WordPress search engine optimisation (WP SEO) options are many and varied. Picking the right options makes a huge difference to SERPs (search engine results pages) outcomes. There’s also a complication with many new design themes being distributed with SEO functionality already embedded.

So, what’s important in WordPress SEO? As a preface to the following paragraphs, I’ve been a WordPress fan since version 1.5 or so, and have years of experience in installation of WordPress, themes and plugins. In particular, WordPress SEO is my speciality, along with website development for clients the world over.

The default installation of WordPress does not lend itself well to good search engine rankings, as many of the essentials are not included in the core code. That’s only a minor problem, as a plethora of good SEO plugin extensions exist. The biggest problem is sorting through the misinformation, conflicting opinions and various offerings to arrive at a solid WP SEO platform.

Best of Breed or the Multi-Tool Approach to WP SEO

Here’s how I see it… There are some design themes and plugins that offer a multiplicity of tools and features, but this can sometimes make them a “jack of all trades and master of none” candidate. For the unsophisticated user, with no driving imperative to attain consistent Top 10 rankings, it may matter little…

My preference is to use a selection of the best plugins, rather than a multi-tool option, because I want total manual control of as many contributing elements as is possible. To achieve my client’s objectives in a competitive niche, I usually need to extract every possible bit of traction out of every single page…

Built-In WP SEO Tools

WordPress does have some core functionality that could be classed as SEO-specific, or at least related… Amongst those are;

Search Engine Friendly URLs – Permalinks

WordPress Permalinks (SEF URLs) allows the post and page file names to be output in a variety of ways depending on your needs. Most website owners people don’t understand the available options. From my perspective the only two that matters are Post Name (new since WP3.x) and Custom.

I tend to use Custom, and add in the Post Category to the URL, as per the illustation above. This generates some extra keyword traction in the URL, never a bad thing – especially if your Domain Name is keyword-deficient.

NB: If you have an existing site that is well indexed and enjoys good rankings, you need to be very careful about playing with Permalinks. Take note of the existing structure, and test any change you make to see if the old file names are correctly rerouted to the new file names…

For example, you were using the “Default” setting http://www.mysite.com/?p=12 format and you make a switch to Post Name. You check that when you try and access the old URL for a given page, it redirects to the NEW page name. If not, you may need to add a 301 Permanent Redirection (for every page indexed by Google et al) into the .htaccess file – which is where the Permalinks mod_rewrite code is placed.

If you don’t handle this correctly, you will jeopardise your existing search engine rankings. Here’s a link to further reading on website redesign best practice.

Navigation & SEO

Often overlooked, the navigation structure is incredibly important to;

• overall site indexing
• ease of use of the website
• emphasizing importance of primary pages
• providing keyword Anchor Text that tells SE’s what the linked-to page is about
• transferring Page Rank internally via cross-linking

A good menu navigation system has some key components; it is independent of page names & headings, includes hyperlink titles, and where possible makes all pages accessible within 1 click of the Home page, and from any internal page. Effective cross-linking means visitors should not have to step backwards a level to get to another page or sub-menu levels. Obviously, an extremely large website with multiple application components (wordpress cms + forum + directory etc) can make that goal too difficult to achieve.

The WordPress 3.x “Menu” structures are a thing of beauty and a joy to behold, and few other CMS can match the sophistication or simplicity of implementing them. Unfortunately, not all design themes support the WordPress menu system, and to me, thats a good enough reason for a website redesign! The WP3.x menus can provide significant additional WP SEO traction when employed correctly by;

• Editing menu item names to include keywords relevant to the page
• Adding keyword-rich descriptive hyperlink text to each item

Where a drop-down menu item has many child pages, consider building a specific sub-category menu in order to display a “sibling” page menu in the sidebar. That helps viewers quickly step from page to page within a defined subsection.

Page Headings

The ability to have a Page Heading that fits the available space without necessarily dictating the Page URL, the Page Title and the Page Menu item is what sets WordPress head and shoulders above competing CMS platforms.

You may now use a verbose Heading that would have previously ruined your Menu layout, and then edit the Menu item manually so it still fits within the top level or dropdown menu constraints.

Page Slug / URL

The inbuilt Page Slug option has always existed, but few people use it to full advantage.

By default, it is generated by the Page Heading / Name, but you can and sometimes should amend it to include the specific keyword search phrase that is being targeted on the page.

Design Theme

Does your design theme support WP3.x menus? If not, its about past its use-by date in my opinion, because there’s so much more milage to be extracted from the excellent navigation structure embedded in WP3.x.

Does your design theme includes SEO bells and whistles, but lacks either;

• a structured update system for the theme that preserves your settings
• the ability to turn off the SEO elements so you can use a preferred / dedicated SEO plugin

Of all the WordPress design themes I regularly use, those published under the Genesis platform are truly excellent in this respect. The core theme code is updated independently of the child themes, and there is an update subscription service that can be set to notify you by email the moment a new version is available.

