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Last Update August 3rd, 2014 As many of you will know, I love WordPress. I use it on most of my affiliate sites which make me thousands of dollars per month and I also use it on my blogs, such as this one. I’m certainly not alone when it comes to utilising this CMS though — tens of millions of sites online are powered by the software.
For all the great things there are to be said about WordPress, though, out-of-the-box SEO certainly isn’t one of its strong points. As I use the software so much and make a lot of my income thanks to search engine traffic, I have come to learn what works best in terms of optimising your WordPress setup.
Before I share my tips for getting more search traffic to your blog, I want to state that the following recommendations should be used with a little bit of caution. The majority of recommendations here are very obvious and totally fine, but there are others which some people may disagree with. Everything I share here has worked very well for me and the countless clients I have worked with, but I will mention on specific steps if any of them may be frowned upon by others.
Now that I have the “don’t sue me” disclaimer out of the way, we can get onto the good stuff.
The Basics
I thought it would be a good idea to split the “obvious” suggestions from the not-so-obvious and slightly more advanced tactics that I will share later in the post.
Title Tags
The title tag has long been thought of as the most important on-site factor in telling search engines what your site (or a page) is about. By default on older versions of WordPress, post titles would display as “Blog Name >> Post Title”. As your homepage is probably already ranking for your site name, you’re not helping yourself by putting your site name at the start of your title. You don’t need to rank for it more than once.
Instead of leaving things this way, I personally like to remove the blog name altogether. This isn’t just because I think it looks better, but because it works. A client I worked with last year received a massive boost in search traffic when we removed their brand name from title tags on their blog posts.
To change your title tags, I recommend you install this awesome SEO plugin. Once installed, log into your WordPress admin and go to Settings >> All in One SEO Pack. From there, I have entered the following:
- Home Title: Viral Marketing : ViperChill (This is the phrase I’m trying to get my site to rank for and a brand name)
- Post Title: %post_title%
- Page Title: %page_title% | %blog_title%
Those are the main ones, and I recommend you tweak the rest to your preferred preferences. The post and homepage titles are the most important.
Meta Tags
When you search for a site in Google, you’ll see a snippet of content under the page link. To control this, you can customise your meta description tag for the page. Similarly, you can also add keywords to your tag to tell search engines what your site is about. I should mention that Google announced a few months ago they do not crawl the keywords tag anymore.
A good few years ago the keywords used to be important as search engines had less ways to determine what a site is about. Now that technology is so advanced, search engines have better ways of determining rankings and relevance. I still like to put the keywords in there (for other search engines) and do this by enabling ‘dynamic’ keywords with the All in One SEO pack.
As far as descriptions go, there is no ideal way to automate the process. The best descriptions are hand written, and the plugin Headspace will allow you to configure them for each individual post. Headspace also allows you to auto-fill a posts meta-description based on the description of your category so if you post a lot, that may be useful for you.
Permalinks
Permalinks are simply the URL’s for your posts. By default, post titles tend to look like viperchill.com/?p=38 but if you look at the URL for this post you will see http://www.viperchill.com/wordpress-seo/. I’ll let you decide which one you think looks better. Not only does this new format tell someone what your page is about before clicking on it, the words in the URL will also be highlighted in search engine results if your post is relevant to the search query.
To change your permalinks, simply go to Settings >> Permalinks. I currently use the following format:
Some people like to have categories in there but I like to keep URL’s as short as possible. A friend pointed out that the quickest solution (in terms of querying your database) is to use /%post_id%/%postname%/. I would only really recommend this if you have a massive site built on WordPress, but it’s interesting to note.
It’s best to do this on a fresh blog, but if you’re making this change on a new blog then make sure you install this redirection plugin. It will move your old URL’s properly and in a search engine friendly manner. Also remember to shorten the post slug when you are writing an article, as by default the URL will use all of the words in your title.
Focus On a Keyphrase
Unless you’re very into branding, it’s a good idea to try to optimise your site around a keyphrase that can send you search traffic. Most blogs end up getting the majority of links to their homepage, so it’s a good idea to try and leverage those links by getting search engine rankings for a relevant phrase.
For ViperChill, I’m aiming to rank for the phrase ‘viral marketing’. Although it is fairly competitive, it has a decent search volume and it’s relevant to what this site is about: helping you build remarkable sites that others naturally want to share. The Google external keyword tool is a good place to start to see which phrases are popular in your audience. Make sure you select ‘All Countries and Territories’ on the left and then ‘Exact match’ on the right hand side to get accurate results.
Once you have this keyphrase, you can use it in:
- The title tag for your homepage
- The heading of your site
- Your logo
- As anchor text in links from other websites
The first and last items on this list are going to be the most crucial to helping you achieve higher search engine rankings.
Turn on Pingbacks
One way to get more links to your site (which increase search engine rankings) is actually to link to other people. If you are regularly supporting a site, it’s very likely that they’re going to return the favour. Especially if they’re in the same industry. I recommend turning on the option in WordPress (if it’s not already enabled) which notifies other blogs when you have linked to them.
To do so, head on over to Settings >> Discussion, and choose the following options:
Use Alt Attributes Religiously
I’ve noticed fairly recently how much emphasis Google seem to be putting the alt attribute when it comes to not only ranking images highly, but also ranking your posts highly as well. Consider a search for the term ‘minimalist marketing’ and here is my site result.
The text minimalist-marketing, which I have highlighted, is actually not written anywhere on the page like that. Instead, it is the alt attribute for one of my images. WordPress applies alt attributes to images automatically, but they are generated based on the file name. Therefore, if you save your images as “minimalist-marketing.jpg” or whatever your content is about, then WordPress will automatically generate that text.
The alt tag is a way to tell search engines what your images are actually about. Not only will it help you get more search traffic to your images, but I think it helps the overall rankings of a page, as well.
Interlink
Interlinking simply means that you link from your blog posts to other blog posts. For example, I sometimes recommend guest blogging as a great way to build your authority in your niche and will then link to my guide on guest blogging. I also use the anchor text of the search query I’m trying to rank for if it doesn’t making my writing look robotic.
