Wordpress SEO Tips

[3wdl]

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From my blog.

http://www.exwebjunkie.com/2007/01/2...ress-seo-tips/

Does anyone have anymore tips to add?

This is not the bees all and end all of guides and I’m sure there are plenty more out there, but I thought I’d pop a few things onto my virtual notepad in the sky after a number of Wordpress installs that I have done recently. All of the following work with Wordpress 2.0 and will most likely work with 2.1.
Titles

One of the first things to change after installing wordpress is the title section in your wordpress template. Out of the box it usually has the title on all of your site as the Blog title, which is obviously rubbish for SEO. There is a plugin that you can use further down in this guide but this will also do it for you.

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo('name'); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo " - "; bloginfo('name'); } elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?> </title>

To do this go into your admin area, select Presentation then Theme Editor. If the theme is a good one it will be in the “header.php” – just replace whatever is in the title tag at the moment.

Mod Rewrite

The next thing you should change is the URL structure – Search Engines really don’t like the standard variable, e.g. something.com/p=73. Make sure that your server supports Mod_Rewrite and select one of the options from the admin area / options / Permalinks. There are thousands of different structures that you can use but my personal fav is: /news/070%post_id%/%postname%.html. This is optimised for google news after reading a few bits on the web about the structure required – if you don’t plan to try and get inclusion here then the default Date and name based option should do you good.

Plugins

The plugins section is one of the best parts of wordpress – there are so many different ones out there but my personal recommendations are:

* Ultimate Tag Warrior – by far the best tag software out there and can also work well with URLs if you have Mod_Rewrite on.
* SEO Title Tag works with Ultimate Tag Warrior and is what I use for most of my sites – the code used at the top can work just as well but this is easier to customise.
* Marketingpop SEO plugin also requires Ultimate Tag Warrior and can work quite effectively.
* Sitemap Generator generates a sitemap.xml file that you can send to google & yahoo. Google’s webmaster toolkit page is very good and can help with getting indexed faster than usual.
* Social Bookmarks will put some nice little buttons under your posts and allow people to submit your post to digg, reddit, etc

Pings

I generally ping the following servers, some of them are great, some are not, but here is my list none the less. You can set these up in your Options > Writing in the Wordpress Admin area.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

Other things to think about

If it works with the post then make sure that you trackback a few blogs in your posts (as long as they are relevant obviously) – the more relevant links back to your site the better and should bring you a little bit of traffic.

MyBlogLog was recently purchased by Yahoo which means it’s likely to get a lot more users over time – sign up an account and add the widget onto your site, not only will it help give you a visualisation of who is visiting your site but you’re mug will be displayed on other blogs you visit and you can sometimes get a bit of traffic from keeping your face on some of the bigger blogs.

Use Social bookmark sites. Submit to Digg, Submit to Reddit, and check out onlywire.com and submit each one of your articles every time you write a post – it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes and they can bring quality backlinks.

That’s it for now – Hopefully this is an article that will continue to develop as time goes by – if you have any other suggestions please do leave a comment and I’ll add them in.

[Brendon]

1) Make sure you've got some relevant keywords in your blog title. I fiddled my title last week, and jumped to #1 for the target term in Y and G in about 3 days
2) Use keywords in your post headlines (I left my posts as numbers - couldn't be arsed messing around with that for the benefit it brings, but that''s largely because I'm lazy, rather than it not being worth it. I'm not monetising my blog via advertising)
3) Comment on other authority blogs, and leave traces. It's not spam, it's HOW THE WWW IS MEANT TO WORK!
4) Try and get other people to link to you. YOu can ask mates for a few freebies to get you going, but ultimately, you have to write good stuff to get love. It's working