Posts tagged Wordpress SEO

Since WordPress is so popular nowadays, I thought it’s more than worthwhile writing a post about some SEO tips specifically pertaining to the CMS. WordPress is such a useful management system I would recommend it for just about any website, not just a blog.  For instance, take a look at KODA, this website I made using WordPress while still retaining a traditional website’s look and feel. Onto my WordPress SEO tips:

Changing URL Structure

This is one of the  easiest and most effective SEO changes you can make in WordPress. To make your subpages appear with the best URL structure (check out my Basic SEO Tips for URL structure tips), you will need to change the permalinks.  To do this navigate to your WordPress dashboard, click “Settings”, then “Permalinks”. You will then want to select “Custom Structure” and insert “/%postname%/” in the text box (minus the inverted commas). This then makes the URL blog.com/the-post-name.

Easy Titles, Descriptions etc.

As I said in a previous post, your websites title is arguably the most important SEO feature of the whole site. The description on the other hand has now tangible SEO benefit, but will certainly help drive traffic as a good description will entice searchers to check your site out.  This  can be managed incredibly easily on WordPress by installing a plugin called “All-in-One SEO” (just search for that in “Plugins”). This let’s you manage lots of things that would otherwise be difficult to access on a WordPress site…

Add a Google Sitemap

Since it’s so easy to add posts and pages to a WordPress site, you often end up with an endless labyrinth of subpages and directories which are almost impossible for the search engines to crawl.  By adding an XML sitemap and submitting this to Google, it ensures all your pages get crawled and begin ranking. The easiest way to do this is by getting the “XML-Sitemap” plugin for WordPress which creates a sitemap automatically and submits it to the search engines. It is also worth signing up for Google’s Webmaster Tools to track your site’s sitemap and check which of your pages have been crawled etc.

Internal Linking

As I mentioned previously, your WordPress site will no doubt end up with a heap of pages on it after only a couple of months.  This means there should be ample opportunity to link one post to another (like I have done in this post).  Be sure to use solid anchor text, preferably the page’s title or the keyword you are targeting (ideally these would be one and the same).

Tracking

Since Google Analytic’s can be a bit difficult to install properly on WordPress (give it a go though, as it is well worth it) you may have to look elsewhere for tracking software. A favourite of mine is the “Wassup” plugin (just search for it in “Plugins” and click “Install”). It is very Analytics-esque, and will show you exactly what people searched for to find your site or who referred them. By having this information it allows you to show what posts are the most visited and what is worth posting about more often.

If I have missed anything out or you want to add something please leave me a comment!