Not only is this useful in terms of SEO, but it also gives your readers more posts to read and thus increases your pageviews.
WWW or Non-WWW
On a lot of sites (and probably yours if this section title makes no sense), there are two ways to access them. For example, if you head on over to test.com, you will see it is both accessible at http://test.com and http://www.test.com. Try this on your own site and see if it is the same.
By default, WordPress handles this redirect for you, but it uses a 302 redirect. A 302 tells search engines the redirection is only temporary, but you really want to tell them it is permanent so that all of your link weight goes to one place. To do this, you need to implement a 301 redirect.
You can choose which one you want Google to list in Google Webmaster Tools, but it’s still necessary to do this. Whether you want to choose the www version or the non-www version of your site is completely up to you.
You will need to be able to edit your .htaccess file which can be found in the same folder that you installed WordPress on your server. Here is how the code in mine looks:
# Begin 301
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.viperchill\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.viperchill.com/$1 [L,R=301]
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
I do have other code in my .htaccess for specific redirects, but that is all you need to redirect your site from the non-www version to the www version. Also, remember to change viperchill.com to whatever your domain name is.
If you want to redirect from the www to the non-www (which I do on a few sites), then swap lines 3 and 4 with this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^viperchill\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://viperchill.com/$1 [R=301,L]
If that gives you any errors or doesn’t seem to do anything, make sure that your host allows you to edit the .htaccess file (most will).
The Next Level
I’ve just shared some of the most common tips you’ll find online about optimising WordPress, but now we’re going to go a bit deeper and share some slightly more advanced tactics. If you only do the above, then that’s a great start, but there are still areas you can improve upon.
Noindex Archive, Category, Pagination or Tag Pages
On ViperChill, I only use categories and I manually create my own sitemap, but I know that a lot of people have date based archives, categories, and tag pages. These might be great for usability, but for search engines, they’re really just lots of pages with links to your other pages.
In other words, the search engines don’t need to crawl through all of them to find your blog posts. For that reason, I apply the Noindex option to my Archives and Tag pages, and do this by installed the All In One SEO Pack I mentioned earlier. There are settings in the admin panel to help you decide what you want to block.
I recommend that you allow one of them to be followed (e.g. normal pagination, or categories) and then block the rest to “preserve” link juice.
NoFollow Certain Pages
I did say there may be some tactics that people frown upon in this post, and this is the first. The Nofollow attribute was first introduced by search engines to help stop spam on the web from ranking in search results. That’s why, by default, all links to commenters on your blog are automatically nofollowed.
Nofollowing scuplting, as it is commonly referred, is simply about keeping and diverting link juice (link weight) to the pages where you want it to go. For example, on every page on my site there is a link to the contact form. Does it really need to be a powerful page?
Just linking to the page once is enough to have it indexed in Google, and that’s all that matters for a number of my pages. Similarly, I nofollow links to my about page, my category links and my RSS feed. This means that the ‘weight’ from backlinks I’m getting to my own post won’t be spread to those pages.
A typical text link looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.viperchill.com”>ViperChill</a>
To make it nofollow, you would change the link like so:
<a href=”http://www.viperchill.com” rel=”nofollow”>ViperChill</a>
Again, Google have recently mentioned that they frown upon this (in some circumstances — not most) so use it at your own risk.
Nofollow Your Read More Link
If you show full posts on your homepage then you don’t need to worry about this. If, however, you just show a snippet of content, then it’s likely you also have a “read more” or “continue..” link in there somewhere. As your post title already links to the page with perfect anchor text, there’s no need to give juice to the read more link which simply takes people to the same page.
In your Theme Editor (Appearance >> Editor) open the relevant file (usually index.php), find the following text:
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”
Then simply add
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”nofollow”
That’s it. You must make sure you are changing the read more permalink, and not the permalink to your post titles. If you’re unsure which is which, then make sure you contact your theme author. There are too many examples for me to go through them all here.
Turn Off Comment Pages
Unless you receive hundreds of comments per post (or you’re really, really picky about page speed), there really is no need to have paginated comments on your site. Older versions of WordPress never had this, but if you recently installed WordPress 2.7 from scratch, you’ll find that paginated comments is the default option.
These can be turned off in Settings >> Discussion and will ensure that your site doesn’t have tons of duplicate pages that are all showing very little unique content.
Sign-Up to Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is a must-use service for anyone who cares about search engine traffic to their sites. Not only will it tell you which keyphrases you are ranking highly for in Google, but it will also notify you when your site has been hacked, or if you have any broken links.
Sometimes you may find that another blogger has linked to you incorrectly and that a lot of visitors are landing on a 404 page. Because GWT makes you aware of this, you can redirect that page somewhere relevant to keep the link value and keep the visitors who are landing on your site.
Building Links
If you implement even just half of the suggestions I’ve presented here then you will probably have better on-site optimisation than 95% of the blogs in your industry. It’s essential to focus on content creation and engaging in your audience when building a blog, but it’s silly to neglect a huge traffic source when you can make all necessary changes in just an hour.
It’s also silly to write a guide on SEO without mentioning the most important factor in getting traffic from search engines (besides relevance): backlinks. Backlinks are simply links from other sites, to yours. Generally, the site ranking 1st for a search query in Google is going to have a lot more links than the site ranking 10th, or even 5th. It’s important that you spend time building links to your site so that the on-site optimisation that you’ve put in place can actually have an effect.
I won’t go into all of the ways that you can build links to your site as there are some great articles out there on the web, but I will list some of my favourite:
- Guest Posts – I really like links from guest posts as they send traffic, they’re relevant, and you can usually customise the anchor text of the link to be anything you want. If you want to learn more about this method, I have a written a detailed guide here.
- Write Awesome Content – There’s nothing better than writing an article that gets tons of links from relevant bloggers. If you put enough work into your content and regularly engage with other bloggers in the niche, they’re going to link to your posts.
- Link Out – When you link out, people link back. I don’t recommend link exchanges or filling up your blog roll, but if you find something on another site that your audience might enjoy, don’t be afraid to share it. You never know, that big blog might just send their 5-figure audience your way.
