SEO Strategy

I’ve been wanting to delve a little more deeply into SEO for Wordpress, so I’ve compiled some Wordpress SEO tips from a few different sources. My sources are at the end of the article.

1. Put your primary keywords in your blog name, and make sure your blog name is wrapped in an h1 tag in your stylesheet. In Wordpress your blog name usually appears in the header on every page.

2. Use the SEO Title Tag plugin to allow you to make your page titles different from your post titles. Each post has its own page title which by default has the Blog Name first followed by the Post Title. But this is less than optimal on two counts. First, the page title should be more tightly focused for SEO purposes than the actual post title, and second, the Blog Name should not come first (if at all) in the page title. For a specific example of how you should fine tune your page and post titles, see Optimizing Wordpress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs.

3. For each post put your target keyword phrase for that post in the post title - Remember that each post is considered a distinct page, so just as with web pages, a primary SEO strategy is to make sure you optimize the title. This, along with your page title is probably the most important thing you can do. Both titles (page title and post title) should contain the exact keyword phrase you are optimizing for.

4. Write your post title to attract readers. This is what will show up in the search engines and should be designed to get clicks.

4. Wrap your post titles in an h1 tag - Many themes are set up so that the blog name (e.g., SEO Strategy) has an h1 tag and the post title has an h2 tag. From the SEO point of view this is not correct. You want your post title to be recognized as the primary title for the page. Leave these titles as h2 on the index.php page, but change them to h1 on the “Single Post” page.

This will take some tweaking of your theme pages. Go to your Admin dashboard, then go to Theme Editor. Click on Single Post and find where it says

<h2><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

Change the <h2>tag to an <h1>. Make sure you tweak your Stylesheet so the <h1>tag looks correct.

4. Use your target keyword in the text of the post - Optimize each post just like you would optimize a web page. Use your precise target keyword, especially in the first few sentences. Then use related keywords throughout the post.

5. Put your post names in your permalinks - If you have put your keywords in your post titles this will also put them in your permalinks. So instead of looking like this,

http://www.rickhendershot.com/?p=123

Your permalinks will look like this:

http://www.rickhendershot.com/article-marketing/article-marketing-insights-in-ebook/

For instructions on how to do this see Top Wordpress SEO Tips for Top 10 Rankings

6. Post links to your best posts in social networking sites - Be sure to use the appropriate tags. You’ll have to discover what are the most effective ways to get powerful links back to your posts from social bookmarking and social networking sites. This will get you backlinks, traffic, links from other bloggers interested in your posts, and reinforce your SEO focus. Some of my favourites are Digg, PlugIM, Clipmarks, Mister Wong, Propeller, StumbleUpon - there are really too many to mention.

7. Link to your best posts from other resources - Use articles, blog comments, and other blog posts to link back to your best posts.

Some of my sources for this post:

Top Wordpress SEO Tips for Top 10 Rankings, from The Optimizer - Weekly SEO News

10 Ways To Optimize Wordpress For More Traffic , from BoydCreative

Optimizing Wordpress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs, from Graywolf’s SEOBlog