The default WordPress is pretty good in terms of it’s SEO capability - it let’s you add fresh content to your site and Search Engines love fresh content.

But there are some things that you can do to change it to give your site’s a better chance in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

In this post I’ve come up with 3 quick WordPress SEO tips to help your WordPress site in the SERPs. Those tips are:

• Changing your Title tag structure
• Changing your permalink structure
• Writing high quality content.

Changing Title Tag Structure

Ah, the Title tag - just a few words near the top of the page - so easily forgotten, so easily overlooked.

But Search Engines love your Title tags and Google gives quite a lot of weight to Title tags when working out it’s SERPs which makes them one of the most important parts of your site’s content.

Google only displays the first 66 characters of your Title tag though so it’s important to get the keywords you’re targeting near the start of the title by changing your Title tag’s structure.

An easy way to customise your Title tags’ structure is with the All in One SEO Pack Plugin.

This Plugin is packed with great SEO features but in particular it lets you change the structure for your Title tags.

In addition to letting you create a Title tag template which every Post and Page will use you can also specify the content at individual Post and Page level.

Giving you a great amount of control over the keywords that feature in your Title tags.

And once you’ve changed the structure of your Title tags, It’s important to remember that the keywords you include in your Title must still relate to the contents of the Page to really wring the SEO value out of them.

Permalinks and URL Format

The content of your Page and Post URLs are also used by Search Engines to help determine your position in their SERPs.

By default WordPress URLs are in the following format:

http://example.co.uk/?p=123

Where p=123 is the ID number for the Page or Post that is being displayed.

The Permalink settings in WordPress enable you to change this to something more meaningful, for example:

http://example.com/my-post-example

This not only helps users remember the address of the page more easily, it lets you add targetted keywords to your URLs which in turn helps Search Engines apply a value to the page.

To change the format of your URLs:

1. Log into your WordPress Admin area.
2. Click the Settings tab.
3. Click the Permalinks link.
4. Select whether you want to change your URL format to one of the predefined formats or create a customised format. If the date the post was published is important to the content I recommend using one of the two predefined date formats (”Day and name” or “Month and name”). However, if your content I recommend using as simple a format as possible (typically just using “/%postname%/” to display the name of the Page or Post).
5. Click the Save Changes button.

It’s a change that takes 2 minutes to do but can have a big effect on your SERPs.

Content, Content, Content

The final SEO tip is the one that’s hardest to achieve - writing high quality content.

This requires time, effort and a little bit of skill.

But it’s worth investing in writing high quality content because if it’s good enough and people start linking to your content from their site it will have a massive effect on your SERPs.

And, just like anything that requires skill, you’ll find the more you write the better you’ll get.

On top of this one of the beauties of Web publishing is that you can go back and edit everything you’ve written and re-publish. So even if it’s not perfect at the start you can always improve your content.

Background

I’m currently working on a custom WordPress Theme that uses category and sub-category archives extensively to create a document library.

I wanted to add breadcrumb navigation to the site to show the relationships between the categories and sub-categories and to add an extra level of usability to the site.

So here are the few lines of code I’ve written to create the category breadcrumb navigation:

<?php
$category = get_the_category();
$current_cat = $category[0]->cat_ID;
?>
<p class=”breadcrumb”> <a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/”>Home Page</a> &raquo; <?php echo get_category_parents($current_cat, TRUE, ‘ &raquo; ‘); ?> <?php the_title(); ?></p>

Note: This code must be added inside the Loop to ensure it works as intended. I’ve added this to both the archive.php - plus all category specific Template files - and single.php Template files.

Let’s look at the code a little closer.

Getting the Current Post’s Category

The first section looks like this:

<?php
$category = get_the_category();
$current_cat = $category[0]->cat_ID;
?>

This code uses the get_the_category() to get the category ID for the currently displayed category archive or post and passes it to a variable - $current_cat – for use later on when discovering the category hierarchy.

Creating the Hierarchy and Displaying the Breadcrumbs

The next section of code is used to create the hierarchy between the categories and to display the breadcrumb links to the user.

<p class=”breadcrumb”> <a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/”>Home Page</a> &raquo; <?php echo get_category_parents($current_cat, TRUE, ‘ &raquo; ‘); ?> <?php the_title(); ?></p>

The first part of the code:

<a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/”>Home Page</a>

simply adds a link back to the site’s home page.

The clever part of creating the category hierarchy and breadcrumbs is done by the get_category_parents() function. This creates a list of the parents categories of a category.

I’m passing 3 parameters to this function:

• $current_cat: This is the category ID of the current post for which I want to return the parents.
• TRUE: This ensures that each parent category is displayed as a link.
• ‘ &raquo; ‘: This is the character I want to use to separate each category in the breadcrumbs.

The final part of the code looks like this:

<?php the_title(); ?>

If the users on a Post page this displays the title of the Post, otherwise it’s blank.

Pros & Cons

Using this code to display category breadcrumbs is a pretty straight forward way to add extra level of navigation to a WordPress powered site.

However, there are a few draw backs:

1. It’s only category based navigation - If you want to add similar functionality for Pages and Sub-Pages additional code is needed.
2. Posts can belong to only one category - This is a fundamental part of creating a hierarchical breadcrumb navigation: when writing a post it’s essential to only add it to only one category.
3. Categories are always displayed as links followed by the separator character - This is great if you’re viewing a single Post; it’s exactly what you want - a link back up to the parent categories. But when viewing a category archive, it can look a little bit odd.

If you use this code and discover any other issues or any ways to improve it please feel free to add a comment below.

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I know, I know.

It’s been an extremely long time since I last posted anything on 7879 Designs but not because 7879 is the latest in a long line of neglected ideas I’ve had.

In fact it’s been quite the oposite.

I’ve been pretty busy with work over the past few months so much so that I’ve only just got round to upgrading the 7879 Deisgns site to WordPress 2.5.

And as you can see, the good news is that the site is still here. The upgrade was as straight forward as ever without any errors in my pretty simple theme.

I’m slowly getting used to the new admin interface too. I’m still not convinced that all the changes are good ones - why put the Settings, Plugins and Users options all by them selves over on the right? - but I do like the redesign of the Write Post page.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll get around to posting more frequently now I’ve gone to the extreme length of upgrading and keep this site a little more up to date than it has been in the past.

That’s not a promise though.

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