- Collaborate – Collaborating with other influencers in your niche is not only a great way to connect with more people, but it’s also a good way to get people talking about you. Oftentimes when I have interviewed people, they will link back to the interview from their own site. I also see people doing group projects which involve over 20 people and then end up having them all promote the one resource. If you can get other people involved, they’re going to help you spread the word.
Finally, don’t make the same mistake I did and scratch your head for two weeks wondering why your blog isn’t indexed. It turns out that a lot of one-click WordPress install solutions block search engines by default. You need to turn this off by going to Settings > Privacy.
Alternatively, you can ignore everything I’ve just written and still do quite well by remembering one thing: search engines follow people.
Note: As with everything SEO related, people have their disagreements on what works and what doesn’t. As stated at the start, these are things that work for myself and have when I had clients. Feel free to only implement certain things or try your own methods. I have updated parts of this post with information from people way smarter than I am.
RSS Subscribers: 
Just an early comment before this goes live. To keep with the title and being the ‘only guide you need,’ if there’s anything I’ve missed, let me know and I’ll add it to the post.
- Glen
I hope you guys enjoy it!
I know this comment is coming WAY after this article was written, but I just had to thank you for this awesome resource that I will continue to use and refer to on my blog. Thanks Glen.
ditto.
Ditto2. o_O
I agree, too. Thank you.
I’ll hop on board here too,
Ditto.
Thanks Glen!
Ditto four.
Great post, Glenn.
Ditto 5 !
Haha, thanks guys!
Thanks for a great tutorial – Indeed WordPress is a fantastic system for getting Great SEO.
Yes I agree, useful info. I tried the 301 but it affected my wp login so I deleted it.
Thanks anyway.
You did not miss anything Glen, this is for sure. The best wordpress SEO. It has helped me correct some errors on my wordpress blog as well as adding new SEO features.
Thanks a lot .
-Peter Hutyr
Hi Glen
Thank you so much for the great post, I have only just started using wordpress so all these tips have really helped. Once again thanks!
Hi Glen,
First a fall thanks for sharing this wonderful post on wordpress search engine optimization.
I have visited this site for first time and i love the way site is design and the logo as well.
Hi Glen,
Thanks for a great and thorough article. I’m trying to spread the love in Finland and in Finnish, may I therefore receive permission to translate your post to my blog (naturally I’ll link to you). This is just superior info…
Thanks again,
Saku
Hi Glen, thanks for a great article. I love the simple way you’ve laid out the steps and being a beginner I found your basic tips to be helpful too. I love the non-hype delivery of your content. There’s so much to learn about this online marketing gig and so easy to get overwhelmed with the at-times conflicting information. Your article will be printed out and used as a guide. Thanks heaps.
Do you use a plugin to generate an xml sitemap?
I think you pretty much covered everything!
Nope. I have a thing against auto-generated sitemaps because you can’t tell if there are certain pages that search engines can’t otherwise find.
I prefer to use a manual one (see: http://www.viperchill.com/base/)
Glen, I got great results for a client when I used both the automated site maps (yes, plural … Google isn’t the only game in town) and a static manual one. With the manual page I also took the time to create a short synopsis of the target page for the benefit of my readers (~50 words) and to arrange the links physically in a way that showed their relationships.
I haven’t touched that site in 2 months and its traffic is still increasing by 10% or more, week over week.
I use SEO Ultimate on my own blogs and search engine traffic there grows in exact proportion to how diligent I am about using it.
Oh, I should mention that the G was scanning me every few minutes … I’ve had posts rank as high as 7 in under 10 minutes. In fact, the final 3 posts I wrote for them ranked 20, 7 and 12 … and all inside of 10 minutes. They’ve since lost a little ground because they didn’t get the needed reinforcement from other pages, but the technique works.
Hi Glen
Excellent post as always. How about including something about Google Analytics or the WordPress Stats plugin though?
Cheers
Carla
Hi Carla,
Thanks. Using a stats tool is good to see which pages are getting search traffic and then work on increasing their rankings. If that’s what you mean, then good suggestion and I’ll add it to my update.
Other than this the most important things in my opinion is to give exactly the best in your posts, so google is doing a great job ranking your post #1.
By the way with *some* of these techniques which I learned in cloud living, I’m receiving 1,5k visitors per month from google, which is nice considering I don’t optimize my posts, but I just rely on the plugin and permalink.
That’s awesome, Oscar.
What I love is that even if you’re already getting a lot of search traffic, I’ve found that things like removing your brand name from blog post titles can increase traffic massively.
Good to hear things are going well for you
Glen, can you explain what you’re referring to when you say removing your brand name from blog post titles can increase traffic?? Seems counterintuitive, so interested in your observations.
I think he means that if you remove your brand name, what remains will be just your post title (and maybe category)….and in theory, your post title and category are going to be more specifically related to the rest of your on-page content than your brand name is.
Glen (or anyone) can correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand the perceived importance/relevance of each word in your title tag is inversely correlated to the number of words in your title tag. Think of it as weighting or relevance, and that weighting will be distributed across either a very small number of words, or a larger set of words.
Put simply, if your title has only two words in it, they’re both probably extremely relevant to the content of the post, while if your title has 15 words, each one is probably less relevant on its own.
Sorry to ramble on, but this point is something I’ve had success with in ranking on my own site, and for clients. It’s good advice.
Cheers,
John
Here’s an example:
“WordPress SEO | Viperchill” is the default post title. By manually editing it to “WordPress SEO” without the “| Viperchill” at the end, you would be removing your brand.
Yup, that’s exactly what it means :). Thanks Kevin :). Although instead of manually editing it, like Glen said in the post, if you use All in One SEO, if you change the “Post Title Format” to remove “| %blog_title%” it’ll just show the post’s title, instead of the brand name at the end of it.
Awesome post, thanks Glen!
And special thanks for @John, @Kevin and @Bex for explaining the %blog title% part!
Great one man, i really enjoyed and learned a few things. Sent you a few corrections via twitter
Yours,
-Alejandro Portela
.thecuso
Fixed them both.
Thanks for the heads up!
Excellent post Glen. Very comprehensive and a great introduction to WordPress SEO for anyone just starting out with it (and probably for quite a few people who’ve been using for a while as well).
