7 Tips To Make Your Wordpress Blog More Search Friendly!

Wordpress is one of the most popular blog publishing applications. First launched in 2003, by 2009 Wordpress is now

Optimising your Wordpress blog for seo

used by 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide.

It is designed for ease of use and comes with a set of default features that are already quite search friendly.

This post is about 7 tips on how to make Wordpress even more search enge-friendly.

1. Place Keywords In Your Blog Title:

These should be placed in the first 60 characters of the title and as far to the left as possible.

What Benefit Is This?

It will help increase your keyword ranking with the search engines and ensure you get better seo results.

2. Use The Title In The Permalink Structure:

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section). Because others may link to your individual postings, the URL to that article shouldn’t change.

When configuring Wordpress avoid the default setting for permalinks which looks like this.

http://example.com/?p=N

where N is the Post ID number.

Using mod_rewrite or lighttpd you can produce a much more useful permalinks as follows:

http://example.com/category/post-name/

Note that by including the category in the permalink you can ensure that this will be indexed.

These are called Pretty Permalinks.

Why Use Pretty Permalinks?

• By having keywords in the post title you will ensure that when the search engine indexes your post, you will have keywords in the external link URL. That in turn will help improve your page rank and authority which will lead to better seo results
• This link structure will help future proof your blog post since if you ever decide to change from wordpress the links will remain the same. That would not be the case if you stuck with the default permalink structure.

3. Place The Blog Post Title First In Your Title Tag:

The HTML title tags in WordPress are created automatically from your post titles. In the default template, the format of the title tag will be something like:

“Interleado Blog » Blog Archive » 5 Tips To Make Your Wordpress Blog More Search Friendly!”

By changing the default settings you can ensure that it looks like this:

“7 Tips To Make Your Wordpress Blog More Search Friendly!”

What Benefit Will This Give?

This will make the search results more readable to online researchers and should ensure a higher click through rate to view the blog post.

4. Organise Your Blog Content:

If you structure your blog content to make it easier for the search engine bots this will lead to higher page rank and authority for your blog.

The basic idea is to choose a limited number of categories and sub categories for topics on your blog and then structure your content to fit these categories.

Blog Posts organisedc in silos by main topic category

Why is This Important?

This will build collections or silos of similar article types and will help increase page rank and authority for keywords indexed in these silos.

5. Create Category Descriptions

Give each category a description, and add that to the meta description using a plug-in called Headspace.

Take care that the description is enticing to gain attention and persuade people to click through to the relevant page or post.

How Will This Help?

This will make search results more readable and should deliver more visitors to the blog.

6. Minimise Duplicate Content Issues:

Because of its flexibility WordPress can result in content duplication of up to 5 times on single author blogs. Readers can access content from multiple archive copies:

1. By Date
2. By Category
3. By Tag
4. Sequentially by clicking on from page to page starting at the front page
5. By Author

This results in complete duplicate content on many blogs.

If you use the “Insert More” tag in Wordpress at the end of the first paragraph of  each blog post. This will largely eliminate the problem of duplicate content.

How Will This Help?

Content duplication is not good for seo. The search engines will only index 1 copy of your content and you want to make sure that is the one you want.

7. Don’t Forget Your Images

Be sure to create effective titles and alt tags for all images in the blog.

To make life easier you can use a plugin. SEO Friendly Images . is a Wordpress optimisation plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes.

Why Is This Relevant?

This should deliver extra traffic from image search engines.

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