Search Engine Optimization for wordpress blog - a beginners primer

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization, search engine

So you’re going to set up a new blog! Congratulations and good luck. You’ve picked your niche, your blogging platform of choice is WordPress, you’re all set up with your theme and plugins,and you’ve got your AdSense account set up and ready to go.

So we just start posting now, right?

Well…..you could, but there are a few more tweaks you could make before you start to give yourself the best possible chance of getting that search engine love we all crave.

Firstly, let’s have a look at post titles and how they relate to page titles (the text you see up the top pf the browesr - on this page it will be something like Pimpmypagerank.com >> blog archive >> Search Engine Optimization…….etc etc).

Normally, WordPress will create page titles in the following way:

• Blog Name / Category / Post Title

Whilst this is nice, it could be better. We don’t really want the name of our blog to be the first thing the search engine sees in our title, as it already knows that. What we really want is our page title to go like this:

• Post Title / Blog name

To acheive this, we wander over to UberDose, and pick up their All in One SEO Plugin. This cool little plugin lets you do a variety of things which help the SEO of your blog, including the above mentioned page title re-writing. Simply upload the plugin to your plugins directory, activate it, and choose All in One SEO Plugin from the Options menu. The configuration is self explanatory.

Secondly, let’s have a look at our URL’s, and how they could be hurting us.

The standard WordPress URL goes something like this (assuming you have chosen “Name and Date based” from the Permalink options admin page in your setup):

• Domain name / date / post title.

IMHO, the date part is a waste of space, and using this format, we’re not stuffing nearly enough keywords into our permalink.
The first thing we’re going to want to do to remedy this situation is to go create some posting categories. Let’s say for argument’s sake that our blog is about Schnauzers (a very cool breed of dog!), our categories might be:

• schnauzer breeding
• schnauzer grooming
• schnauzer feeding
• schnauzer behaviour
• schnauzer pictures

An important part of this step is that when posting to our blog, we only assign one category to each post, you’ll see why in a minute.

After we’ve created our categories, we want to go to the “permalinks” section under the “Options” menu, and add the following custom URL structure:

/%category%/%postname%/

What we’ll get now is a URL which looks like this:

• Domain name / Category / Postname

So our URL might end up being:

http://www.schnauzerama.com/schnauzer-grooming/how-to-cut-your-schnauzers-hair

Search Engines are now in absolutely no doubt as to what your page is about.

Of course, you’re going to need to back these tips up with quality, relevant content, but why not give yourself a bit of a head start?

*You’re not going to want to implement these tips into an existing blog, especially changing the permalink structure, as the URL’s are created on the fly, and will be different to the ones the search engines think that the particular page is at. Any incoming links will be rendered useless as well. These tips should really only be implemented on a brand new blog, unless you really know what you’re doing, but if you knew what you were doing, you wouldn’t be reading my posts for advice!