Jan 15 2008
Search Engine Optimization for WordPress-Powered Blogs
Search 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!
Hi!
Thanks for spreading the word of WP YouTube! =)
Regards Jens Törnell (creator of WP YouTube)
That’s quite nicely written pieces of advice!
I find all-in-one SEO pack quite valuable.
@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.
Once again I have found a good post of yours
Thanks, John. I’m happy that you read it.
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!
Hi, I visited your blog just now. Very nice. Thanks!
Best Articles Site
@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.
Very good comments. Thank you
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
Thank you, Jim Mirkalami. I’m so happy to know that.
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
Interesting. There are some good ideass presented here. I need to do spend some time reading more about these topics.
Yes, that’ll help Doug Steele.
I like your blog theme. I want to use it on my blog.
Can you please tell me from where I can download these theme?
Many thanks
——————————————————————————–
Dan owner of the future gadgets blog future gadgets and inventions
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
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.
Sweet tutorial, just what I have been looking for.
Sweet resource, just what I have been looking for.
I have added you to Stumbleupon.
Thanks Bubbila for reading this article and for adding me in StumbleUpon.
I truly appreciate it.
Great post ! Good sound advise. Some of these tips I didn’t know anything about. You helped me and thanks.
Nice post thanks!
Yep – I think wordpress is a much
I thought the same Odev.
[...] If your online business runs a blog that uses WordPress platform, make sure you read my previous post on how to optimize them. [...]
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!
Great Post Thanks! I see a lot on seo for wordpress..
You are welcome. I am glad that this post helped you all.
Great Stuff, a lot of information about the Search engine optimization and SERP.
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.
Thank you so much for this blog, I’ll try SEO on my WP blog
Seo is something everyone should know about. It can make the biggest difference if you have an online business.
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
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.
But why is it that word press themes are not as flexible as the word press?
I think “All in One SEO’ is thebest plugin available.
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.
Great Post Thanks! I see a lot on seo for wordpress.
Have you noticed that the dofollow plugin has helped (or hurt) your blog? (Since installing it)
thank you so much for this information, it has motivated me to set up my wordpress blog.
great Post an very good informations, thx!
This was very informative. I’ll be using this on my own wordpress blog. Thanks!
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.
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.
[...] something interesting to websites and blogs. Because it sounded like there’s another useful WordPress plugin to me, I decided to peruse further and give their services a try. Now, here’s my honest [...]
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?
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
Thanks! Great
Once I was introduced to the SEO potential of Wordpress blogs, I haven’t used any other blog script or CMS for my sites.
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 )