5 Non-Technical Tips for Better WordPress Blog Rankings

[Optic]

I'm a wordpress freak. I use it for most websites I build, because of the ease of both development and administration for my clients. It's also very SEO friendly, but there are a number of things you can do to make a big difference in your rankings.

Here are 5 tips that anyone with a wordpress site can use, without any coding knowledge.

Tip #1 - Set your permalinks

Many people have caught on to this, but if you haven't yet set your permalinks to give you SEO friendly url's, the time is now.

First, before setting your permalinks, install Dean's Permalink Migration Plugin. It will ensure that any links you have to your posts and pages are redirected properly.

In the settings tab, click Permalinks. You will see a few choices of url structures there, and at the bottom the custom permalinks input box.

There are really only 2 good choices for permalinks in my opinion. You can include the category and postname, or just the postname. I personally use just the postname, because it gives you the freedom to change categories, and use multiple categories with less hassle.

To set your permalinks to category + postname, enter /%category%/%postname%/ into the custom input box. For just the postname, use /%postname%/.


Tip #2 - Limit your links

wordpress gives you alot of options for widgets in the sidebar and plugins to add features, but don't get carried away. Remember that the more links you have on a page, the less juice is passed to each post or page.

On of the worst offenders, is the tag cloud. These can get huge pretty fast, and send PR to tag archives, which probably aren't what you want to rank. Other than that, nobody really uses them to find content. Just don't use them.

Another thing I see alot, is bookmark menus on the homepage. Most of them will give you the option to only show them on posts or pages. These are just another bunch of links to waste PageRank on. Besides, who is going to bookmark a post they haven't read?

Tip #3 - Link to posts, not archives in the sidebar.

This really isn't a hard and fast rule, as you can customize category archives in a way that is both useful to users, and provides optimized pages for some of your main keywords, but most people don't do this.

The best thing to do, is display your posts in the sidebar, sending good anchor text to posts directly. Default wordpress offers a Recent Posts widget that can get this done without coding, just set it to display a good number of posts.

If you use Thesis, the Killer Recent Entries widget will allow you to display these by category, and show the number of comments. Alternately, if you can code a little, it's fairly simple to add get the same effect by adding some code to your sidebar template file. For more information about this, and the code needed, check out Thesis creator Chris Pearson's post, What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories. This is the article that convinced me to make this change myself, and I've seen great results in pageviews and rankings since.

Tip #4 - Full internal links in posts

RSS makes it easy for others to syndicate your content on their blogs. Some people have a problem with this, but I think of it as free links. In every post, use contextual linking to other posts using the full url.

This will increase the chances of getting links to your content when it's used on autoblogs or other places syndicating our posts. Not all will leave the links intact, but many will. If you find someone using your posts and not linking back to you, ask them to either restore the links, or remove your content.

You can also install Yoast's wordpress SEO plugin, or RSS Footer, which lets you put links in the footer of your RSS feeds. This is good for links are your actual subscribers.

Tip #5 - Link to related blogs

One cool feature of wordpress, and some other blogging platforms and even forums, is Trackbacks. When you link to another wordpress blog, the owner will receive a notification of the link in their comment administration. Some blogs will even display trackbacks below their posts, with the title for anchor text. These are often nofollowed links, but you still get the relevancy of the anchors.

This is a great way to let the other bloggers know about your blog, and increase the chances that they will link to you in the future if they deem your content useful to their readers.

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I'd love to hear about results of the use of these tips. If you have any more non-technical wordpress SEO tips to share, leave them here as well.

[ronniethedodger]

Tip #4 - Full internal links in posts

RSS makes it easy for others to syndicate your content on their blogs. Some people have a problem with this, but I think of it as free links. In every post, use contextual linking to other posts using the full url.

Isn't there a plugin that will help auto-link certain keyword phrases inside of your posts? Most of your tips are of the "set and forget" variety, where this tip needs to be part of your posting routine -- and anything to simplify the process would be good.

[kgun]

Excellent advice as usual and good thread.

I'm a wordpress freak. I use it for most websites I build, because of the ease of both development and administration for my clients. It's also very SEO friendly, but there are a number of things you can do to make a big difference in your rankings.

Is it even faster with wordpress Express where you can blog directly to your webserver hosted by a third party any place in the world with internet access? Do you use that service or is the platform to restrictive on plugins, themes etc?

Tip #2 - Limit your links
On of the worst offenders, is the tag cloud. These can get huge pretty fast, and send PR to tag archives, which probably aren't what you want to rank. Other than that, nobody really uses them to find content. Just don't use them.

