Make Wordpress blogs SEO friendly - Part 1
For a long time, i ignored the importance of SEO. I figured that having quality content, and quality content alone would get me to the moon and back. It doesn’t.
Can you imagine how many of your first time visitors come from search engines? You can’t. Forget the return visitors for a second. The first time, a visitor ever visits your site - There is around a 70-80% chance that they will have arrived from a search engine. (others including email refers, website refers, etc).
Let’s just imagine your website gets 10,000 visitors a day. We take your search engine traffic away.. which leaves you with around 2-3,000.. Poor. Now, imagine the opposite effect, and you get more search engine traffic than you already do..
Markets for blogs such as this one, are saturated. So, you need to take time into increasing your rankings, because they account for more traffic than you think. I’ll show you a few techniques that you should be using, and how to easily achieve them in your wordpress blog.
1. Proper Placement and Use of Header Tags
Depending on what theme you’re using, especially if it’s a custom one — Your header tags will be poorly placed, or non existent. the h1 being the most important tag! Make sure you put it as soon as possible after the <body> tag.
<h1><a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></a></h1>
Make sure that is in your header.php; The first thing that a search engine wants to know is what your blog is about.
There’s also a <h2> tag, which should be placed in your Main index template, Search Results, Single Post and Page Template, which stands as the title for the posts. Obviously, the titles of the posts are EXTREMELY important!
<h2><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
Search engines take the header tags seriously. Make sure you include h3, h4, h5 and h6 too (They get less important as the number gets higher)
2. Domain Canonicalization
Many people think that http://Website.com, and http://www.website.com are the same, search engines don’t.
I can’t really elaborate anymore on this. Those are effectively seen as different, different page ranks, different search results.. make your life, and the search engines life allot easier and just stick with one of them.
http://scott.yang.id.au/code/permalink-redirect/ — Wordpress Plugin
If you’re not using wordpress, I wont leave you out.. Just add this to your .htaccess file
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
3. Permalinks
As useful as PHP and other server side scripts are, search engines doesn’t see it as a static page. Let’s take for example..
- http://www.site.com/page.php?page=photoshop
‘page’ is only a variable there.. That could be changed to anything, but.. effectively - it’s still part of page.php.
Wordpress is set by default to present your site in the exact same way.. http://www.andyrew.com/?p=123 — See?
In wordpress, go to Options > Permalinks - And set your custom permalink structure to..
/%category%/%postname%/
And then just copy and paste your new .htaccess file that wordpress gives you. PHew!
Again, for those of you not running wordpress.. here is a basic code (Obiviously, you’ll need to play about with it)
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/pages/([^/]+)/?$ pages.php?&page=$1 [L]
(If you’re having trouble, leave a comment and i’ll try and help you out)
That’s it for part 1. Check back in a few days, and i’ll post section two. Please subscribe to the RSS feed
Responses || Discussion || Debates || Commentaries
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Make Wordpress blogs SEO friendly - Part 1
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February 3, 2008
Great article, thank you. I recently posted my method of implementing comprehensive URL canonicalization for WordPress. It provides WordPress users a great way to handle complete canonicalization directly via Apache/htaccess. Hopefully it will help your readers in their WP optimization efforts. Cheers!
Increasingly it seems like Google is paying attention to how long visitors are actually staying on your site or whether they click straight back to Google and go onto the next site. Therefore it can also be quite helpful to add elements that will keep visitors attention. This could include a power headline and introductory paragraph at the top of a site (even a blog) and also the use of videos and podcasts which may take several minutes each to enjoy.
How are you? your website is cute
I have a new band and we just had a live gig u can see here:
http://tinyurl.com/7×2s6l
Maybe you need to concentrate on making your own content, instead of scraping Sickipedia, making Britology.com and making money off placed ads. Cunt.
You need to stop being a thieving cunt.