Just one quick heads up though, you’re missing the link to the redirection plugin that you mention in the permalinks section.
Cheers Ken,
That was the plan. I’ll fix that link now, thanks!
Awesome to see you over here
Great write up with some great addons. @ Anthony Feint I recommend http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/ as a firstclass XML Sitemap.
Cheers Kev, and thanks for joining the discussion
Not a problem Glen. I was thinking of writing a very similar post myself, so it’s good to see I’m not the only one to spot a gap in knowledge
Thanks Kev, I’m pretty sure I use that plugin. They all do the same thing – an xml sitemap is a standard (recommended by Google webmaster tools) so I guess it doesn’t really matter which plugin you choose.
Well right now I am confused about the nofollow attribute.
However, I followed advice from other posts and I they worked, so probably I am going to use this one as well. Thank you for the article.
Hi Tom,
If you are unsure, I would implement the things you know about, and see how that helps. Then after a few weeks, try implementing nofollow and seeing what happens. I have tested this about 5 times in different environments and found it to help.
Pretty sure nofollow can’t be used for PR-sculpting anymore (at least that’s what Matt Cutts says). Also, I’m curious why you would remove the blog name entirely from the title tag? Why not just use “Post Name | Blog Title” format?
Aside from that, the only thing I would add would be to add more sites to the Update Services under the “Writing” setting. This will help your content get indexed quicker by Google.
As I said in the post, I tested this for rankings, and thousands of pages on multiple different sites increased rankings after doing this.
Good tip, I will add that in my reiteration.
Glen, I’d be very interested to hear what type of methodology you used to determine that the increase of rankings was because of using the nofollow tag.
My guess would be you’re also performing other tasks on the site at the same time and the NoFollow part being included has no impact on the rankings.
Nope, when I test, I do one thing at a time. Similar to my recommendation in the comment above:
Very nice write up and I agree with many of the points you make.
I do however, have a few points I disagree with you on.
First, turning off comment pages isn’t neccesary anymore as you can simply use a canonical URL on the subsequent comment pages alerting the search engines that the original post is the URL you want on record. AIOSEOP has this functionality as do several themes such as Thesis.
Secondly, I would once again urge people not to be too quick to noindex tag pages. If used properly you can expand the number of terms you cover and rank for using Tags. Michael Gray recently wrote up a good post on this subject on his blog wolf-how.com.
Finally, I tend to disagree with you about the use of the nofollow tag (as mentioned in a comment above) but I doubt it has much impact on the rankings one way or the other at this point.
I would caution though against the use of “well it worked for me” as the sole backing of any advice. If that’s your justification there’s absolutely no way to refute it no matter how much evidence to the contrary the opposite position might have. For example, Matt Cutts has publicly stated that PR sculpting via NoFollow doesn’t work anymore. While he certainly doesn’t tell us everything and I wouldn’t take everything he says as gospel, I have yet to see convincing evidence to refute his claim.
The bottom line to all of this is that as with any SEO advice, given here, on my site, or any other site, is to TEST IT FOR YOURSELF.
Anyway, as I said, great post.
Hi Ben,
Great to see you here. It’s great to have SEO heavyweights chime in as I’m not someone who will ever claim to know everything. I miss one Matt Cutts blog post and everything is incorrect ;).
You may not need to turn off comment pagination for search engines (with your solution) but it is still not a nice solution in general to go through multiple pages just to read all comments.
Awesome. I have used them myself and found little benefit, but I know sites like TechCrunch and Engadget who are writing hundreds of posts on the same topics are doing well with tags. If that is the case for anyone reading this, obviously don’t change anything if you’re getting traffic to them.
I once considered sharing my tests but when I see what happens with SEOmoz, it’s really not worth the hassle. Search engines will change the rules and people will continue to disagree. SEO is a tough subject to write about.
Thanks for your thoughts. Appreciated.
I’m curious what other sites to add to the Update Services. At http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services do you just add the entire list they have listed there?
Hi, Glen.
Thanks for a well thought-out post. I use Blogger. Do you have any advice for Blogger users? I was told that WordPress does not allow advertising on its pages. Is that true?
Hi Anne,
This guide is for self-hosted blogs (where you can put advertising), not for WordPress.com sites. You can download the code from WordPress.org.
I personally don’t use blogger but I’m sure a Google search will turn up a lot of good results. This might help (though I haven’t read it all personally) > http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Blogspot-SEO-Checklist-The-Practical-Way-to-Improve-Rankings/
Thanks, Glen.
I’ll have a look at the link.
Anne
As usual, a well researched and detailed guide. Am going to add this post a resource for small businesses. In short: Awesome.
Thanks buddy!
Thanks for a great tutorial – Indeed WordPress is a fantastic system for getting Great SEO. But instead of getting all those plugins, and worrying about updates and compatibility, I use the Thesis Theme, which has almost every one of those options built right in to the post editor.
It has some, but definitely not all. Thesis is a great theme but having to learn a whole new system for implementing changes (hooks) and paying $164 (more than one site) is not very accessible or affordable for most people.
Additionally, I prefer having custom themes.
Glen, thanks for a great post, I really enjoyed it. As usual it is share share share with you!
Heh, I try my best
Great tutorial! WordPress is an excellent platform for SEO, and most people don’t utilize it to its fullest potential. I’m bookmarking this one and using it as a checklist for the blogs I manage. Thanks!
Thanks Jessica, awesome to see you here
Glen,
Thanks for the details! I definitely had a couple of things implemented from another one of your posts, but I tweaked a couple of other things you’ve mentioned here. When I’m more comfortable, I will take on your more advanced suggestions.
Paris still? Hope you’re enjoying the weather wherever you are; my cars are snowed in and I couldn’t dig them out to make it to work. Some day soon!
Great article, thanks Glen. Essential reading for anyone serious about SEO and WordPress. One point you might want to include in “everything you need to know” is that themes can impact SEO your efforts – some themes being better than others (Thesis, for example).
Hi Paul,
Yes, I use Thesis on a couple of sites and it’s definitely nice to have a better SEO solution out of the box.
Thanks for the comment!
