Search Engine Optimization for WordPress-Powered Blogs « John Raul dot Com

Search Engine Optimization for WordPress-Powered Blogs

15 January, 2008 | 73 comments | Published under Blog | 8,183 views

WordPress DashboardSearch engine optimization (SEO) is one of my favorite buzzwords in the Web 2.0 era. It refers to the process of improving the volume of visitors, the quality of traffic from search engines, and higher ranking of a website in search engine results page (SERP).

SEO is significant to site owners (regardless of the nature of the site) because it promotes greater chance of getting a higher position in SERP. Higher rank usually means greater probabilities of being searched by people, bringing traffic to their website and creating opportunities. If you just created a blog website powered by WordPress or you have an existing site that is not optimized, here are the most common effective methods you can do to improve your SERP rank.

Provide quality content at higher frequency

This is easier said than done. Providing fresh, quality content at higher frequency remains the most effective method of SEO. Quality content refers to the significance of information or services presented on your website. For instance, if you’ve published an article (or any content) that interests your users, chances are great that they might visit it again, promote it or create link to your website.

Search engines nowadays are getting smarter and more sophisticated that it can nearly bring visitors exactly to the page they really want. Search engines will look less on the syntactic composition of a web page, and focus more on the real, actual content. Since this is the trend, it’s wise to strive to provide quality content. The content, for me, remains the “king” when it comes to website marketing.

Make your pages searchable

Validate your pages and make sure they adhere to W3C coding standards. Having a good code in your pages basically will help spiders crawl and search relevant information on the page. Spiders are automated programs or scripts that search engine use to browse and discover the pages of Web. While validating your code does NOT improve your SERP ranking, it does contribute to an effective SEO by its nature. Use absolute links, and try to avoid making a Flash-dominated page because, as of this writing, it performs poorly in improving SEO. Dead links and HTML/JavaScript/CSS syntax errors should also be eradicated so that the page will properly be indexed.

Join the social community bandwagon

If you ever heard of social community and bookmarking sites (e.g. Facebook, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, Del.icio.us, among others), they are hot these days because they promote socialization beyond borders. Fortunately, webmasters can take advantage of them because they can be great tools to improve the exposure of a website. Most sites work by submitting to them your content through Web feed formats (like RSS), online bookmarking and personal submission, which they publicize. Squidoo, for instance, lets you create blurbs to promote or sell just anything. If interested online readers found them, they can potentially bring huge traffic to your blog or website. To participate, visit social community websites and create an account to them.

Install SEO-friendly WordPress themes and plugins

Personally, the Themes and Plugin feature are among the myriad things I love in WordPress blog platform. They are easy to install and you don’t need to be a geek to be able to add widgets and extended functionality (well, it helps when you know HTML, CSS and PHP – but don’t be scared if you don’t). If you own a WordPress-powered blog, visit their official website and browse for SEO-friendly plugins and themes. You may personalize them if you want.
This website, powered by WordPress, uses the following plugins:

  • Adsense Deluxe
    Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higher. For complete usage and configuration click on AdsenseDeluxe under the “Options” menu.
  • All in One SEO Pack
    Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
  • Digg This
    Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referrer.
  • DoFollow
    Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments.
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith
    Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
  • Google Search Widget
    Adds a sidebar widget to let users search your site with Google.
  • Google XML Sitemaps
    This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.
  • Social Bookmarks
    Adds a list of xHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.
  • Text Link Ads
    Really Simple Web/RSS Advertising For Personal or Commercial Use
  • WordPress Database Backup
    On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
  • WP-Cache
    Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.
  • WP-Print
    Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
  • WP 2.3 Related Posts
    Generate a related posts list via tags of WordPress 2.3
  • WP YouTube
    WP YouTube makes it easier for you to post embed YouTube videos in WordPress. It also features YouTube options , for you to control all the YouTube videos at the same time.

I’d like to give credit to the creators of the above-mentioned plugins. It is up to you to discover how they work and what benefits they bring. Also, please note that there are other plugins that you may want to install for your WordPress site. My personal advice, however, is not to install too many plugins because they may consume too much CPU resource if you are on a basic hosting.

