Blogs can bring in a lot of visitors to your website via the big search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN if they are updated regularly and of course are properly optimized for these search engines. Although I haven’t been using Wordpress for that long I’m pretty sure that I’ve maximised the various settings and features available in terms of search engine optimization. Now when I say settings and features I basically mean standard options which are available within the various Wordpress interfaces by default, I’m not talking about editing the code in your blogs theme files, I will talk about that in a follow up post. You might have guessed then but this post (the first of two on Wordpress optimisation) will provide you with some tips for optimizing your blog and its posts in a non code modifying way.
Some of this stuff will be fairly basic but for the sake of completeness I will cover it anyhow. To begin then, the title/name of your blog is most likely not up for change as perhaps you already have an established blog which is known throughout your community but if it’s at all possible to include some keywords in your blog title be sure to do so. If for example your blog is about gardening then call your blog ‘Joe’s Gardening Blog’ or ‘The Gardening Guide Blog’ as opposed to something like ‘The Gnomes View’ this will help your blogs SEO chances by having occurrences of your blogs main keyword(s) in practically all your wordpress page titles and it should also help you due the keyword rich links which you will get (hopefully) from other bloggers and webmasters who link to your blog using its ‘official’ title/name. I suppose I could have followed this advice with my own title and called it something other than ‘Blogged Thoughts’, the reason I didn’t though is because my situation is a bit different as my blog is not only about SEO, it’s also about the Internet, technology and certain Irish issues which catch my fancy so I didn’t feel comfortable with anything too specific.
The next item refers to customizing permalinks. Permalinks are direct URL references to your blog posts. Wordpress allows you to customize these URL’s to make them static looking and keyword rich thus making them more appealing to the search engines, Google and MSN in particular though. The permalinks interface is available from the options menu in Wordpress and I suggest you make use of it. I have chosen the custom structure option and my syntax is “/%post_id%-%postname%.html” which produces URLs for each of my blog posts with the id of the blog post and the name of the post in them. You of course can use any structure you like and an excellent reference page is available at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. After saving your structure Wordpress attempts to write Apache mod_rewrite code to your .htaccess file (if none exists a new one will be created) to allow your URLs to be rewritten according to your chosen structure, this of course means that permissions of 666 or greater will have to be applied to your .htaccess file and the directory it exists in (the main wordpress directory).
Next a paragraph about Wordpress categories. It should be no surprise to you that I recommend naming each of your categories in the most descriptive way possible, if you have space try and use more than one word I know though this is not always easy to do. Also in relation to categories be sure that you make use of the description field available when editing or creating a category as these are inserted into the title attributes of all category links and many search engines provide relevancy points for keywords in title attributes nowadays. Make your description keyword rich of course but don’t go overboard, remember the real intended purpose of the title attribute is to improve accessibility.
In terms of boosting the rankings of your actual posts, well the permalinks option which I discussed above will certainly help, this works best though if you have chosen the title of your post wisely. A common concept of search engine optimisation applies here again, be descriptive as possible and be vauge and general as little as possible. This means that when your entering your blog titles you should try and avoid fancy journalistic type ploys like alliteration, puns or metaphors as much as possible and simply tell it as it is. If your post is about emmm lets say…. Wordpress search engine optimization well then be pretty darn sure you include ‘Wordpress search engine optimization’ somewhere in the title of your blog post, preferabely near the beginning. Being descriptive as possible when titling your posts will mean that your main keywords will be included, this in turn will provide for keyword rich URLs (via permalinks), keyword rich heading tags and keyword rich title attributes on your blogs main page, relevant category and archive pages and the page of the blog post itself of course.
When choosing the category of a new post try and place it in as many relevant categories as possible (within reason of course). Often many posts will overlap two or more topics and could/should be placed in multiple categories because of this. Imagine a post about the Google sandbox… this post could go into categories called ‘Google’ and ‘SEO’, next imagine a post about hosting in Ireland… this post could go into categories called ‘Hosting’ and ‘Ireland’, well you get the idea. The advantage of placing posts in all relevant categories include the fact that the end post itself is linked to from more places on your blog and thus gets found easier by Google, Yahoo and MSN. In addition to this, if your posts get picked up by any syndication sites such as www.irishblogs.ie they will often archive your post snippet (and link back to the original blog post) in all the categories which it was placed in on your blog. To get a clearer idea of what I mean simply visit www.irishblogs.ie and notice how many of the posts are listed ‘in’ multiple categories, click into at least two of these categories and notice how the post snippet (and the link back to the original blog post) is present in all of them, this means that again your posts are easier to find but also that Pagerank (perhaps only a small amount though) will be passed to them. Irishblogs.ie is of course only applicable to certain blogs but I have noticed that most syndication sites work in the same way, so the advantages of multiple categories are there to be had no matter what your blog is about.
Well that’s really all the optimisation which can be done with Wordpress without getting your hands dirty with actual code modification. I mentioned above that this post was the first of two on wordpress optimisation and folks I don’t lie so check back on Wednesday or Thursday for the second part in which I will cover (or at least try to) the use of Wordpress code conditionals to optimise eh… Wordpress.