But isn't there other reasons not related to "PageRank bleeding" to use them? In other words isn't there a tradoff between user friendliness and SEO argumenets?

Tip #5 - Link to related blogs

One cool feature of wordpress, and some other blogging platforms and even forums, is Trackbacks. When you link to another wordpress blog, the owner will receive a notification of the link in their comment administration. Some blogs will even display trackbacks below their posts, with the title for anchor text. These are often nofollowed links, but you still get the relevancy of the anchors.

I have seen complaints from bloggers that state that it would have been better not to use trackbacks because of spam. So what is the risk of trackbacks as a potential source of spam?

[Optic]

Isn't there a plugin that will help auto-link certain keyword phrases inside of your posts? Most of your tips are of the "set and forget" variety, where this tip needs to be part of your posting routine -- and anything to simplify the process would be good.

SEO Smart Links is supposed to do this, but it didn't work when I tried it. Perhaps it was out of date with the WP version at the time. I'm really not sure, but it seems like a pretty good idea for clients who don't use contextual links on their own.

Excellent advice as usual and good thread.


Is it even faster with wordpress Express where you can blog directly to your webserver hosted by a third party any place in the world with internet access? Do you use that service or is the platform to restrictive on plugins, themes etc?

I've never used the service. I prefer to use my own hosts. I have heard of a service called WPEngine however, which offers hosting, and configuration of cacheing and other plugins.

There are some ways to publish remotely though, like Atom, or using email, but I've never used them, and honestly don't know much about them.

I've seen a service called ManageWP, which is supposed to handle multiple blogs, but I don't trust anyone with my admin info. Call me paranoid!

But isn't there other reasons not related to "PageRank bleeding" to use them? In other words isn't there a tradoff between user friendliness and SEO argumenets?

I've never talked to anyone that actually clicked on those. When was the last time you actually used a tag cloud to navigate a website?

I have seen complaints from bloggers that state that it would have been better not to use trackbacks because of spam. So what is the risk of trackbacks as a potential source of spam?

I think the problem comes in when you start displaying the trackbacks under posts. This would definitely be an invitation, giving you less control of who you are linking to, nofollowed or not. You can always moderate them, but I don't see the point of displaying them really.

[urb100]

My 2 cents:

1)I added id in the seo friendly url, so google news like it even better.

2)I also added followings on each blog post so SEs know it's the original post.

<meta name="original-source" content="url">
<meta name="syndication-source" content="url">

[junosama]

I'm always surprised at how many people don't update their permalinks. Its so easy to do, but anyone new to coding can miss it. Maybe it should be default for wordpress...

[urb100]

I'm always surprised at how many people don't update their permalinks. Its so easy to do, but anyone new to coding can miss it. Maybe it should be default for wordpress...

one of the technical aspects of it is if you have WP installed on a windows servers, Permalink is so much more pain.

Any of you WP experts out there have WP installed in windows server (IIS), and have done permalinks correctly specially if you are in shared hosting like goDaddy etc?

[Optic]

My 2 cents:

1)I added id in the seo friendly url, so google news like it even better.

2)I also added followings on each blog post so SEs know it's the original post.

<meta name="original-source" content="url">
<meta name="syndication-source" content="url">

Is that supposed to be working now? I heard of the new tag, but haven't put it in my themes yet.

Also, do you think this really does much unless you are being nice and syndicating someone else's content? Have you seen the tag actually move the original source above a syndication that outranked it? If it worked for a site designating itself as the source, and it wasn't I think this would be a bad thing.

If I've got this tag wrong please correct me.

one of the technical aspects of it is if you have WP installed on a windows servers, Permalink is so much more pain.

Any of you WP experts out there have WP installed in windows server (IIS), and have done permalinks correctly specially if you are in shared hosting like goDaddy etc?

Eww.

[SuperMan]

I agree with changing the permalinks to reflect the post name, and when naming the post keep this in mind of how you want to title your post. Usually helps to start with the keywords that the post is about.

But I have also read that Wordpress slows down a bit when you start to accrue posts because now you have numerous posts or files in the same directory. Is this true ?? How do you deal with this ?

[Optic]

I agree with changing the permalinks to reflect the post name, and when naming the post keep this in mind of how you want to title your post. Usually helps to start with the keywords that the post is about.

But I have also read that Wordpress slows down a bit when you start to accrue posts because now you have numerous posts or files in the same directory. Is this true ?? How do you deal with this ?

I use W3 Total Cache to speed up WP. It does many things like caching and content delivery networks, file minimization.

You may be surprised to find just how many auto-drafts your database can accumulate. I've seen nice improvements from deleting these.