Spread your links to the world

In SEO, it is generally better if you strive to have more inbound links. Inbound links are links pointing to your website from other sites. If you are blog is new, it is wise to submit your website’s Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to free web directories. This can initially build inbound links that can be beneficial. Your next option is to exchange links with other bloggers or sites. Making friends online, blog commenting and link baiting usually help. If more of your inbound links come from sites with high PageRank and belongs to your blog’s niche, you might increase your blog’s PR as bonus. There are still quite a number of methods to spread your links to the Web, I leave it to you to discover. Enjoy!

73 Comments »


John Raul II
on

@Jens

Your WP YouTube plugin is really very useful!!! Thanks for creating it!

@SEO Meter

Yes, it’s a nice WordPress plugin. Thanks for reading my post.


Robert Eckert
on

Great content deserves a round of applause!Absolutely an amazing blog you have here.I just started my blog a few years ago and realize with great content you can acheive high pr rankings in google.With articles within your niche market.

I you have a chance maybe you could give me some pointer’s or a simple review of my blog.

ThankYOU!


John Raul II
on

@Robert Eckert

Okay, I will try to find time to review your website.
Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this post.

@George

You are welcome. :)


Jim Mirkalami
on

I have been a frequent visitor of this blog for some time now, so I thought it would be a good idea to leave you with my thanks.

Regards,
Jim Mirkalami


Jim Mirkalami
on

I have been visiting this site a lot lately, so i thought it is a good idea to show my appreciation with a comment.

Thanks,
Jim Mirkalami


Doug Steele
on

Interesting. There are some good ideass presented here. I need to do spend some time reading more about these topics.


Janet
on

Interesting! I’m really helped. It’s really smart idea. Do you know you can make your blog more popular? maybe I can help you, you may contact me at anytime you want.

Cheers


John Raul II
on

Thanks, Janet. Okay, I will try to contact you, but I will have to save if it costs for me to be popular. Well, obviously it costs.


Bubbila
on

Sweet resource, just what I have been looking for.
I have added you to Stumbleupon.


John Raul II
on

Thanks Bubbila for reading this article and for adding me in StumbleUpon.
I truly appreciate it. :)


Cindy
on

Great post ! Good sound advise. Some of these tips I didn’t know anything about. You helped me and thanks.


jenny
on

Thank you so much for this blog, it is wonderful. As someone who helps other, Im always looking for great information and I cant wait to share this one to my contact.

Thanks!


Testking
on

Great Stuff, a lot of information about the Search engine optimization and SERP.


claudia
on

Very useful information. I am trying to increase my pagerank in another blog of mine. It has lots of backlinks and traffic but I lost my PR last year.


domain hosting site
on

All in one SEO for wordpress all the way! It increased my search engine traffic by double and it took like 40 seconds to install. A++ plugin


Justin
on

Really a fabulous little tutorial, I love finding blogs that have similiar interests to mine. I really appreciate the info John, I picked up some useful info and can’t wait to apply it.


tampa seo
on

Your knowledge of SEO is quite impressive, thank you for all the easily implementable advice. You are missing a few tools to help by shortening the process of social bookmarking and such; this was a great piece very informational.


James
on

Have you noticed that the dofollow plugin has helped (or hurt) your blog? (Since installing it)


alan
on

thank you so much for this information, it has motivated me to set up my wordpress blog.


HGH
on

This was very informative. I’ll be using this on my own wordpress blog. Thanks!


Information Systems
on

He’s right, too many plug-ins can cause your blog to start loading pretty slowly. However, if you’re interested in pulling in more people to your blog, the youtube plugin can help. Google gives… well I don’t want to say “preferential” but can’t think of a better alternative… to video content. This is because they want to have a good mix of video, image, and text content on each page.


gaurav
on

john! this seo guide proved immemnsely helpful to me. Thanks for a great post. Now i’m planning to move from blogger to wordress since I think it is much more seo friendly.


