Ultimate Tips for Powerful SEO on your WordPress Blog
If you have a WordPress blog and you’re chasing the first place in Google, tried almost all SEO tactics and followed hundreds of advices you’ll definitely find this post useful. So, in this article, I’ll tell you some powerful seo tips but most important I’ll SHOW YOU how you can optimize the seo for your WordPress blog.
Optimize the “h1″ heading of your WordPress blog.
Instead of having the same “h1″ (which on most blogs is the blog title) on every page you can change it depending the page that loads. So open “header.php” file of your WordPress theme and change the h1 of your blog to something like this:
<?php if ( is_single() || is_ page() ) { ?>
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<?php the_title(); ?>
</a></h1>
<?php }else{ ?>
<h1> <a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>" title="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>">
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
</a></h1>
<?php } ?>
This code will show the post title or the page title in the “h1″ tags on the single posts or normal pages, and the blog title on the rest of your sections (ie. category, archive, search pages).
Set the “Read More” links to “nofollow”
Add the “nofollow” attribute to your “Read More” links. Change the default wordpress tag that generates these links to something like this:
<a rel="nofollow" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>#more-<?php the_ID(); ?>">Read More</a>
Use a WordPress SEO plugin
Generally I don’t like to use plugins but this time I’ll recommend one. “All In One Seo Pack” is an amazing plugin and it’s a must for any blogger who chases the first places in Google. It’s extremely easy to use and automates a lot of things like setting up the canonical urls, setting up individual titles for every page or article you publish or generating meta tags automatically.
Make your title tags Seo Friendly
If you don’t want to use a seo plugin that automates this process here’s how you can do this manually:
Open “header.php” file of your wordpress theme and replace your title tag with one:
<title>
<?php if (is_home () ) {
bloginfo('name');
} elseif ( is_category() ) {
single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('name');
} elseif (is_single() ) {
single_post_title();
} elseif (is_page() ) {
bloginfo('name'); echo ': '; single_post_title();
} else {
wp_title('',true);
} ?>
</title>
Source: http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-make-your-title-tag-seo-friendly
Add custom meta descriptions
You know that when searching online, in the results, people will read the title and the description first. If these two don’t attract their attention you lost them. Here’s how to set up a relevant description manually if you don’t want to use a seo plugin.
Open “header.php” file of your wordpress theme and paste this code between your “head” tags:
<?php if ( (is_home()) || (is_front_page()) ) { ?>
<meta name="description" content="Blog description goes here" />
<?php } elseif (is_single()) { ?>
<meta name="description" content="<?php the_excerpt();?>"/>
<?php } ?>
Source: http://www.wprecipes.com/wordpress-seo-add-meta-description-to-your-theme
Use “title” attribute to your images
Besides using the “alt” attribute which is a must you also should set up the “title” attribute. If you use a lot of images in your articles, with the help of this attribute you will definitely increase your traffic. Use keyword rich descriptions in both “alt” and “title” attributes. Google Images has a lot of fans. Why not take advantage of the traffic that it generates, by optimizing your images.
Customize your post’s URLs
Carefully customize the “slugs” of your posts. If you have a title like this for example “10 Seo Tips and Tricks for your WordPress Blog”, WordPress will generate automatically the slug in something like “http://www.yourblog.com/10-seo-tips-and-tricks-for-your-wordpress-blog”. Even if the urls are seo friendly, this is not enough. Get rid of the stop words or any unnecessary and irrelevant words in the “slugs”. Edit your urls to show something like this instead: “http://www.yourblog.com/seo-tips-tricks-wordpress-blog”. You get the idea.
Make some Internal Link Building
If you write an article related to some other article written in the past, make sure you link to the old article through its keywords. This way you can revive old post and, even better, you can grow in Google rankings.
Add “nofollow” attribute to your blogroll sponsored links
You know Google hates paid links don’t you? Or maybe you just want to stop the “PR” leak. If you have such links in your blogroll, make sure you set them to “nofollow”. It’s very easy and it will help your rankings in the long run. You can use the “Better Blogroll” plugin for this or if you don’t like plugins just follow this tutorial: “Adding nofollow attribute to your WordPress Blogroll” (see how I made Internal Link Building?).
Use the “strong” tag to give weight to your keywords.
It is recommended to use the “strong” tag at least once on your main keywords in your articles. More, it is also recommended to bold keywords in the beggining of your content and also at the end. But this will give your article an ugly spammy look if you use it without the need to emphasize something. The easy way is to style the “strong” tag. See the example below:
<strong style="font-weight: normal;">My Keyword Here</strong>
Make sure you don’t make abuse of the tag in this way.
Hope you’ll find this post useful and use these tips wisely to increase the traffic and the quality of your blog.
Cheers!
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Very good pointers. Another thing that can be done to increase traffic is to write teaser articles on other article sites that link to your own. These articles should be original and offer valuable information to give off a good first impression to visitors who read your content for the first time.
And ping your blog!
There are some more tips at http://www.carnavia.com/blog/web-design/do-it-yourself-seo