Wordpress SEO Done Right
This article on Wordpress and SEO is somewhat useful, but its terseness hides the principles behind the SEO techniques it’s trying to teach, and as a result, some of them are not as effective as they could be. I’ll try and go throw the list and point out any improvements to the article which I can think of, or explain the ideas behind the techniques:
1) Permalinks
Thomas suggests /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ as a good permalink structure for ranking in search engines. The actual truth of the matter is that you want rich keywords to appear in your URL, as close to the root of the site as possible. That’s why something like /%postid%/%postname%/ is better, or even using the postname in your subdomain to set up http://%postname%.yourdomain.com to forward to the real permalink, is better.
2) Titles
Thomas’ suggestion is good. By placing the title of the post before the title of your blog, you are boosting rankings in the search engines. Wordpress defaults to putting the blog name first, like “Elliott Back: Wordpress SEO.” But tell me, if you’re looking for information about WP SEO on google, seeing my name first won’t incite you to click.
3) Tags
I’d suggest an autotagging solution, like Denis’ terms2tags. It automatically classifies your post using Yahoo’s term extraction adds Technorati tags. Why bother spending precious time tagging your own posts when all them can get great tagging coverage automatically?
The rest of it seems like generally good advice!
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 3:11 pm and is tagged with seo techniques, truth of the matter, google, precious time, good advice, technorati tags, search engines, subdomain, denis, improvements, suggestion, blog, yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on June 23rd, 2006 at 1:59 am
[…] Elliot Back suggested some additional tips for Wordpress SEO. […]
on June 23rd, 2006 at 5:31 am
other say that the best permalink would be just /%postname%/ so I use that in some of my blogs.
on June 23rd, 2006 at 11:39 am
Isulong, the most important thing is to get the post name in the URL. If you only include the post name, then it will cause problems if you have more posts with the same title.
on June 24th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Personally, I always recommend:
/yyyy/mm/dd/post-slug/
There are compelling arguments for why it’s the best for usability, and I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence that /id/post-slug/ is better for SEO.
Also, the idea of using a subdomain per post doesn’t sound that great imho. It could potentially lead the search engine spider to downgrade your domain as a web ring of single page sites.
on July 10th, 2006 at 2:39 am
Here is another article about SEO for WordPress:
www.seo-portal.com/10-seo-tips-for-wordpress/2006/07/09/
on July 24th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Just found this article on your site myself…
I think one improvement would be for sure the entire meta/head area section of a WordPress site, its a shame that SEO for WordPress is so lousy.
I created a plugin myself to correct the title tags, meta tags, and autodiscovery of RSS links as well. I have also written several articles about how to correctly SEO WordPress sites and the steps you need to take with WordPress to do this.
My plugin is here:
WordPress SEO Plugin
on October 18th, 2006 at 3:56 am
I just completely re-did one of my sites because of this article. I wasn’t aware of how important the post-slug was. I haven’t tried the plugin yet since I haven’t implemented it yet but I’m probably going to do that.
on October 22nd, 2006 at 5:36 am
I gotta agree from my findings that Titles + H1 tags are incredible important for getting great rankings for your desired keywords.
on November 2nd, 2006 at 12:49 am
Very useful stuff here. Wordpress is really the best CMS for SEO.