Cheers Glen. Thank YOU! Pointed a few people here, and Stumbled it!
Ahem… er, yeah – that’s “impact your SEO efforts” not “impact SEO your efforts”.
Great stuff. Just getting involved with Affiliate Marketing, Blog marketing etc. Using Thesis Theme and Affiliate/Squeeze Themes. It appears that each of these products directly incorporates some of the functionality that you were defining through plug-ins, but I found the logic that you provided behind the “why” of using these tools properly to be very helpful. I look forward to learning more. THANKS!
Hi Vito,
Glad that you could get something out of the post, even if you couldn’t apply some of them directly.
There’s lots more to come, I promise
You’re very welcome.
- Glen
Excellent post! I will be implementing lots of this stuff. Thanks!
You’re welcome Vinay!
Let me know how things work out for you.
Alt Tags and Interlinking are huge and will help out any site. People always overlook images as non-important. Most use generic images that won’t show up in image search and won’t send traffic their way. Image search can double your traffic if used wisely. Images show up in regular search as well and a good image can send tons of people your way. I always use images that will read well in search and get lots of clicks. You have to show and tell what your topic is about. Images help sell my blog!
Interlinking is also huge. It keeps not only Google on your site longer, but visitors as well. It makes your blogs more powerful. Just by linking to this blog with the word “seo” can really boost its relevance.
Interlinking does wonders especially in a niche. It helps Google really learn more about your site and what your site is really about.
Great blog. Love reading your ideas and perspective.
great article, full of useful tips…like everything else, a little TLC of your blog can go a long way. Thanks VC.
Great tips, Glen! Bookmarked and sphunn.
Thanks for these tips Glen! Worth while for those of us who do not use WordPress SEO to the fullest!
Thank you,
Jesse guthrie
WOW! I’m so glad you were willing to share this information, a lot of people don’t. It’s funny how step-by-step throughout this post I implemented what you said.
Great post Glen, great post.
def a good suggestion to preserve your link juice for relevant content and i’ve taken your post as an opportunity to go through my most valuable blogs to tweak a bit – here’s hoping that it will give some keys the needed boost to be a top3 result.
i’d love to see a post on you link building strategies as you usually just touch the topic but never really go in-depth. personally, i’m looking for relevant pages and ask for a link exchange or if i can post a do-follow, i’ll just do that. when you mention that you have this one person doing link building for you, i’ve tried that approach as well but have been rather disappointed by the result as there sometimes were links in between that just weren’t in the right environment.
It will happen.
Just give me time
As these posts tend to take me 6-8 hours, I have quite a few ideas backed up but link building will definitely be a topic I cover in the future.
cool – can’t wait to read how much you’ll reveal!
just had a look at your feedburner stats – damn, your subscriber numbers are growing quicker than the us national debt…
Haha.
I guess that shows the power of putting a lot of time into your content
Hi Glen,
Excellent post. I started building some links to our website by submitting some articles to online articles directories like ezinearticles.com – but a friend of mine told me that I should do it slowly as Google seem to penalize websites that create too many backlinks – considering them as spam links. What are your thoughts on that? Do you have any rate at which you build links or simply the more and faster is the best?
Thanks,
Hakan
Over at Webmaster World, the consensus is that your links should grow at a rate approximating an ‘organic’ rate; ie; it’s okay to give them a little nudge — just don’t use a rocket booster to do it with. Besides … put the bulk of your effort into creating quality content for your own site first — otherwise people will have no reason to hang around, much less to come back.
[...] WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need Explains how to improve your search rankings of your WordPress blog by tweaking its settings [...]
Good post Glen.
My WordPress tip for the day is the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.
Dude, it turbo charges the little text editor/post writing bit! Loads of extras, formatting, link attributes, easy to add code etc etc. Text editor on speed…..whoo hoo!
Take it for a ride and see what you think.
Cheers
p.s. just worried about how many other awesome, productivity boosting plugins there are out there now………
Hi Glen, good article as usual.
A WordPress Plugin you might want to try is SEO Title Tag plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-title-tag/). It’s useful if you want to target similar but different keyword phrases in the page title and blogpost title. The plugin also allows you to change the page title on your home page, category pages (plus any other pages you may have), as well as your individual blog posts. A very worthy addition IMO.
On the permalinks structure I do a slightly different one as follows:
/%post_id%/%postname%/
The reason for it is that if I have a blog that is centered tightly around a group of keywords then after some time it can get tricky with repetition/duplicates.
If my key word is “how to knit a dog” and over a year I have a number of “how to knit a dog” posts each one appears as a different link because there is an assigned number:
http://www.dogknitting.com/21/how-to-knit-a-dog/
http://www.dogknitting.com/112/how-to-knit-a-dog/ etc.
By the way, feel free to rip ooff the dog knitting niche, I don’t have time to really pursue it.
Great post! I love it
I am going to re-read it to get a REALLY good understanding and implement it in my blog. Thanks!
Hi Glen,
Your wordpress post more than enough to start up bloggers as i doing wordpress video tutorials in http://www.youtube.com/fourblogger.
Keep on writing.
And Glen, I want to introduce my blogging efforts to you little bit. Sure I won’t waste your time. Contact me from you email. Thanks.
Pascal.
This is a really good post. We have followed your guide and have seen a significant increase in our traffic – thank you
Hi, Really happy to have found your site, you’ve been inspirational.
I was wondering about your alt tag and how you define them. I have been using phrases, but was recently told that singular words are best. e.g I’m working on a wedding site at the moment so instead of tagging a post with – wedding photography scotland, I’m now considering separating it out to the three words. What would be most beneficial in your opnion?
Thanks again, look forward to future posts.
The alt text on images is an interesting one. I’ve used it on my mini-sites as a way of testing the waters on long tail keywords related to my sites main keyword(s). Its also a good spot for adding your keyword varitions. Great post Glen.
Hey Glen…. thanks for the luv… Always appreciated. Nice looking guide ye have here, will certainly give it some pimpin’ via me newsletter brother!!
