Different Ideas On Seo For WordPress
Firstly, there are tons of Seo for wordpress plugins which do a lot of the well known tasks out the box, but what I will cover here is some on page and off page ideas of Seo for wordpress which have served well on many sites I have worked on.
For the purpose of this I am assuming you have installed a decent wordpress seo plugin, like all in one seo which will take care of the obvious tasks like adding meta descriptions, adding keywords from tags and allowing you to noindex archive pages to stop dupliate content. If you haven’t covered the basics like this then take a look at our other seo for wordpress article to get yourself a decent plugin.
So take a look at this list of further Seo ideas. Depending on your site and how it is set up or regarded by search engines some of these may make a difference in ranking for you, some may not. Most of these ideas I have played with and gained varying results. Hopefully one or two may help bump a keyword search up a few places for you.
Using Robots Text To Disallow Wordress Admin Files
Now this one I decided to do on a site I was helping with a while ago. When searching in Google using site:URL I found that the wordpress admin pages and some plugin files were being indexed. It was creating hundreds of pages of worthless directory indexes. This might not be a problem if you haven’t been messing with your site too much, but it sure won’t harm your seo if you disallow robots from seeing any wordpress files. I have even read comments from conspiracy theorists on forums who are convinced that Google will watch your site with caution if it knows it’s built on wordpress, so if they are correct (which I don’t think so) this will stop your CMS being viewed to some extent. In your robots text file add something along the lines of this.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
However, if you have a site that uses a lot of images and you get decent traffic from image searches then you may want to allow search engines access to your uploads folder whilst disallowing the rest.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Sitewide Strength With Seo On Your WordPress Categories
Many in Seo go hell bound on creating backlinks for their homepage or another single page which they deem as most valuable. Whilst this is ok if you don’t have much content, sites with lots of content ordered neatly in relevant areas massively benefit by some Seo for wordpress categories.
Firstly, make sure you have a nice neat relevant description using your main phrases/keywords by going into dashboard > posts > categories. Make sure you have something in your description box. If you are using plugins such as all in one seo for wordpress it will use this text as meta tags.
Grab a plugin that removes the /category/ from your wordpress category slugs. Shorter URLs are always better, especially when they are descriptive like siteURL/wordpress rather than siteURL/category/wordpress. Here is one that has been around ages. Wp No Category Base.
Check that your categories are being indexed by spiders and you haven’t selected “noindex” for categories in your seo plugin. This is needed if you are posting lots of different content relevant to categories for a wordpress website to get sitewide authority. You can noindex archives, but not categories.
Now do some backlink building to your category URLs. This in turn will pass on link juice to the articles listed within them. Find directories that offer deep links when you submit listings. There are many out there that offer you 4 or 5 deep links. Write some articles for ezine and other good content resources. Do some guest blogging or “real” commenting on relevant blogs. Try to give your site some wide authority.
Use Images In Your Posts To Help With Seo For WordPress
WordPress is an amazing CMS or blogging system. The media side of things are excellent. So use them. Find a nice image for every post, name it something relevant to your keyword for that post and upload it. Insert it into your post and make sure you add an alternative tag with keywords inserted again. Google will place weight on relevant images in posts.
Interlink Your Content
There are many wordpress plugins which can do this for you. There are ones like contextual related posts which will add some links to related content by category or tag under each post. Or if you would like to auto link relevant content from within post text use a plugin such as Seo auto links. Just don’t overdo it. Setting 2 or 3 links per post is more than enough if you’re typing around 300 + words per page.
Don’t Ignore An HTML Sitemap
Chances are that you have read on numerous occasions to make sure you have an XML sitemap to submit to Google websmaster tools. Yes, it’s essential. However, give the spiders more reason to find your posts by adding a straight forward HTML sitemap for better Seo for wordpress. This is an old favorite plugin of mine Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. Easily added by creating a page and adding the tag supplied. You can either have the sitemap on the end of a main menu, or be descreet and add it to your footer somewhere.
Mess About With Your Menu Content
There is a strong belief that the first content a spider finds on your page should be the most relevant to what your site is about. With this in mind, take a look at some of your underperforming keywords and either create some new relevant pages, or take some already published content and place it in the line of fire using wordpress menus (if you theme supports them). Maybe you have a small menu up the top of the page with “About us” or “Contact” links in which gets spidered before the main navigation? Use this menu and add a couple of keyword rich pages into it, create or modify the existing content on the actual pages to direct the spiders onwards to further related pages/posts/categories to the keywords. This will help add depth to the relevance of the area when you effectively “push” the spider down there.
Hopefully this rambling gives you something new to think about, and helps you out on a few serps places.
No Comments