Having a design theme that also makes provision for inserting your Google Analytis code into the correct (wp_footer) location is also a bonus…

Meta-Data

The ability to manually control the Titles, Descriptions and Keywords meta-tags is very important in the overall scheme of things. The best-known WP SEO tool is the All In One SEO Pack. There are a number of derivatives, copies and emulations that do more or less than the original AIO SEO Pack, but I’m a loyal user… I’ve tried and still use a couple of others (Platinum SEO & Headspace) because i’ve no compelling reason to change them. However, the default install on all my sites is still the All In One SEO Pack…

All In One SEO Pack’s default installation needs some settings checked, especially;

• Enable – if you don’t enable it, it won’t do anything!
• Canonical URLs checked
• Rewrite Titles checked
• Autogenerate Descriptions checked

On a first install on an existing WP CMS or Blog, that immediately gives Google some additional relevant content to work with, while you find the time to go through pages and posts to manually write compelling text content for these elements.

Page Titles

By default, the page title is generated by the page heading plus the Site Name if you do nothing… The AIS SEO default setting is Post Title Format: %post_title% | %blog_title%

However, its sub-optimal because the Page Heading is normally a little cryptic and contrained by space or aesthetics. Use the SEO Pack’s “Page Title Format” to its full potential as its one of the single most important SEO elements in any website.

I often REMOVE the | %blog_title% from the AIO SEO settings, and manually write all Titles for primary pages and posts.

The Title is usually constrained to 70 characters. Whilst you can add more, Google will only show 65 characters including spaces! Therefore, its important that the stuff you actually want people to see is at the beginning! That means making sure any generic “tagline” is short, and at the END of the Title.

Page Description Meta-Tag

The page description meta-tag is usually generated from the first paragraph of text on the page. Google will also “ad lib” a description if you put nothing in the box… Neither outcome is optimal, given that what you want is an accurate description of the page content that impels a reader to click your link in the SERPs…

The Title is usually constrained to 200 characters. Whilst you can add more, Google only shows 150 characters including spaces, so again its essential that the stuff you actually want people to see is at the beginning! Inserting your targeted, exact-match, high-volume keyword search phrase at the beginning of the Description is the correct approach.

Keyword Meta-Tag

Keywords meta-tag content can be manually entered, or generated from categories and or tags assigned to the page or post. Misinformation on the Keywords meta-tag suggests its use is a complete waste of time… Thats not correct! Whilsts its importance has certainly been diminished over time, at least some major search engines do still read it, and it is therefore worth using correctly.

I usually insert 1- to 12 relevant variations of my targeted, exact-match, high-volume keyword search phrase in this meta-tag, separated by commas.

Google XML Sitemaps

The major search engines agree on very little, but an historic consensus saw all SE’s decide on support for the “sitemap.xml” format to aid in website indexing. By default, those major search engines all look in the robots.txt file for the link to your website’s sitemap. An oldie but a goodie, the stand-alone Google XML Sitemap plugin is my preferred option.

robots.txt

Many websites don’t have one of these crucial files, which instruct search engines where they should or should not go within your website. They are also the expected location for the path to your sitemap.xml in this line of text the bots and spiders look for;

Sitemap: http://www/yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Not having one generates 404 page not found errors, and basically shows all and sundry that its an unsophisticated and disorganised website…

HTML Sitemaps

Providing an HTML sitemap is useful tool for a larger site, as its one way of giving people and search engines an overview of the site and a 2nd level access pathway. Some design themes generate a sitemap-style custom 404 Page Not Found error page. My HTML Sitemap plugin of choice is the WP Realtime Sitemap

Social Media

Early last year marked a significant milestone in Google’s goal of rewarding the best content. One of the elements is “User Experience” and within that category is acknowledgement of a site’s modernity. A key indicator of that is inclusion of Social Media content, or lack thereof. There’s two ways to do that;

• FB Like and Google Plus +1 buttons that allow visitors to give you a vote of approval.
• Inclusion of links to your sociual medai profiles; FaceBook page, Linkin, Twitter and YouTube accounts etc.

The three plugings I use most often are; FB Like, Google Plus Ones and Social Profiles Widget

WP SEO Summary

The preceeding is a brief introduction into what works with WordPress SEO and why it does so. Thats only part of the story, of course… No matter what tools you have installed, if you lack a sound grasp of the Principles of Applied Search Engine Optimisation, and experience in the practice thereof, progress will be modest without;

• effective keyword search phrase research
• allocating approriate keywords phrases page by page
• targeting keywords effectively within all possible elements

The Equally Crucial Off-Site SEO:

Approximately half of the weighting in Search Engine Rankings is actually Off-Site SEO! Search engines assess external verification of your sites content by analysing the quantity and quality of inbound links to your website. The keywords in Anchor Text (link titles), in conjunction with On-Site SEO efforts, ultimatelydetermine if and/or how well your site ranks for a specfic keyword search phrase in the SERPs.