Not bad Mate, not bad. Not really new stuff, but nice to see it covered in one post. Pretty much picked up everything one has to think about in the first place. So well done. Guess I’ll be back more often in order to check out your posts
remember guys that google only follows the first anchor to a page (in most cases) so things like more links arent an issue any more unless they come before the keyword anchor in the code.
I believe that was disputed very recently in a Matt Cutts video (although I don’t trust everything that the search engines put out). It’s not linking to pages multiple times that I worry about, it’s more linking to pages that aren’t necessary to link to.
Thanks again for a very informative post, Glen. I am just getting ready to launch my first blog and have been doing a lot of research, but there were still a few things in your post that I missed. Thanks. I know you said you have more posts lined up. Is by any chance one of those a list of plugins you use, or would recommend to a newbie like myself? Looking forward to continuing to learn from your very interesting and informative posts.
Cliff
Wow! I’ve been using WordPress for years and I even use the All in One SEO plugin, but this post really opened my eyes to a couple of things I ought to be doing beyond the basics. Thanks!
There is another world outside the basics that most bloggers don’t know about. All the stuff covered in this post was great and I learned a new thing from it.
It is true what they say, “If you just learn one new thing per day then you will be better off tomorrow”.
Dang you Glen. The quality of this freakin post here was off the charts. In fact, it was so good I’ve spent the last half hour fixing some ‘kinks’ you pointed out with my blog. Thanks brother!!!
[...] a nice post by ViperChill popped into my email box. Head on over and read it- you won’t hurt my feelings. The reason I [...]
Hey Glen, great post as always, chock full of must-know info…
Maybe I missed it in the post, but what is the redirection plugin for changing permalinks for my older blogs in a search engine friendly manner?
I really want to change the permalink structures of my blog sites, but since they have a little age behind them and some SEO traffic already, I don’t want to knock them back to the beginning.
Thanks,
Bizz
[...] Get fans (not just users.viewers) 4.) A little controversy is good. 5.) Make it beautiful. SEO: WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You’ll Need 5 Ways to Use Google Reader’s Feed Creation Tool for [...]
SEO is probably the thing that has been hardest for me to implement and optimize on my blog. When I started the blog I had only a very vague notion of what it was. I didn’t consider it when coming up with my Blog title and byline. Now that I get it, I wish I had known about it before coming up with the branding and name for the blog. i still have not spend so much time on SEO. Even though I have gotten better at putting more energy into it, and I had done several of the techniques you discuss, I am still only getting 1-2% of my traffic from search engines.
I’m thinking of renaming and rebranding, but don’t want to confuse my readers, although it’d be better now than later. As I read I started to incorporate more techniques you layed out. Hope it helps. And i will certainly consider it much more closely for future online projects from the beginning.
Thanks for such a comprehensive guide.
I really didn’t want to write a comment containing only something like „great post”, but this time I have to
so…
Great post, lots of useful information.
I thought I knew a lot about WordPress and SEO until I read this article. You pretty much covering everything pertaining to optimizing a WordPress blog and left no stone uncovered. Very useful and informative and I will be sending some people here to read it.
To your continued success!
[...] shares a previous Wordcamp article on WordPress Security. Also shared there is another link on Search Engine Optimization over at [...]
Nice summation of SEO for WordPress, Glen. Congrats again on your SEMMY!
[...] WordPress SEO:The Only guide you need [...]
May be a bit advanced but if you have multiple installs of wordress on the same class c ip server, Google is going to start penalizing you.
Nice writeup of the hosting aspects here;
http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?t=952659
Make that clear, please. All of my WP installs are on the same shared server space. Probably a hundred other installs belonging to other people are on the same machine. I have my own dedicated IP address and my blogs do not link to each other. Am I still getting spanked for having multiple blogs on the same IP?
If so, I might as well spread them out some on some cheap hosting space and go ahead and let them link up, too. It would be nice to have an incoming link from something other than a comment.
Another awesome post. Learning so much from you Glen, gonna have to go back and re-read this a couple of times to assimilate it all.
Thank you for such a guide! I didn’t understand everything, but did what I could and looking forward to compare my figures of march with those of February!
Best regards,
Andrés
Changes you make will not have instant results, but within 4-6 weeks I believe you should see some good results.
Depending on how authoritative your website is, how many pages you have, and so on.
Thanks for the comment!
[...] guide to Search Engine Optimization for WordPress from a marketing blog called [...]
just nofollowed pretty much every internal link on my site.
does this mean i’m gonna be rich now?
Just had to comment so that people know you are joking.
(Alex is a deranged friend of mine)
Hey! Great article! I liked the way you explain every part of seo…. Thx!
[...] I wrote my article on WordPress SEO last week, I knew there would be some controversy as a lot of SEO’s build an ego around [...]
Hey man great article. I actually followed quite a few of these for my new blogs. It’s nice to have a central list that I can just work down as when your applying them to several different blogs it’s easy to overlook things.
One note, you might want to mention that the user should make sure they have the correct url setup in the WordPress>Settings>General area as they are trying to setup with a 301. I forgot about that and was getting a lot of redirect loop errors when I tried to use your 301 code. It finally dawned on me, but after a while, haha.
Woah, a lot of that information was way over my head, but I was able to apply one thing from that article so well worth it. Thanks, that was very helpful.
First time reader – fantastic article! Thanks for breaking it down. RSSed.
-Matt
I am setting up a new wordpress blog, following the instructions you’ve listed in your post
All is pretty straight forward except the nofollow of the Read More Link. I have 2 different questions:
1. I can’t find a separate <a href="”> in my index.php theme file. It looks like it is embedded into the more generic call, and i can’t find a way to customize the Read More link in there, to make it nofollow. Please note, that, the call does exist in a h1 tag, but this is different.
2. Would not it be better to completely remove the Read More link ? Is the call to action “Read More” that necesary. Mashable as an example does no use Read More link
Anyway great read!
Thanks for sharing
Hi Frank,
I think it is better for usability. You could put another permalink in there if you wanted to that takes people to the full single post.
understood and solved ! thanks
[...] WordPress SEO – The Only Guide You Need – This is a great tool for everyone who has a WordPress Blog. I thought I knew all the SEO tricks, but after reading this, I found a few new things to implement. [...]
very handy, thanks
A great plugin that helps with the internal link building strategy you mention is the “Internal Link Building” plugin from SEO ROI: http://seoroi.com/downloads/internal-link-building-2. The “Related Posts” plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/) is also very useful for both visitors and internal link building efforts, particularly when your post titles contain the target terms of the post – which, obviously, they should.
