th, 2008 5:49 am

    Impressive post…

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  15. fan on October 7th, 2008 8:40 am

    i just want to set up a wp website
    thx for sharing us so much useful information
    thx very much!

  16. fansdfe on October 9th, 2008 7:55 am

    Use Google Sitemaps Plugin
    i add to my wp website
    but i do not know how to run it since i tried many times,anyone can help me?

  17. Natalie on October 31st, 2008 7:33 am

    Graet post mate. Keep them coming….

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  19. Istoselidon on December 11th, 2008 5:07 am

    Great article and informativ. I have this bookmarked. Thanks

  20. Pepe on January 2nd, 2009 7:36 pm

    Thanks. I have a problem with All in one Seo pack for 2.7. It’s not changing the Post titles URL.

  21. Seo Submissions on February 10th, 2009 12:44 am

    Articles also play some part in internet marketing. As articles are read by visitors there are more chances for visitors coming to the sites. Articles should be relevant to the theme of the site

  22. Davey on March 3rd, 2009 5:53 pm

    Thank you for the tips. I am in the process of designing a new site and researching SEO so that I can optimize my pages for the search engines, sooner than later.

  23. mario webmaster on March 7th, 2009 10:24 pm

    i agree with you. thank you.

  24. Clarksville SEO on May 7th, 2009 9:23 am

    The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed.

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    Written by a good / worth learning

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