WordPress SEO Guide

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SEO. While some might say that it is dead, it is an incredibly powerful method in which we can drive traffic to our websites. The only problem for bloggers is that, understanding SEO requires a ton of work, right? There are so many steps.

First, you have to optimize your site. How? Then, you have to build backlinks. But I want to write! Then you have to do more optimizing. And yeah, get more backlinks.

In the end, though, if you want your site to have readers, you need to somehow get people there. The best way to get actionable people to your blog is through SEO. Twitter and Facebook are great, but SEO is really where the money is.

In this guide, I am going to show you a lot of useful tips, I think, that will help your site with SEO. While I do SEO professionally, nothing is full proof. We are constantly making changes and Google is constantly making changes. Because of that, I can only say that these things work for me and I’m confident they’ll work for you. But, in SEO, there are no guarantees.

Basic SEO

Before we look at unknown ways of helping your site rank, it’s important to do a site audit to ensure that you are maximizing the optimization on your site. If you aren’t, by making some of these simple, yet necessary changes, you’ll find yourself ranking higher in the search engines. In my book, that’s always good.

Title Tags

The very first thing that you want to do on your blog is ensure that you set up your title tags for each post. According to many SEOs, this is the single most important tag on your website when it comes to optimization because it tells Google what the page is. More than any other tag, this is the one that goes, “Yo, Google…This page is called “WordPress SEO Guide.”

New versions of WordPress automatically have this set up. However, if you’re running an older version of WordPress, perhaps that isn’t the case. They used to do it Blog Name >> Post Title. This hurts for two reasons:

1. You are already ranking on your homepage for your blog name, so ranking for deep pages as well decreases the value.
2. You want Google to see the title of the post so that’s what gets indexed. Google reads left to right. If the blog name is there first, they read that first and think that’s more important.

So, if you’re using an older version of WordPress–Update–then you’ll want to go in and change it so that the title tag comes first.

I would check out the All in One SEO pack. It’s a plugin that really does a nice job. I don’t personally use it, but that’s because I only use WordPress themes from StudioPress and Genesis comes with a SEO Settings control panel, so I don’t need a plugin to do the same thing. I obviously would go with StudioPress because you’re getting a great premium theme and great SEO settings, but since they cost money, do what you think is best.

URL Structure

In WordPress, the stucture of your URL is called the permalink. Basically, what is the URL of the entire post. For this post, the URL is http://www.blogrevolter.com/wordpress-seo. It’s short, simple and concise. More importantly, it tells you what you’re ready and tells Google the same thing.

You have to manually change this in WordPress. Otherwise, your post URL will be http://www.blogrevolter.com/?p=25 or whatever. That offers no SEO value and good luck telling a friend about a blog post because they’ll forget.

To change the permalinks, go to settings and click permalinks. I advocate for the “%postname%” tag which gives you the structure I showed above. However, sometimes you have a massive blog that might need something a little less static. I’ve heard suggestions of having the category listed–I don’t advocate this–and also listing the date of the post. If you’re updating often, the date might be a good call. Otherwise, I suggest keeping it simple.

Meta Information

You’ve got your meta keywords and you’ve got your meta description. Many people who say they are “big in SEO” say that these are important. They be a-lyin’ to ya. At least, they’re lying about it being important in correlation to your rankings.

In reality, meta keywords and meta descriptions don’t help you rank at all. Google announced this back in 2008 because people were spamming their meta information and that was making them angry.

But, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. Part of the reason we do SEO is to get people to click on our listing rather than someone elses.

Naturally, if we have a unique, custom meta description that really says what the article is about, a person is more likely to click on it if it is of importance.

How do you change them? Since I use Genesis, I do it right below this editor box I am writing in. But, the best meta description is a totally unique one, so it is important that you get creative here. This is one way that you can directly impact how people click your link.

Alt Text

One of the things that I like to do here is use images. I feel like it opens things up and makes them more interesting. It creates something to look at to add a bit of a feel to the article.

But, did you know that you can optimize your image to help your page rank better?

For example, I set the alt text for the image to be “WordPress SEO.” That’s the only keyword that I am putting in there.

While alt text has lost some of its value because of keyword stuffing–those dumb SEO morons–there is still some value in it. If someone searches for WordPress SEO in images, they might find my image and that’ll bring me traffic.

WordPress automatically creates the alt tag for the image based on the title, but you can always go in and change it. Having the image optimized takes ten seconds, but over many years, it can have a great impact. Would you take ten seconds to get 100 visitors over three years? I know I would.

WWW or Not

This is actually very important and one of the first things I make sure is going on with my sites. Here’s why…

When you type in BlogRevolter.com, do you type in with www in front of it every time? Of course not.

So, when someone links to me, sometimes they include the www and sometimes they don’t.

Google sees the WWW.BlogRevolter.com and BlogRevolter.com as two separate entities. I don’t know why, but they do. Because of that, if you are getting backlinks to some with the www and some without, you’re splitting potential link juice. Therefore, you want to go into your .htaccess and put in some code. Now, I didn’t come up with this code. I actually took it from ViperChill. But, it is a great bit of code, so I suggest it.

# Begin 301
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.blogrevolter\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.blogrevolter.com/$1 [L,R=301]

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

What that basically does is tell Google that whenever they come to your site without the www that it should automatically redirect to the www. All links will do the 301 as well so all link juice heads toward one page only. That increases the strength of each page and helps you rank higher. Very important.