Also, you mention “this redirection plugin”, as if you intended to link to it. I assume you had intended to link to this plugin, so here’s the link, in case anyone needs it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
[...] is changes you make to the actual code of your website to help with rankings. In my guide on WordPress SEO I gave a lot of tips on this that you can also apply to sites that aren’t running the [...]
wordpress is one the best place to set up any site..I love it. easy to use and lots of things to do and impress your readers
Really insightful post and the first time I have been on your site. As a WP user, There are some things here that I have used to update the makup of my sites form an SEO perspective.
Bookmarked and shared!
Cheers,
Lee.
[...] WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need [...]
You know there are people charging for the infromation you have freely given here! Excellent post, and I look forward to your future releases as I myself use WP!
Thanks a million, I just went through and nofollowed a bunch of things and noindexed a few pages too, such as admin and login etc etc…. I hope I see a noticeable boost in rankings but my site has a pretty strong presence already in some areas so not sure how it will do.
[...] Allsopp writes at ViperChill on the topic of Viral Marketing. He recently posted a guide to WordPress SEO that you may learn a lot from. Posted: March 10th, 2010 under Guest Posts [...]
It’s nice to see another person in the niche that actually knows what they’re talking about.
Great article Glen. I’m going to be putting some of this into practice tonight when I get home from work.
Hi Glen,
I just discovered you and this excellent article. I’m going through this article and implementing one at a time to see their impact. I appreciate you sharing what’s worked for you and having the opportunity to learn from your experience.
Good work page 2 for ‘wordpress seo’ and 457 links
Thank you for this. I have all of this setup on my site thanks to Ninja Blog Setup, but I want to make sure to provide the same to the companies that I am writing for, so that they think my writing is making it all the better, which it will!
Great post and great blog.
I’ll be back.
Glen,
First of all, thanks for an outstanding article. One question… I’m working on helping a friend out with his blog (I know, mine needs serious work), and I pulled out my handy-dandy http header viewer to look at the redirects that WordPress does when it redirects from the non-WWW URL to the WWW url. It looks like WP is doing 301 redirects. Might WP have changed this setting recently?
Thanks for the great info, and good luck in your endeavors!
Hey Mike,
You’re welcome.
I believe WordPress only implements 302 redirects as default.
Great post, Glen – I definitely had to double-check some of my setting to make sure they are correct.
I wanted to contribute some additional resources: the following 2 plugins (either one works fine, but Cross Linker is easier to set up) make interlinking a breeze
KB Linker,
Cross Linker. Once you set the parameters, they interlink the keywords for you.
Ana Hoffman
Hey Glen,
Just wanted to follow up about this post. it seriously kicks ass. I have probably referred back to it over 20 times since you posted it. Great stuff!
[...] WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need [...]
well written and most of the points , infact all of the points made sense to me ! looking forward for more posts from you
How to write Meta-tag? is it important?
Most of the tips you point out in this post are very logical. But then you still need to be told once before you see it. So thank you for the very useful advice! Regards
Hey Glen. I had a problem using your advice on 301 redirection. Here’s what I did:
- Open the .htaccess in the cpanel file manager
- I found a 302 redirection code. I deleted it.
- I put your 301 code and put adaptyourself.net where it was viperchill.com
Please tell me what went wrong,
Iván Pérez.
I really like wordpress because it is very search engine friendly. I mean to say your Google ranking will definitely be better than a Flash site or old HTML site. And the more visitors that can simply search your site, the more traffic you will get and hopefully more money.
Just a quick note to say thanks for the tips, I was well behind in my effort and knowledge. With both topped up I’m feeling optimistic about my chances.
I’m really glad I found this post. When your just starting out, SEO is possibly one of the most cryptic parts under the hood. Yet it plays a vital part in gathering an audience. Thanks to your post, and some searching on wordpress forums, I concocted a system that should work even for my visual content.
Great post, thank man!
Nice article. I was going into my blogs and changing some things as I reading this post. However, I still have few things that need to addressed at a later time.
But I do have one question about key phrases and anchor text. I have blog that I would like to rank high in search engines for key phrase “Alabama State University”, would it be wise for me to use an anchor text like “Alabama State University Community – ASUVoice”, because my thoughts are as long as I have “Alabama State University in the anchor text it should be ranking. Or, am I wrong? Should I just leave the anchor text as “Alabama State University”?
[...] WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need [...]
Hey Glen,
Quick question: do you use both HeadSpace and All-In-One SEO on the same site?
Very good tutorial. I have been flipping sites for a while and didnt use the best of SEO practices. But I will definitely tighten up now!
This is useful information for every wordpress users. Should apply this not only read pass. Thanks for sharing
I have a wordpress blog and its given me nothing but trouble and no one seems to know whats wrong with it !
Thanks for your help.. It helps me a lot… but i need some more about “How to get Backlinks for free”.. I could not get it any where. Help me to improve my website’s PageRank.
good job is a fantastic article …simply awesome! .. i lke it…
White Label SEO
Thanks alot for this post. I have been struggling to rank in the search engines and am always seeking seo advice. I get decent traffic and also rank okay on Alexa but the Google Pagerank Checker says that I have 0 pagerank and I can’t figure out why? I know people who steal all their content, have blogs that are younger than mine, and have pageranks of 3 and 4 right now! Hopefully implementing these strategies will help!
Hi there im to to being an seo just wanted to pass along my blog and website adress so people can get some great information,tips and tricks.
Thanks
Come to my site
check out my blog
Awesome post… it’s just what i was looking for.
Hey Glen,
These are some great tips for the SEO newbies out there. Thanks for organizing stuff in an easy-to-understand way.
Hi Glen,
I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what WordPress theme are you using for this site?
greetings from turkey, great article, thanks.
