SEOing Wordpress

[janeth]

I've decided to do a little search engine optimization on some of my blogs. I found a lot of information but very little information that told me where to go and what to do. Because of this I decided to start a list of some of the things I've done and how I went about doing them. The blog I'm using is Wordpress.

If you log into Wordpress and click on options, then click on Permalinks you will be taken to a page that allows you to change the way your url's are shown. It's best to do this in the beginning stages of starting your blog because once you change the way your url's are shown, you will loose all incoming links going to your current pages.

You have three chooses, the first is the default setting, the second shows the date and title name and the third is a custom setting. I used the third and placed /%postname%/, this shows the title of my post in all the url's and nothing else. I'm not sure if this was the best way, if I duplicate a post title I'm not sure what will happen. The second option might have been the better option but I did not want the dates in my url.

Next problem I saw was with the title of my pages, I downloaded the blog and went to the wp-content folder, then to the themes folder and then picked the template I was using. From here I went to the header.php page and changed the title to only show the title of my post but later found a post by bj that had this code

<title>
<?php if (is_home () ) {
bloginfo('name');
} elseif ( is_category() ) {
bloginfo('name'); echo " - "; single_cat_title();
} elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) {
single_post_title();
} elseif (is_search() ) {
bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s);
} else { wp_title('',true); }
?>
</title>

So I changed it to this.

After this I downloaded a plugin called SH-Autolink, I'm still playing with this but it looks like a pretty neat tool. Lets say I want certain keywords to link to information about those keywords. I can tell the blog that every time it sees the keyword PageRank it needs to link to an article that explains PageRank.

I cheated a little and made it link to my website design site every time it sees the words website design but that does seem to be the most important site for someone looking for a website design company to me. (-:

I'm still playing but these are the changes I've made so far and I thought someone might be able to use this, so I posted it here.

[janeth]

I decided to do a little test now that my blog is optimized for the search engines. I wrote some text about custom website designs and I'm going to try and rank it for custom website design.

Here's my thinking.

If the blog ranks well then I'm able to make a list of keywords and write articles about each of my keywords and rank those keywords in the top ten. But I guess step one is seeing how long it takes to rank my blog post in the top ten for custom website design.

[incrediblehelp]

I guess I am confused Janeth. What is the difference in just writing a post on one of your keywords and then linking to it where ever you want in the blog or other websites?

[janeth]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

I guess I am confused Janeth. What is the difference in just writing a post on one of your keywords and then linking to it where ever you want in the blog or other websites?

Doing it this way is automatic and if a visitor wants to know the meaning of a word then it's already linked for him.

I can write 1,000 post and every time I use certain words they will link without me having to do anything.

[incrediblehelp]

I understand, I look further at it. So does it link by title tag only?

[janeth]

No you add the keywords you want to link and to what site and it picks out all the keywords in the text of your post and makes them links.

[bhartzer]

After this I downloaded a plugin called SH-Autolink

That's a handy plugin for WP. I've actually had it customized by my programmer so that instead of linking to URLs I specify ahead of time, it automatically does a search to find blogs that recently talked about that keyword(or keyword phrase). It then links out to that other blog site and sends a trackback. This is helpful for getting links back to your blog post from other sites. It's also helpful for your blog's readers, makes it easier to link out, and also helps get manual links to your blog (if you link to them and send them traffic there's a good chance that they'll link to you).

By the way, you might want to look at my March 2006 post about search engine optimization for blogs. I'm surprised that you missed that post of mine. ;)

[janeth]

I saw the post Bill and it is a very good post and led to this post but the problem was I could not find any articles that told me where to find the stuff on my website.

They would say change this and this and then I would have to spend the next hour trying to figure out where the stuff was at.

[bhartzer]

trying to figure out where the stuff was at.

You mean just editing the templates on your own site?

[janeth]

Originally Posted by bhartzer

You mean just editing the templates on your own site?

Yes it took me some time to find everything.

[bhartzer]

Did you find everything you needed to find?

On another note, let's get back to talking about optimizing your WP blog:

Make sure that you get get your site's feed noticed. Get it listed in blogines.com, and all the other places where you can list xml feeds. (Promoting your XML feed is a whole other topic.)

Make sure that you set your permalinks so that they're /like/this/and/use/directories/ rather than using a question mark and and ID.

Don't forget about your ping list. Make sure you have a good ping list. (A ping list is list of URLs that are "pinged" whenever you add a new post.)

Make sure you use the more feature so that your home page doesn't include the full posts. It's really annoying for readers to have to scroll through all the posts on your home page to find the ones they want to read. Use the more feature to include snippets of each post on your home page.

Moderate your comments. Or just turn them off altogether.

Don't forget to add channels for each post--multiple channels are helpful, too.

[janeth]

Where is the more feature located Bill?