PNUO

When Matt Cutts, who is the head of Google’s search engine team (and probably the most powerful/important guy in the world when it comes to search engine optimization), spoke at WordCamp 2007, he gave plenty of good SEO tips specifically targeted towards WordPress users. Here are some of the key points/recommendations that he made during his presentation:

• Don’t include the post date in your URL.
• In URLs, no spaces are worst, underscore are better, dashes or hyphens are best.
• Use alt tags on images: not only is it good accessibility, it is good SEO.
• Include keywords naturally in your posts.
• Make your post dates easy to find.
• Standardize backlinks (don’t mix and match www with non-www).

As you can see from these tips, some are very basic, while others are very important because you see a lot of people doing otherwise. In this section of the eBook we are going to cover a number of SEO techniques your WordPress blog(s) can use to maximize your search engine rankings.

WordPress Permalink Structure

“Don’t include the post date in your URL.”
“In URLs, no spaces are worst, underscore are better, dashes or hyphens are best.”

WordPress, by default, gives you a number of permalink options to choose from. Unfortunately, the most ideal solution (based upon both Matt Cutts and several prominent SEO suggestions) is not available. Here is what you should do when setting up your WordPress blog:

1. In your dashboard, go to Settings.
2. Click on the Permalinks tab.
3. Select the Custom Structure field and type the following: /%postname%/

Once done, your permalinks will display using the words in your blog posts title and use hyphens to separate them. Some people say they prefer the permalink structure that includes the date, but this structure has two flaws. The first is that it pushes your keywords further to the right, which makes them less likely to be indexed (for people that use long blog titles/URLs). The second problem is that using the date shows readers the date of the post. If a web surfer sees a post is 2-3 years or older (or months old if its news related stuff) then they are less likely to click over to your website.

For people with existing WordPress blogs and want to switch their permalink structure, you can do so using the Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin. (more information here: How To Switch Your WordPress Blog’s Permalink Structure). It will create 301 redirects for all existing posts to the equivalent in the new permalink structure. I did this on one of my blogs without any problems.

WordPress Post Slug

This creates a little extra work when writing your posts, but have you ever considered editing the post slug that appears just underneath the post title? By default, the post slug will strip all characters and simply display the words and numbers in your post titles with hyphens between them.

What I’ve gotten in the habit of doing on posts whenever possible is to edit the post slug and remove any non-keywords. This ensures that search engines are giving attention to your posts keywords. An example would be if you wrote a post titled “What are the 300 Best WordPress Plugins?” By default, the post slug will look like /what-are-the-300-best-wordpress-plugins/. Removing the non-keywords and you’ve got: /300-best-wordpress-plugins/.

If you are lazy, you may also want to check out this SEO Slugs WordPress plugin.

Using the Post Meta Title

This is a method used by most top bloggers, but you rarely see anyone mention it. If you use either the free All-in-One SEO Pack WordPress plugin, or the more advanced SEO Sniper premium WordPress plugin to manage your blog’s SEO, you’ll notice that you have a section to enter another title on the “Write panel”. This is the meta title that search engines see. One common SEO technique is to write two titles for your post. One for your readers, and one for the search engines.

Ideally, you’ll want to come up with a clever title for your readers that will be displayed on your blog and grab the attention of your feed readers. Keywords do not matter for your blog title as the search engines will not even see it if you assign a custom meta title. Enter your blog title in the post title field at the top of the screen. Your search engine title is the keyword-rich title you’ll want to place in the plugins title field down below where you enter the tags. This is what the search engines will see, as well as what people surfing search engines will see. Surfers aren’t looking for catchy titles, so this title should contain your keywords, as well as be convincing that your post will provide what the surfer is looking for.

Using Images + Alt Tags

“Use alt tags on images: not only is it good accessibility, it is good SEO.”

You may have heard people say that it is great to add pictures to your posts. This is because it is usually noticed prior to seeing the post title, meaning it alone can grab a feed readers attention or the attention of someone visiting your blog post. It will also often leave a good first impression. What people don’t usually realize is doing so is also good SEO.

Whenever you upload a photo to your blog, you’ll want to enter your “alt” text in the Caption field. I usually recommend people think of the caption field as the anchor text of your picture, as search engines can’t read the picture. Without this, search engines won’t know what the picture is of and won’t include it in their photo index. Within this field, you are also able to add a description of the picture in the picture field.

Doing this should get your photos included in the Photo section of most major search engines, which has the potential to generate additional traffic to your blog.

