Search engine optimization is the main source of traffic in most blogs. It’s free, organic and gives you highly targeted traffic. So you have to pay very close attention to your site structure to make it SEO friendly as far as possible. There are millions of SEO tutorials you can find online and they explain all the basic concepts.
The most important thing to be noted is, search engines today are very intelligent and highly capable of identifying quality content. So you don’t have to pay too much attention to SEO. If your website is human friendly and filled with good quality content, it automatically makes it a SEO friendly website. Still there are few technical things which you have to do to stand tall in tight competition in WWW.
Here I’m trying to clarify few of common SEO related issues in the most popular blogging platform, WordPress. Most of those techniques have been tested in self hosted version. So they may not be possible in WordPress.com blogs.
Few years ago I was using all-in-one SEO pack to automate SEO procedures in my blog. However, with time lots of other developers came out with better SEO plug-ins. The best plugin you can find today is wordpress-seo. It’s free and offering you most comprehensive set of SEO features.
Go to your wordpress blog dashboard -> Plugins -> add new, search and install wordpress-seo plugin. After installation is completed activate the plugin. It will add new menu item to main sidebar. Now you are good to go.
WordPress SEO Configuration
Here I’m trying to be pretty straight forward with wordpress-seo settings. Below configuration is based on my personal experience and tried and tested for more than 6 months. It would be a good fit for any average blog, but may not be the best for all blogs. Click on SEO tab in side bar and access wordpress seo settings.
Dashboard
Here you configure site-wide security settings and different webmaster tools verification codes. If you want to go back to default configuration, press reset default settings.
Titles and Meta
This is an important section. Here you can set titles and meta tags for different items in your blog. You have to pay very close attention to titles than meta tags. Search engines give more weight to titles and if you have catchy titles there is a good chance of getting more clicks in search results.
In general tab, check no index sub pages. Users always need to see fresh content, so no point of indexing subpages with old content. Check, use meta keyword tag, though it’s not important anymore. For others default configuration would work. Clean up head might not be a good idea in some cases, so uncheck entire options there.
In home tab, set appropriate meta description and keywords after a proper analysis. Set author highlighting and publisher as appropriate. Setting title template is very important. My personal preference is “%%sitename%%”. It will simply display site name as title, simple and clean.
Now go to post types. Best title template you can use here is “%%title%% – %%sitename%%”. It will display post title and site name. Good for SEO and good for branding. Auto generated keyword and description is not a very good thing to do. So leave description and keyword template empty. When you are writing a post set them manually using wordpress seo box there. Finally never forget to uncheck all noindex, follow checkboxes. You need all your post and pages to be indexed in search engines.
Now go to taxonomies section. Uncheck noindex, follow checkboxes. It’s ok to index them in search engines. Set title template to “%%term_title%% – %%sitename%%”. I wouldn’t worry about description and keywords. If you want to go extra mile set keyword template to “%%term_title%%” and description template to “%%term_description%%”.
Finally go to other section to set author and archive meta. Set title template for author as “%%name%% – %%sitename%%” and for date archives “%%date%% – %%sitename%%” would work fine. Disabling archives could be good for SEO, but not so good for user experience. So best way is noindex, follow date archives and only if your blog is having single author noindex, follow author archive as well.
Social
If you want to enable facebook insight here you can set relevant meta tags. Same way you can add twitter card as well. All the relevant tags will go in to head section.
XML Sitemaps
Enable XML sitemap and submit post/page sitemap to Google webmaster tools and other webmaster tools. It will make it easier for search engines to crawl your pages.
Permalinks
WordPress can handle permalinks perfectly and you don’t have to use this section. If your site has lots of comments check “Remove the ?replytocom variables”. It will make it easier for search engines to index your comments.
Internal Links
Using Breadcrumbs is a great idea for a site which is having complex site structure. It’s good for SEO and user experience as well. Enable Breadcrumbs and insert them in to your WordPress template.
RSS
If you want to alter content in RSS feed you can do it here. You can user different templates as well as HTML codes.
Now your entire configurations are in top shape. You will get the result down the time. Remember SEO will never give you instant results, so have patience, trust the system and continue it in long run.
In import and export section you can export all your wordpress seo settings. Export it and save it in a safe place. In the case you have to reconfigure it, you can use exported settings with just one click.
Now you have taken all the basic SEO steps. However there are few things remaining. You have to be active in social media, get good quality links and make your site super speedy. In another article I’ll tell you how to make your wordpress blog super speedy.
Never forget, content is the KING. If you have good content you will get lots of social sharing as well as back-links.
Tags: #Blog #SEO