19_08_2008

3 Quick WordPress SEO Tips

Scrawled by Ian | WordPress Tips

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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Number of Comments: 2 Comments so far.

  1. Wordpress SEO Plugin wrote on the 09_09_2008

    Wordpress is a great blogging platform and getting it search engine optimized really isn’t a hard task. Using proper permalinks and robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content and a few other methods can really make a difference. The All in One SEO plugin is really the best bet.

  2. Creative Farm Design » Site Power by Wordpress Gallery wrote on the 30_09_2008

    [...]  http://www.7879designs.com/wordpress-tips/3-quick-wordpress-seo-tips/ — very good SEO tips [...]

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