If you’d like some help with getting your WordPress website cranked up and generating more visitor traffic, feel free to contact me directly, using our Contact Form.

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Having worked through Basic WordPress SEO elements, we still have a few more cards up our sleeve that we can play to gain some additional Advanced WP SEO traction. One important aspect is getting relevant exact-match keyword search phrases distributed across multiple on and off page elements. Search engines assess many website factors, and its helpful to reinforce your on-page text with relevant keywords in all the little “out-of-sight” places. Doing this increases both the overall word count and balances keyword density… The following represents some tried and true mechanisms that will assist your site upwards…

Its by no means the final word – the goal posts are regularly moved, new strategies emerge and clever people keep creating new solutions to current set of problems. However, working through the items outlined, on top of the Basic WP SEO suggestions, should definitely give you incremental improvements to SERPs rankings.

Image Alt Tags & Titles

Many people overlook the advantage of adding relevant keyword search phrases to Image ALT tags within their posts. By default, the image file name is assigned to the Image Alt text tag. Its not quite so bad if you accurately pre-named the images for the post in question, using an “exact match” keyword search phrases.

However, most people use either a cryptic, meaningless image file name, or in the case of photographs, they go with the file name assigned by the camera.

If you’ve a lot of images across your website, manually going through post by post, or page by page and adding keyword-rich Image Alt text can be a tedious and time-consuming task.

Fortunately, there is a quick ‘n dirty solution to this which automatically populates the image Alt and Title texts – try SEO Friendly Images which allows you to automatically reset image Alt & Titles across the entire site!

This is usually a “one-time” thing where you auto-update all images at once with SEO-Friendly Images. Thereafter, you manually assign Alt and Title text to new images as you add them.

Note that its also important to accurately name your image files, preferably including an exact-match keyword search phrase that is relevant to the page / post.

Cross-Linking & Hyperlink Titles

Make it easy for both visitors to find (and search engines to index) content by cross-linking is an important strategy in your SEO processes.There are several ways of doing this, including the Navigation / Menu element discussed in the Basic WordPress SEO post. Linking to Related Posts is useful, as is ensuring that all links have, wherever possible, hyperlink Titles that include keywords relevant to the page the link is directed to.

As websites grow larger, and posts get pushed down the lists, it becomes more important than ever to have some kind of strategy in place that keeps them connected and accessible.

Related Posts & SEO

Make it easy for both visitors to find (and search engines to index) content by cross-linking is an important strategy in your SEO processes. There are many plugins available that take various approaches to listing related posts.

ELI’s Related Posts Footer Links and Widget is a simple but effective plugin that can relate posts by either Categories or Tags, and offers various configuration options. It produces a list of related posts at the end of each post, and/or in a sidebar widget.

Hyperlink Titles & SEO

WordPress 3.x has a very important SEO-relevant facility in the Links tool. First, theres the convenience of (albeit slowly) displaying a drop-down list of all pages and posts within the site that you can link to. Second, it automatically adds the Title of the page or post as the hyperlink title of the link you are adding. That increases keyword count / density, and conveys additional accurate information to Google et al on what the linked page is about!

Use that, rather than the right-click “Copy Link Location” pasted into the link input dialog box! The added advantage is that WordPress will then prevent broken links should you ever rename the “Slug” – e.g. the page file name…

Tags & WP SEO

Using Tags correctly requires the application of some discipline to the process. It should not be a willy-nilly “shotgun” approach, where you assign hundreds of vaguely-related tags to every page! That’s just another, but far worse version of keyword Spam.

You should also make an effort to avoid content duplication – if you have a Category called Gas BBQs, you should not have a Tag called Gas BBQs because both are likely to have exactly the same content. Instead, you could tag the individual BBQ items with 2-Burner, 3-Burner, 4-Burner etc, enabling visitors to extract all associated Product posts in a more useful format. Similarly, you might assign Tags by Product Price Ranges – Under $200, $200 to $499, $500 to $999 etc. Work forward on the basis that;

• Every Tag and every Category create a viewable page
• Search engines don’t like duplicate content

Balance the use of Tags with the use of Categories to ensure that neither produce exactly the same output.

