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Search Engine Optimization for wordpress blog - a beginners primer

Posted by stuart as , ,

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!

21 comments so far

Stephen Cronin says August 31st, 2007 at 8:01 am

Actually, if you have a new blog, then I wouldn’t recommend using category in the permalink (even though many people suggest this). Using category isn’t sensible unless you are very sure that your categories won’t change. If you change them as your blog matures, you break your permalinks.

Also, if you accidentally post using the wrong category, then you can’t change the post to the correct category without breaking the permalink that’s sent out via ping services the instant you click publish.

Guadagnare says August 31st, 2007 at 9:31 am

I already use All in one Seo and I love it.
It is great.

Unfortunately, my server providere does not give me access to my htaccess file and I cannot change the structure.

Do you know of any work around?

Thanks
Guadagnare

SarahG says September 2nd, 2007 at 7:09 pm

I actually think that the newest version of WP doesn’t update your htaccess anyhow as new sites we’ve set up and tried to set up permalinks didn’t affect the htaccess file (despite it being writeable).

It seems that it simply uses a structure of

domain.com/index.php/year/month/day/post-slug/

as the default one

I changed it all manually however as I didn’t want index.php being in the URL too. However this may be a step in the right direction for someone who can’t alter their htaccess. Plus permalinks like this are possible on IIS and that doesn’t have htaccess available.

Kristie says September 4th, 2007 at 9:18 am

I’d have to agree with the comment about using categories in your URLs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten to click on the category until after I’ve hit publish…

Louiss says September 5th, 2007 at 3:44 am

For new blogger I bet them will change their category frequently as they are new. They might not know what they will write in future.

snel geld lenen says September 5th, 2007 at 7:14 am

Nice post, thanks for the tips and the SEO plugin!! Cheers,

Cheatalot says September 11th, 2007 at 3:31 am

Very handy post! Some really nice thing i can use for me new blog :)

Adrian says September 13th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

I want to ask if it is wise to change the categories of blogs from its original content once its start to pick high Ranks?

Thanks

Detroit Wedding Photographer Blog says September 15th, 2007 at 1:14 pm

I like just using %postname% and no category at all.

I don’t know if that makes a difference. Would it?

Dylan says September 21st, 2007 at 5:33 am

Quote:
I don’t know if that makes a difference. Would it?

You do gain some benefit from putting the category name in the URL if its relevant for your search terms (and they should be).

Quote:
I want to ask if it is wise to change the categories of blogs from its original content once its start to pick high Ranks?

If it changes the URL structure you should avoid this. If it doesn’t then you can change them as you see fit. Of course if you’re ranking high for a term and you change categories this could affect your rankings

Poker Tips says September 24th, 2007 at 4:33 am

Thanks for the tips, i will use them on my weblog :)!

spletno gostovanje says September 25th, 2007 at 1:47 am

Thanks for the great tips. I belive having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it.

Dallas Office Space says October 1st, 2007 at 12:08 pm

Im just starting a blog on my website and your post will be a huge benefit. Thanks!

Otto says October 9th, 2007 at 9:07 pm

The Permalink-Redirect Plugin is very usefull to avoid double content.

http://fucoder.com/code/permalink-redirect/

Internet Marketing Blog says October 15th, 2007 at 2:59 am

We have a 6 part series on SEO for Wordpress at our blog. Please check it out.

Lau @ Digital Photography Tutorials says October 15th, 2007 at 4:23 am

interesting I would follow this optimization advices

Alex Bell says October 23rd, 2007 at 4:10 pm

[…]
Agree having keywords in your URL is an absolute must and important.Nice wrap up.

Alex Bell.[…]

dev waring says January 29th, 2008 at 9:46 am

what i like to see for wordpress is to give the blogger more dynamic web options too besides the basic html

dev waring says January 29th, 2008 at 9:48 am

wordpress needs to bring in more html it would b more helpful for the seo part of the blog and gives more control to the page for coders

Buy links says February 14th, 2008 at 2:50 am

Having the right keywords in url is important, very important & not only for blogs. I have read the 6 part series on SEO for Wordpress and found it very helpful, thanks.

Jarrett Channing says March 4th, 2008 at 7:43 am

I recently started a new blog and actually made sure all of these things were set up before i made my first post. this was a good refresher though.

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