Video Blogging Tips
on

I like what you said about the W3C deal. However, if you’re a blogger user, it’s almost impossible to validate. In order to do so you have to do everything purely in HTML. No widgets, not fonts and colors sections or anything. I have been there before and I have gotten my blog to validate. However, it’s almost a waste of time because no matter what, there will always be something that you’ll need on your site that just won’t validate.

For instance, I don’t think Entrecard validates does it?


DaveG
on

I’ll look into your Text Link Ads plugin, also that XML sitemap is just what I was looking for, the current plugin I use doesn’t generate an XML file.

Thanks


Justin
on

Once I was introduced to the SEO potential of WordPress blogs, I haven’t used any other blog script or CMS for my sites.


Forex
on

sorry for my english, excellent article and blog post, i just digged your post and stumbled up so you can get more popularity.

Congrats on your website , great info.

Cheers,

Mike ( Mexico )


Joseph
on

Great post. I too have been using the All-in-One plugin for SEO on all of my blogs. Thanks for the great info.

Joseph


Hot Business
on

Thanks John,

This is a really usefull plugin list you delivered to the community. Will use your list with my next wordpress site.

David Norden


SEO optimization
on

We at Crown SEO, Ltd. have seen blogs and sites skyrocket overnight into number one Google position through the use of white hat SEO tools so the concepts of this blog are correct.


Outcome3 Vancouver Search Engine Optimization
on

WP-DBManager also does a great job at backing up your database, plus you can schedule regular updates. Imperative for folks who forget those oh-so-important tasks that they know are there, but always slip one way or another .. (raises his hand sheepily)


SEO Resources
on

WP seems to have a better look and feel to it than Blogger. I am currently a blogger user and am thinking about using WP for my future projects. I liked your comment about validating your site so that you can make sure it is searchable by the SE spiders. I never thought about that being a SEO tip but it makes sense to me and thank you for letting us know.


Graham Cox
on

Thanks for the list. i’ve tried out of few of these services and I must say that it truly helps in creating a more profitable scenario for one’s online business.


Remi Vladuceanu
on

Wow! Thanks for these tools John!

I just finished setting up my new blog and I found your site searching for wordpress plugins. Great share man!

Thanks again.

Remi


Kevin D
on

Pretty useful tips. I really like WP YouTube, just exactly what i need, thanks a lot!


Local Search
on

I tried that all-in-one seo pack, but how do you disable the defaults? i.e. I add in custom meta des etc. but it still adds the site’s default meta des etc.


backlinks
on

Providing fresh, quality content at higher frequency remains the most effective method of SEO. Quality content refers to the significance of information or services presented on your website

“Good Quality of This site’


Dekstop Computers | SNSFOX.com
on

Nice Post, i just want to add one great plugin, Its the Robots Meta which can protect your blog from duplicate contents. I want also to remind the readers in the last plugin mentioned above, “youtube plugin” because i also installed a sort of that plugin “youtube blah blah plugin” im not so sure though about the name. but what it did to my blog was to automatically put spam comments on each of my posts, and for a blog owner, its really annoying to delete lots of spam comments everyday because of that plugin, although im not so sure if this is really the plugin im pointing, but as i said it was sort of youtube plugin. Hope this help !!!


Cheap Video Games
on

SEO is so crucial these days. The search engines help deliver people with cash in hand. Listen to John, he knows what hes talking about.


Company Registration UK
on

Great post. I often recommend WordPress to companies that are initially starting up and want a website. People often underestimate SEO as a way of getting targeted visitors but is very important in getting off the ground.

That’s a great list of plugins and will recommend your list to any that go ahead as I think they’re invaluable in developing a great, user friendly and accessible blog that is likely to succeed. Thanks!


Mirna Bard
on

It’s a very informative post for SEO. Seo is now the most booming field in the era of Web 2.0. Search engine optimization services increase SERP through effective web site promotion.


Gold Coins
on

SEO helps website to receive a lot of traffic. It is nice that your sharing this information to benefit a lot of people.

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