You should also be consistent with tag usage; review the list and reassign multiple similar tags to a single tag! For example, it would be inappropriate to have Tags (or Categories) for; Gas BBQ, Gas Barbecue and Gas Barbecue, given that those are simply variations on a theme. You might target those keyword phrases in particular posts, but I see neither reason nor merit in having multiple similar tags…

There are many and varied approaches to tagging, the one I use the most is Simple Tags – and oldie but a goodie. Its name belies its strengths because it actually performs a diverse array of functions;

1. Mass Edit Terms – to view/edit every post and the tags assigned to it
2. Manage Terms -to replace/ merge tags
3. Auto-Terms – automatically add links to tag-phrases found within the posts
4. Tag Cloud management

Use the “More” HTML tag

You should also use the “MORE” HTML tag to avoid having the entire content of every page displayed within each Category and Tag page. What “More” does is allow you to enforce a page ending at a specified location in the post, with a link to “Read More.” It effectively provides an excerpt of each post in the Category or Tag list.

Where you have many posts per category, it provides a useful teaser to each post rather than the full text output. There only seems to be one “Auto More” plugin that is supposed to automate the process of manually adding the More HTML tag into posts on the basis of pre-set rules.

However, the break by Word count does not work and the break by Characters options is not recommended, leaving break by Percentage  which gives erratic results… On the basis of suboptimal automated output, I’m still adding the More tag manually – but am open to suggestions, if you know of a plugin that woks properly.

The Headspace SEO plugin provides a facility to replace the “Read More” text with something a little more juicy,

Breadcumb Navigation

Proving a “breadcrumb” trail of navigation gives;

• readers an indication of what section of your site they are in, and provdes a way to retreat a level, or to the Home page.
• search engines another indication of the internal structure of the website.

Both of these are “good things” and are recommended. There are multiple plugins available that provide this funcionality, including Really Simple Breadcrumbs. There are themes that provide embedded breadcrumb navigation, such as the Genesis framework from Studiopress.

Here’s an example of Breadcrumb Navigation, showing the current page, parent page and Home page links;

Blogrolls & Links

Use the facility to link to all and sundry with great caution!

I’d NEVER give Home page or Sidebar links away to any site I don’t own! Well, not unless I’m being paid handsomely to do so. Similarly I’d NEVER give a site-wide link  to a site I don’t own!

Think of links as like a bank account... incoming links are an asset, essentially a vote of confidence in your site by another, added to your link bank. Conversely, think of outward links as a vote for someone else, deducted from your link bank…

Therefore, a single site-wide link in a Blogroll that appears in your sidebar or footer might give away every bit of link juice you’ve earned. Multiple site-wide links may well leave you in a severe link deficit – to all intents and purposes, bankrupt…

If you must give links, use a proper Links page and display each link once only, where it will do the least possible damage to your own Google “link juice” reservoir! Don’t link to anyone who won’t link to you…

Plugins to convert all outward links to “nofollow” are available, and those help to prevent Page Rank leakage from your website, whilst still providing a useful link that your site visitors can follow. The External Nofollow plugin does just that – conserves your link juice on external links, but leaves your internal links untouched.

Duplicate Content

As alluded to before, you should be aware of this issue and take steps to minimise content duplication. For example, applying NOINDEX to archives (date-based lists of posts) makes some sense. Some people suggest applying NOINDEX to Categories and Tags.

However, if you’ve used the More tag effectively to segment posts into nicely balanced summaries, and ensured that Categories and Tags are clearly separate elements with varied content, I’d leave them indexed.

The prevailing view on Content Duplication is that Search Engines clearly understand that there is a huge distinction between INTERNAL content duplication, and EXTERNAL (copied) content. Google staff have commented on this, and view it as a relatively normal occurrence – hence the growing utilisation of the rel=canonical tag which ought to point to the authoritative source of the content… Thereby negating the need to worry excessively about internal content duplication issues.

Comments & PingBacks

Comments are a vexed issue – if you allow them, make sure that WordPress is correctly set to prevent publication prior to moderation..

• I turn pingbacks off site-wide
• I turn Comments off on all pages, and auto-set WordPress to turn post comments off after 2 weeks.

The Spam bots drive you crazy otherwise – on a busy WordPress site, the percentage of “good” comments is quickly overwhelmed by the trash if you don’t take firm steps to reduce it.  Make sure you’ve got Akismet installed, and automatically eliminating the spam that does find a chink in the armour.

Comments and pingbacks also have the potential to drain your link juice, so you need to weigh up the pros and cons here.

Content

Given that Google now rewards good content above all else, you should be writing more verbose pages / posts with a minimum of 600 – 800+ words if you are serious about attaining rankings. Those dinky little 250-word posts that got you good rankings in the past are not going to serve you so well in the future.

In fact, you might want to go back through a few of them and expand them out with additional original text, and increase their perceived value to both search engines and readers. Doing so will ensure the former send you more of the latter, which is the objective of the entire process!

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