Emphasize Keywords

“Include keywords naturally in your posts.”

No matter how small or quick the post you are making is, take a moment before publishing to figure out what keywords might be used within a search engine to find this post. Then make sure you have properly emphasized those keywords within your post, either by bolding the keyword or by making sure they have been worked into your post several times over. Something as simple as this can really go a long way towards getting higher post rankings, but you’ll want to make sure you aren’t overdoing it, so it looks natural. When I’m doing consulting, I advise people to write the post naturally, then replace words like they, them, those, he/she, and other similar words with the full keyword.

Using Anchor Text

Ahh, good old anchor text. For those unfamiliar with the term, anchor text is the text used when you are linking somewhere. Search engines use this text to determine what the link is about. If people always link to your websites homepage using something like “Internet Marketing”, then search engines know that your blog is probably about internet marketing. The more unique links you get pointing to your website, the higher your ranking will go for that term. The people that get the most inbound links will often have a higher ranking. It is of course much more complex than that, but that is a good way to learn the basic technique of using anchor text.

This is probably one of the most talked about SEO techniques, and you’ll often find people trying to do link building, link swapping, etc. Because these are basic techniques and are covered all over the internet, I instead want to advise people to spend some of their time focusing on something they have much more control over, and that is internal anchor text.

Most blogs have a few posts or pages that they want to stand out to search engines. Through the use of internal anchor text, you can actually tell search engines what your most important posts are by linking to them using the anchor text you want to emphasize. In my example above of Internet Marketing, if you have a page dedicated to internet marketing, you’ll want to link to that page each time (or most of the time) whenever you mention internet marketing in your posts. This is something many of the top bloggers do, but I rarely see this happening among upstart or inexperienced bloggers.

Making Your Post Dates Stand Out

“Make your post dates easy to find.”

As you can see from the above quote, Google loves dates. Though you shouldn’t be placing them in your blog’s URLs, you will want to have dates displayed on your posts. Most WordPress themes that I’ve run across come with the date displayed by default, but if yours for some reason doesn’t, you can place the following code into your theme:

<?php the_time(‘F jS, Y’) ?>

This way when search engines crawl your blog, they will be able to find the post date. The only time I do not recommend adding a date to your blog is when you are building a small niche blog. In these situations, you do not want readers to know the date of the post because it may have been months or even years since your last post. More on this later!

Standardizing your Backlinks

“Standardize backlinks (don’t mix and match www with non-www)”

If you’ve been around the internet for awhile, you’ve probably noticed that with the internet is gradually moving towards life without the www prefix. I don’t believe I have a single website or blog that uses www and I do not recommend people launching a website to use it. With that said, I also don’t think that existing sites that already use www should change anything.

The main thing search engines like is consistency, so stay with whatever you currently have and launch all new websites without the www. When most people link to you, they typically just copy the link from the web browser, so whichever method you use should naturally be used in inbound links pointing to your website.

Using Breadcrumbs on Your Blog

One trend that you are starting to see more of around the blogosphere is breadcrumbs. For those unaware, these are the navigation links that appear at the top of your pages, giving your users another way to easily navigate your website. What many people don’t know is that adding breadcrumbs to your WordPress blog(s) also helps search engines determine the structure of your website. Ideally you’ll want your breadcrumbs linking to your homepage, one category page (if you select more than one category, it should still only display one), and of course the blog post or blog page itself.

In order to add something like this, your best bet is to use a breadcrumbs WordPress plugin. There are a number of good breadcrumb plugins available, but my favorite is probably Breadcrumb Navigation XT.

Controlling Link Juice

When setting up your blog, once you’ve got your layout done, I usually recommend people go through and make sure you aren’t leaking link juice (aka Google Juice, leaking PageRank) anywhere. Place a rel=”nofollow” tag anywhere that doesn’t need to be followed by search engines. This often includes (but isn’t limited to) placing a no follow tag on all your feeds (Entries, Comments, and Email RSS), pages that don’t need indexed (advertise, about, contact, etc.), and stuff in your sidebar that are external links such as affiliate links, badges/buttons, and widgets. You don’t need to worry about internal widgets, such as Recent Comments, Popular Posts, or Top Commentators. Using these distributes the link juice within your site, which not only fine, but actually encouraged.

If you maintain something like a blogroll, you’ll want to either rel=nofollow these links as well, or move them on to a single page. This is because in the past year, search engines have started to place more value on natural post-level links than site wide links, so you are doing your friends a favor by moving their link to a single post or page.