Wordpress SEO Tips
22 Jan
This is not the bees all and end all of guides and I’m sure there are plenty more out there, but I thought I’d pop a few things onto my virtual notepad in the sky after a number of Wordpress installs that I have done recently. All of the following work with Wordpress 2.0 and will most likely work with 2.1.
Titles
One of the first things to change after installing wordpress is the title section in your wordpress template. Out of the box it usually has the title on all of your site as the Blog title, which is obviously rubbish for SEO. There is a plugin that you can use further down in this guide but this will also do it for you.
To do this go into your admin area, select Presentation then Theme Editor. If the theme is a good one it will be in the €œheader.php€ – just replace whatever is in the title tag at the moment.
Mod Rewrite
The next thing you should change is the URL structure – Search Engines really don’t like the standard variable, e.g. something.com/p=73. Make sure that your server supports Mod_Rewrite and select one of the options from the admin area / options / Permalinks. There are thousands of different structures that you can use but my personal fav is: /news/070%post_id%/%postname%.html. This is optimised for google news after reading a few bits on the web about the structure required – if you don’t plan to try and get inclusion here then the default Date and name based option should do you good.
Plugins
The plugins section is one of the best parts of wordpress – there are so many different ones out there but my personal recommendations are:
- Ultimate Tag Warrior – by far the best tag software out there and can also work well with URLs if you have Mod_Rewrite on.
- SEO Title Tag works with Ultimate Tag Warrior and is what I use for most of my sites – the code used at the top can work just as well but this is easier to customise.
- Marketingpop SEO plugin also requires Ultimate Tag Warrior and can work quite effectively.
- Sitemap Generator generates a sitemap.xml file that you can send to google & yahoo. Google’s webmaster toolkit page is very good and can help with getting indexed faster than usual.
- Social Bookmarks will put some nice little buttons under your posts and allow people to submit your post to digg, reddit, etc
Pings
I generally ping the following servers, some of them are great, some are not, but here is my list none the less. You can set these up in your Options > Writing in the Wordpress Admin area.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
Other things to think about
If it works with the post then make sure that you trackback a few blogs in your posts (as long as they are relevant obviously) – the more relevant links back to your site the better and should bring you a little bit of traffic.
MyBlogLog was recently purchased by Yahoo which means it’s likely to get a lot more users over time – sign up an account and add the widget onto your site, not only will it help give you a visualisation of who is visiting your site but you’re mug will be displayed on other blogs you visit and you can sometimes get a bit of traffic from keeping your face on some of the bigger blogs.
Use Social bookmark sites. Submit to Digg, Submit to Reddit, and check out onlywire.com and submit each one of your articles every time you write a post – it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes and they can bring quality backlinks.
That’s it for now – Hopefully this is an article that will continue to develop as time goes by – if you have any other suggestions please do leave a comment and I’ll add them in.
Thanks for the tips!
Beware of OnlyWire, they do sneek some of their own links into you account on the social bookmarking sites. It is not at all obvious when yu sign up, that this is their price for “free”.
I’d think at least you are wandering in some bad neighborhood in the Google sense.
K
I see you’ve got a list of places to ping. Is this any different from the default list in wordpress that ping pinomatic.com?
There’s a post on my blog with a huge list of wordpress blog pings
http://www.boydofayrshire.com/2007/07/05/word-press-ping-list/
Hi Michael,
The pingomatic list is very basic, adding the others will help to spread your blog faster.
Cheers for the heads up about the difference between pingomatic and the list you’ve published.
For wordpress its also good to harden up your wordpress and make it less vulnerable to hacking etc. Good post over at http://blogsecurity.net/wordpress/news-160807/
Hi there, Very nice place you have here. You’ve done a good job & awesome blog on !
First class article. Interesting point about pings – this was news to me.
Great Article! It was very imformative. I haven’t heard of some of the plugins you mentioned. But I did notice that you did not include the All-in-one SEO plugin. Do you use that plugin or do you just handle the SEO manually using the methods you mentioned in this post?
Also, big ups to you on the ping list. I’ve been looking to make mine a bit larger and you just provided some solid additional ping sites. Thanks for that!
Great tip! ALWAYS make sure you rewrite you blog posts to display the name not the post number – cheers
Here is an interesting site. I ‘m sure you would find this tool useful
pingmyblog.com
Yeah.. Onlywire.com must be a social network that using for creating a nice backlink to our site. There’s still a lot of social network that can bring traffic to our website such as: twitter, stumble upon, facebook, etc.. Try they all first before say it’s not work!
Merry Christmas
For wordpress post structure, I’m a bigger fan of /%postname% or /category/postname myself. I’ve never really bothered with google news, though, so I wouldn’t mind hearing a little more about how your structure is optimized for it.
Hi. Nice post. My favorite SEO plugin for Wordpress is Headspace. I first used All In One SEO package but I like Headspace the most. Thanks.
I’ve been using OnlyWire for quite some time now and I didn’t know they do that dirty trick! Not until I bumped to this article. By the way, great tips you have there, I’ll be sure to keep it all in mind.