I’ve been designing and building WordPress blogs for a few years now and I’ve noticed that I always seem to get a relatively high PageRank without much effort. I also notice that I get a decent amount of Google traffic, even when I’m not writing, for terms I never intended to rank well for. I’m not an SEO expert, so I attribute this to the SEO-friendly WordPress habits I tend to practice. Here are my big secrets - and seriously, it’s nothing special.
PageRank isn’t everything
PageRank is nice, it’s a good guide to how important Google thinks your blog is, but it’s not everything. Your goal should be to make the first page for terms that people are likely to use when searching for the topic your blog covers. Easier said than done. John Chow is actually doing an interesting experiment with the term “make money online” right now.
Make sure your <title> tags make sense
If every single page on your site has the same title then you’re making a huge mistake. Seriously. Huge. Chris Pearson wrote a great article that explains how to use WordPress code to make your titles change dynamically depending on which page your on. This will help tremendously with indexing and also getting people to actually click through to your site when it shows up in the search results.
The only thing you have to do next is learn to write great headlines.
Make sense of your permalinks
This is another really, really easy tip to follow through on. When you first install WordPress your URLs will probably look something like “http://www.domain.com/page/?id=6″ or something along those lines. It’s useless. What does a page ID of 6 mean to you, your visitor, or a search engine? It means it’s the 6th post or page you added to the site. Great.
Why not edit your permalink structure so that it looks like “http://www.domain.com/03/2007/the-title”? This means a lot more. It means the post was written in March of 2007 and even tells me what the title is. This is - quite literally - a piece of cake. Login to WordPress, go to Options, and select the Permalinks tab. If you don’t feel comfortable customizing it, WordPress has a few great options and all you have to do is click the box you like.
Narrow down your topic
This is important for a number of reasons, but it also makes sense in relation to SEO. If you’re hoping to rank high for a term in Google, MSN, Yahoo, or any other search engine (are there any others?) it makes sense to have more than one page about that topic. What better way to create hundreds, even thousands of pages about a topic than to write a blog about it?
Each article in WordPress is considered another page by Google. Simply write about your topic and eventually Google will have all your posts indexed. When someone is searching for anything related to your topic, your blog has a better chance at coming to the top because of the number of posts you have about the topic.
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What about meta tags Ben? Can they help?
I think most people tend to feel meta tags have lost their importance in SEO. They don’t hurt you (as far as anyone knows) but stuffing a bunch of a keywords into a meta tag won’t help either.
Go Bucks! Sorry, you aren’t on gtalk, I had to announced it somewhere, haha.
Good article Ben! This is very helpful for my new blog. Any ideas how to get more readers to a new blog? I’ve had trouble getting traction..
Be careful when playing with the built in permalink structure of Wordpress. If you simply change your link structure you can create duplicate content which is NOT good for SEO.
great tips for a wordpress beginner.
awsome article! thanks for the tips just stumbled it :)
Great tips, thanks for sharing!
thanks for tips
ok I will.
If I’m not mistaken John Chow’s experiment didn’t turn out so good for his SERP’s.
But I can’t agree more: search engines, esp. Google loves Wordpress!
nice post ben, I hit it on the nose when it comes to SEO. I really like “it makes sense to have more than one page about that topic.” I single post on any one topic does not hold all that much weight.
Thankiossk
Cool!
Very well said. I agree with you that page rank is not everything. But clients and traffic is. If you don’t have both, you are missing on a lot of things.
Thanks for the tips!
Great article. Really learned a lot.
thanks for the tips, newbie here.
Thanks for the tips!
Great basic SEO. I would only add that bloggers hould be sure that their main search phrase is somewhere on their main page in tags, as well as in at least once, as well as in somewhere on the page as well.
Google in particular likes this. Oh, and don’t keyword spam. METAs do no favours, true, byt they can hurt you. Putting keywords into your metas that do NOT appear in text on the page WILL get you penalized on Google.
Cheers,
Ron Davies
The ProfitMart Blog
Why don’t you mention categorie and tagging structure? Those are two really important factors to give all your pages the desired PageRank!
now a days many people working on blogging only. and wordpress is the main thing for cutomized blog. this tips will help me to improve my SEO knowledge for blogs. i have tried some seo plugins for my blog. you can check it at my link here.
I agree, PR isn’t the one who holds the life of our sites in the web. Well, yeah your site is popular in the search engine because lots of higher pagerank sites are linking back to you and apparently having higher traffic but is this really our main concern? Definitely not (although it helps). What our target is a traffic (customer) that will avail/purchase our service/product and not just paid traffic.
-Jan
Terrific article Ben! This could proved to be very fruitful for my new blog. It would be very helpful to me if you can provide ideas on increasing more readers? I’ve had trouble getting traction. Anyway thanks for such an important article on SEO.
I will agree that PR aint everything. One can rank higher with great keywords and meta tags!
thank you for the great tips though!
Very good article, I have fulfilled all as described here for my all blog based on WP. Following my article about optimalisation wordpress for search engine ( forgiveness in language indonesia) at http://www.sejutablog.com/optimalisasi-wordpress-untuk-mesin-cari/
Regarding the better permalinks. I think there is a little error in the order of year and month in your example above. It might confuse some readers. As you correctly show on your own blog, the year should come first.
Good basic stuff, although I still feel good quality meta tag titles are a key part of effective SEO. Having friendly URLs, even without the numbers, just the title, is another key that I’ve seen.
Another great habit to get in to is networking with some of the best and sharing your new posts with others that can add them to their favorites in Digg, SU and other SMO sites. Muhammad Saleem, one of the top Diggers and Social Media Mavens, talks more about this.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Truly amazing post Ben! It’s incredible how most people don’t realize the importance of things like this.
You think. I think that the cat is out of the bag. And THAT will make things really really interesting as people rush to do these things. Almost like an SEO arms race….
very usefull tips Ben thanks for making so many things clearer to me
useful tips and essentialfor wp waarriors. I esp agree with the section on titles. That really makes a difference in search.
We use %postname% for our permalinks and sometimes add a keyword in front like:
/seo/%postname%
This works well for SEO we have found.
You write very well.
Great Work, but can you update it? I manage to get it to work like 95% but theres still somethings I cant get to work
We got hit with a 2 point drop as well, from 6 to 4. We’re not about to remove our text links though until Google steps up and explains their reasoning behind the drop.
First time on your blog. Nice read. Like the letterpress effect on the top. Great design.
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