Basic SEO steps for Word Press

[Bagi Zoltán]

1) Setting the best URL

Observed that search engines don’t recognise keywords in the URLs, unless they are separated with hyphen, full stop or plus sign.

After installing your Word Press blog software, URLs create by default will contain question mark and an identification number of your post. Why not exploit the advantages of the keyword rich URLs and make your blog search engine friendly right away by replacing the URLs with question marks and identification number with keyword rich urls.

All you need to do is as follows:

i. Login to you Word Press admin control panel, at the Permalinks submenu, you will see the available Permalinks options, select custom options. Next to the Custom, specify below text and fill it with this value:

/keyphrase-separated-with-hypens/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Optionally you may want to remove the date of posting to shorten the URLs, and if you want your other important keyphrases -set as categories that would group your posts and- will be shown in the URLs, set this one.

/keyphrase-separated-with-hypens/%category%/%postname%/

When you publish a new post and your selected permalink structure is not the default or the numeric based, the script will automatically set the title of your post into the URL (separated with hypens). If you would like to see something different Word Press offers you the opportunity to customize the URL filling out the Post Slug input form.


2) Setting the title tag

As default the title tag of your homepage is set during the installation, but if you changed your mind and want something different go to the General Option and you will be able to set something more keyword rich one. Remember that with each additional word you will reduce the relative weight of the already set ones in the eyes of search engines.

If you click on one of your post you will see that the script show the title in the following form:

Blog title » Post Title

In order to maximize the exploitation of the title tag, you may want to change the code. If you don't have FTP permission, log into your Admin account and choose the Presentation menu, and select the Theme Editor option. In the right sidebar you will see the part of your current template. Please select the Header from those slices. Now you see the content of the header.php. Look for the code opening with <title> and closed with </title>, and replace with this code:

PHP Code:

<title><?php if(!is_single()) { bloginfo('name'); } wp_title(); ?></title>

and save the template. The title tag of your post contains only the Post Title, so we eliminated the Blog Title, but the &raquo; is still there. In order to remove it, you need an FTP account. Open the /wp-includes/general- template.php file with your FTP software and substitute this code:

PHP Code:

function wp_title($sep = '»', $display = true) 


with this one:

PHP Code:

function wp_title($sep = '', $display = true) 


and it's done.



3) Improving the Page Rank flow

I suggest you to install the Category Tagging plugin which will make the links of the related posts display above the comments.

According to the Google Webmaster Guidelines placing more than 100 links at a single page is not recommended, so endeavour to keep the number of outgoing links as low as you can, and you will have the opportunity to utilize the gained Page Rank.

Good luck to You!

Bagi Zoltán writes article

[temi]

Excellent post bagi, rep added, when I have some time over the months I will enhance it maybe with some screenshot

[Bagi Zoltán]

That is not a bad idea Temi, so hurry because it's possible that I will be faster

Rep added. Great stuff!

[mabaoshan36]

Blog itself is a seo friendly program with div + css.
that is an aspect of seo.Besides plugins are also seo helpful as descripted above.

[gkd_uk]

Great and detailed post Bagi - Tried to add rep, but get the message that i need to spread some rep around.



How many members will I have to give rep to before I can come back around and give a member rep for the second time.

[gkd_uk]

And by the way Bagi, I have clicked on the little icon to digg your post

What is the advantage of this digg tool?

[Bagi Zoltán]

Digg can bring you huge traffic, since that is a very crowded social bookmark system. Thank you for the dugg.

[Mr. Brown]

WP is a great tool, and what you have posted here makes it that uch more user-friendly.
thanks

[menj]

Nice tips here, going to give you a rep for this

- MENJ