How to Make Your Wordpress Blog SEO friendly

I have been receiving lots of questions about how to make your website Search Engine Optimized (SEO).

The first question you have to ask yourself is what type of platform do you want to use?  A regular HTML website? or a blog platform?  I suggest a blog for numerous reasons.

1. Once up and running it is far easier to maintain and update.
2. The search engines are giving preference to blog content versus generic website content (all other factors the same.)
3. Tutorials on how to use, design, optimize your blog are abundant.
4. Built in ease of use (RSS, Pagination ect)

Ok, so now we have built a case about why you should use a Blog vs. a website, let’s shift the discussion to how to make it the most SEO friendly you possibly can.

*****HUGE DISCLAIMER******DO AS I SAY NOT AS I DO***********

Because I am constantly learning and discovering new ideas and tactics some of the best practices I’m about to discuss, have not been implemented on this blog because I have a version 2.O coming soon and they will be implemented then.

*****END OF DISCLAIMER*************************

If I was to build a new wordpress template (which I currently am) here is what I would do:

1. install the “all in one” SEO plugin
2. make the Page title links easy for the spiders to crawl. (instead of using the wordpress automatically generated page titles-hand write them in HTML)
3. decide the keywords that you want to target to be found on and create a content page for each one of those words or group of words.
4. create a webmaster account for Google, MSN, Yahoo and then create a sitemap for all of them.
5. Inside the worpdress template:
   Page.php – Change post title to h2.
   Single.php -Change post title to h2.
   Archive.php – Change title to h2.
   Comments.php – Change responses/leave reply text to h3
   Sidebar.php – Change sidebar headings to h3
6. Tags are also an often overlooked part of the whole SEO optimization process. Please USE them at all times if you try for SEO. It helps to use your main keyword as a tag first and then some variations. Ideally you want around 5-10 tags.
7. Links: Start getting quality back links using anchor texts (duh). But here is a little trick.  Internal linking is a great way to create some link juice.  I use a plugin called KB Linker.  This is such a cool plugin that will allow you to automatically create internal links as well as anchor texts.
8. When posting a blog post use an image.  In the image be sure to include your keyword in the description.

The great thing about SEO is you only have to be better than your competition.  I use keyword elite (though now I can’t because it is not Mac compatible so I am looking for another Mac friendly program that is as good as Keyword Elite) to analyze what my competitors are doing.  All you have to do is get the same links that they are using and then add a few of your own AND out SEO them, meaning do some of the above better than them and you will get the results.

Tagged as: San Diego SEO, Wordpress