Many people dream of ranking high in Google and other search engines. This is logic : Google means money. The higher you rank the better you can sell yourself and the higher the value of your site is.
Wordpress is a blog platform with a very high SEO optimization on board already. With some small tricks and some plug-ins you can highly improve your ranking.
1. Use the Wordpress permalinks option and post slug.
You find this option under Options —> Permalinks 1
Although Google and other SE index pages with dynamic URLs, urls with the important keywords in are still rated higher.
Which is more significant?
http://yoururl/?p14
http://yoururl/post-about-permalinks
When you are fiddling with the permalinks, immediately delete the /index.php slug in the rewrite rule when present. It looks horrible.
When posting, use the post slug in the post page sidebar of WP to create the best url/slug you can think of. Otherwise WP will use the post name.
Example of changed post slug here. Although I did not use once the word hack in that entry, you’ll still find the site over Google when looking for Vista activation hack (somewhere around pos.45)
Remark : As Joefish correctly points out in the comments, this tip is mainly for new posts.
2. Integrate your post title in your page.
Search Engines return a short slug to stamp the result. They include the title tag in the returned results.
Why invent the wheel again if Chris Pearson has written a brilliant howto already?
If now you combine #1 and #2 you should be able to integrate all your keywords in the slug and/or your title, allowing you to rank better than when using an everyday title and dynamic url.
3. Integrate a XML sitemap to your blog [plug-in].
Wordpress doesn’t offer a XML sitemap together with the package, but luckily there is a great plug-in for this. Sitemaps are important for SEO tho. They create a list of all your entries.
Although SEO-technically there is hardly any difference IMHO, I still prefer to add a XML Sitemap to my site than a XHTML sitemap. The reason here for is simple : Arne Brachold has a great sitemap generator for WP, which pings the 3 major SE with every new entry or anytime you update/change a post.
After you have installed the Sitemap generator, you can add the URL of your sitemap in the Google Webmaster Console.
Alternatively you could integrate a XHTML sitemap, accessible to any crawler. Again Chris Pearson helps us out.
Best option is to use both of course.
4. Use UTW Tag Warrior [plug-in].
Ultimate Tag Warrior is a very powerful plug-in for your WP blog. Tags have a lot more importance than Technorati only. They allow you categorize all your articles without creating too much clutter in your WP Categories2
Most powerfull advantage of UTW is that every tag you use becomes an own category with his own URL. If the tags are integrated in your theme, the bots will index this url. Other tag plug-ins don’t always offer this option.
My experience with UTW is that tags rank VERY high in SERPs.
5. Use a valid CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) theme
SE are machines and no humans or browsers. They don’t crawl your design but read code.
The simpler your code, the better your site will rank. Use a valid CSS template to keep all the deisgn clutter/specifics out of your html code and making your site more accessible to the crawlers.
Easier said : Google prefers accessible websites. ;-)
5 Easy tricks which will largely boost your ranking in SERPs.
Although this manual is WP focused, the 5 tricks work for any system. Most open source platforms have plug-ins, hacks allowing the same optimization3.
1 mod_rewrite required. Ask your hoster if you’re not sure.
2 You can easily have thousands of tags, but thousands of categories? Wouldn’t that clutter your categories and sidebar just a little too much?
3 If you paid for a platform without any of those options, allow me to kick you nicely in the butt now. Next time, give me your money. I promise you I will be just as useless.
5 have made me smarter ↓
1 Joefish // Dec 24, 2006 at 4:11 am// View all comments by Joefish //
I’ve got two thoughts to add to this.
First, your advice on post slugs is best left to new posts. Changing the slug on posts that have already been crawled could lead to searchers getting 404s, plus there’s the possibility your ranking might actually be lowered if the search engine thinks you’re cheating by having two posts with identical content. Change old post slugs with caution.
Second, have you seen this plugin? It’s an add-on for Arne’s sitemap generator that adds UTW tag archives to the sitemap. Arne links it on his page too, but it’s a useful link to have here as well.
Nice write-up, Franky.
2 Franky // Dec 24, 2006 at 2:03 pm// View all comments by Franky //
Joefish, updated the post slug part.
In another SEO post, I’ll go deeper in when and when not to use the post slug for older entries (how to read/use Google’s Webmaster Console)
I’ll have a look at the plug-in for Arne’s Sitemap Generator. Thanks for the tip.
3 Avitable // Dec 26, 2006 at 12:32 pm// View all comments by Avitable //
Some good points for bloggers looking to increase their SEO.
4 Franky // Dec 26, 2006 at 5:31 pm// View all comments by Franky //
Avitable, this surely was written to give you some hints too.
Find permalinks for your tips on your company site, or move those articles to a blog, don’t be scared by opening comments.
Use h2, h3 aso to create sections, those also have SEO relevance.
And link back (re your other comment) might come sooner when you allow comments. People will appreciate your professional advice.
Best example of this are many SEO blogs, and also Copyblogger. Brian has really valuable tricks howto-write-for-the-internet and how to correctly linkbait. ;-)
5 A Feast of Crumbs » I might be a little nuts // Jan 15, 2007 at 6:45 am// View all comments by A Feast of Crumbs » I might be a little nuts //
[...] The export/import process also stripped away all my post slugs. All slugs were automatically regenerated from the post titles. Which, if you're like Franky, could be a significant problem. I don't tweak post slugs often, but I have retitled posts (like adding "Updated" to signify new content), which breaks the permalinks for those posts. [...]