Advanced SEO

You know, I find it funny that I label this advanced SEO. Because, truthfully, it’s not so much advanced as less thought of techniques that help you out. If you only did the steps listed above, you’d be in great shape. These are just a few more steps that will help you achieve some more results.

No Index Certain Pages

The no index tag simply tells Google that they don’t need to index that page in the search engines. For example, do you really need to index the archives page? I mean, you can, but is it really going to make that much of a difference?

Some might argue that it does. And, if you choose tags, for example, that are really competitive keywords, it might help over time. For example, I run a Star Wars blog. And, in that blog, I wanted to rank for the keyword “Sith Emperor.” When I noticed it ranking (a while back), it was leading to a tag page.

So, in that case, I wanted to have that be indexed.

But, when someone searches for a long tail keyword, they aren’t going to be checking out my tag. And, if I have written a post about that topic, chances are, I optimized the post so that I don’t need to rank for the tag or archive or whatever.

Use your discretion here, but it’s something that I’ve seen some people advocate.

Shut Down Paginated Comments

I’m in the unfortunate position of not having hundreds of comments. If I had hundreds of comments, I’d be a happy camper. But, I don’t. So, this isn’t an issue for me.

But, what about those people who do have hundreds of comments? They should paginate their comments, right, to maximize speed?

Not from a SEO perspective. By paginating comments, what you’re doing is creating a second page with the exact same content as the first page. And, that equals duplicate content. Remember what I said about how to avoid the panda update? You want to make sure there is no duplicate content.

If you are worried about speed, there are other ways to speed up your blog such as checking out a content delivery network. This allows your blog to be hosted on a bunch of different servers so the page loads much faster. That’ll get you the speed you want and more than make up for not paginating your comments.

Content and Ads

Believe it or not, Google pays attention to the layout of the site. What they want to see is that the content is as close to the top as possible. The more stuff you have between the top and the content, the worse Google will think of you.

Therefore, you want to make sure that you have formatted your site to have your content appearing up top. This falls into the argument of “above the fold.” You want your most converting elements and content to be here because this is what people are going to see first.

Another thing that is equally as important is ads. Is your blog completely littered with ads? Chances are, Google won’t rank you as high as if you have no ads.

The reason is because Google saw a trend with low quality, spammy sites…They were all filled with ads.

Therefore, you want to make sure that your ad to content ratio is good. Have a ton of content on the page if you want to have a ton of ads. Spread the ads out so that they aren’t overbearing. Google is in the business of making the experience nice for the visitor, so if your blog looks gross with ads, they’ll get rid of you.

No_Follow Misconception

One of the biggest misconceptions about on-site SEO is the use of the no_follow tag.

The way link juice works is really convoluted. But, a basic understanding of it is this:

If you are linking to ten sites, you are going to be sharing link juice equally with those ten sites.

Now, it used to be that if you added no_follow to one of those links, then the link juice that was going to those ten sites was then split among nine different sites. In other words, more link juice. Why is this important?

Because one of the tips some “SEO Experts” will give you is to make some links to certain pages–such as the contact, about, and other pages–no follow because you want to maximize the link juice to other anchor text deep links. Cool, right?

Nope.

Google changed their system with no_follow. Now what they do is treat that as a dead link.

If you are linking to ten sites, but one of those is a no_follow, then link juice passes to the other nine pages. However, 1/10 of the total link juice is ‘lost.’

In other words…Any links that are no_follow don’t have the link juice shifted elsewhere. It just stays isolated and isn’t used.

Therefore, it makes no sense to add no_follow to the different pages. And, since Google kind of frowns down on it, I would argue against doing it.

Building Links

In the end, you need to build links. I talk about link building in another article and don’t really want to bore you with another blurb about it. But, good SEO relies upon both on-site optimization as well as link building. If you aren’t link building, you’re going to be hurting.

I’ve talked about the components of a link and those are important to page attention to. Remember that sometimes, you won’t be able to get the anchor text you want. That’s okay. A link is still important even without exact match anchor text.

And, in actuality, you don’t want to always get exact match anchor text. If Google sees that you are getting the same backlink with the same anchor text EVERY time, they are going to get suspicious. So, vary it. Play around with different anchor texts.

SEO and Tools to Check Out

There are quite a few tools that I would consider checking out if you’re going to really get into SEO. Some of them are paid, obviously, but some of them are not. And the ones that are not are just as great as the ones that are paid.

First up, I’d really consider getting a Genesis theme. I know I’ve said it a lot, but they make great themes, they’re easily customizable and they are built with a ton of SEO control. My blogs do better when I am using Genesis.

Another interesting tool is called Free SEO Report. I’ve used it and it does provide some great data. What I like about it is that it gives you a second set of eyes when auditing your site. I do SEO audits for a living–or at least part of the time–and this tool allows me to get some insight into my competitors. It costs $19 a month, but I’ve found it to be useful.

The Adwords keyword tool is great. It’s free and you can get some great information about keywords. You can get a lot of information about what other keywords you might be able to rank for.

That’s That…

Is it completely exhaustive? No, of course not. But, this is a great start to your SEO ventures that are easy and straight forward. I’ve suggested some paid tools…You don’t need them. But, they do help. And I’ve suggested some things here that might seem like rocket science. It’s not.

In the end, SEO is just about making your site look as good for the reader as possible. If it looks great to the reader, the search engines will love you. If you have any questions, I am always open. Chime in below!