When it comes to permalinks changes and redirections, nothing makes the change as easy as possible than Scott Yang’s Permalink Redirect plug-in. So far so good, it still works on wordpress 2.9.2. I’m yet to test it on wordpress 3.0
I use /%postname%/%post_id%/ structure and recommend it to all folks on shared hosting. Those database queries could get you into trouble when they become too much and start zapping resources.
Thanks for the non-www to www redirect tip.
With the permalinks I have mine set to /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html because I exported my blog from Blogger to WordPress and I am not sure if I made a change to it if it would then mess up all the posts. Thanks for writing this guide!
@Rhiannon: Please read this post with regards to maintaining your blogspot permalinks in wordpress. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2Kyn1kkCikkJ:justinsomnia.org/2006/10/maintain-permalinks-moving-from-blogger-to-wordpress/+Maintain+Blogger
All I use for wordpess seo is the all in one pack and then I add some deep linking plugins and also the dupe content cure.
Works great, I rank page 1 for most of my sites.
Rob x
but HOW do you no follow pagenation? The only options in all in one seo are for tags, categories etc.
I see on your site that if i type in viperchill.com/page2 it redirects me to viperchill.com. What is the code to set this up?
We have been involved with WordPress for some time now. This post is outstanding for anyone who wishes to increase their traffic and rankings. I will Retweet because that’s how I found it.
Great post, I already knew most things but I did find several interesting things to change on my websites. you just gained yourself a new subscriber
ps.: nice site, i find it really attractive
Great and comprehensive article. Thanks! I’m following much of what you’ve written already, but missing out many of your points, so I’m glad that I’ve got another stab to make my site even more search engine friendly
Good post, will frequent your site.
Hi Glen,
A couple of things that I’d appreciate your thoughts on (and hopefully others would too).
First, use of tools such as Scribe to optimise posts/content for SEO. I guess what I’m looking for is good/bad/waste-of-time-or-money-for-this-reason type thoughts.
Second, use of video in posts/content (coupled with transcripts for SEO). I’m fondling my way through this and experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t.
I’ve only been active in blogging/internet marketing for 6 months or so and a lot of what you have written in this post and others on this site aligns perfectly with what I find actually happens with the sites I have been developing.
Thank you for the great contribution you’re making. Wish I’d discovered it sooner.
Steve
These are the tips I was looking for.. I’m literally striving to reach out the meaning of SEO.
Thanks to lead me on he right road!
To my amazement, the phrase “profane economy” listed my site as number 1 in Google. Of course that is because no one else thinks of that phrase. I hope to set up a reading list and establish a referral relationship with Amazon or others for commission. I have a lot of site development work to do, and it will look totally different from the current place holder. But since nobody will likely key in the phrase “profane economy”, how to I take advantage of this ranking?
Dr. Gary Russell
gary@gwrussell.ca
Really Good Stuff! I’ve got most of these things implemented on my blogs, however you did hit home on a couple of good points… e.g. using the redirection plug-in when changing post titles and using the 301 redirect — even though the latest versions of Word-Press uses a 302 redirect. Very Informative!
Thanks for sharing
I will try to improve my wordpress blog SEO according to what you share. Thank you very much
I tried using the re-direct posted above but it wouldn’t work- I guess the new WP installs (I’m using 3.0) are different.
Can anyone shed some light as to how I would write my .htaccess file to direct it to the www version in this case?
Thanks in advance.
I have a problem.. since I installed Platunum SEO; that blog has double Meta Description and double Meta Keyword… what do you think.. Thanks and Peace
Uninstall it…
Wow, I already started to implement some of your strategies on my blog. Thanks a lot.
I no have skill for SEO can u visit my blog for view. My blog is very young, but can u review my blog?just for me know how much efective my SEO.
Thanks nice share
Hi Glen
Thanks for all the SEO info.
I’m probably doing most of this but the “turn off pagination” is something that I’d not thought about.
I’ll take another read and see if there is anything else that I’m not doing.
Appreciate you taking the time to put this article together.
Excellent Post. Yes you are right that google Webmaster Tools is a must-use service for those who cares about search engine traffic to their websites.
Not only will it let you know which keywords you are ranking highly for in Google, but it will also tell you about any broken links.
Glen, SEO certainly isn’t one of my strong points. So I really appreciate you sharing these great pointers. Thanks
Thanks! I think this is one of the most comprehensive – and easy to follow – guides to good SEO practices.
Great post. It looks like I have been doing everything wrong when it comes to my WordPress blog. I will definately implement a lot of these changes immediately.
This is fantastic information for any newby or seasoned marketer. I’ve linked to your site as I just find it extremely valuable. In addition, I have book marked. Probably 8 of out of 20 of my sites are on page 1 and 2 of google but as you mentioned, no traffic, no money. I will not get frustrated, I will focus on article marketing which I find to be successful. I outsource it and as well will write my own if inspired by the right thoughts. I found you through Problogger, love Darren! Continued success to you as well!
Great SEO tips for wordpress – nice and simply put, just like wordpress itself
Thanks very much!
Okay, can someone explain “grab my button” I’ve read the directions a thousand times, I can’t get it to work!!! Why can’t I copy an image from photobucket, why do I have to upload to my server, so confused! Any help?
Photobucket want to keep traffic on their site. You could try uploading pics to imgur.com and linking to those if you want.
It’s generally viewed as unethical to steal another sites bandwidth, unless that’s the purpose of the site (imgur).
Glen,
Sorry, what do you mean stealing bandwidth? I just cannot for the life of me figure out this button thing, everyone is saying it is so easy and I’m not getting it, ARGH!
Very Useful. Thx. I bookmarked It.
Useful tips. I will use some of them on my wiki. Cheers
Very good tutorial. I have been flipping sites for a while and didnt use the best of SEO practices. But I will definitely tighten up now!
Great article……just what I was looking for!
It’s nice to know that there are like minded people in this business. I use about 90% of what is written here based solely off of research and my own case studies, much like you. I have found that using a /%category%/%postname%/ permalink setup works best for me. I also ensure that I keep the noindex/ follow attributes on my Archives. Category, etc pages, except for one. I use index/follow on my Tag pages and I see a tremendous amount of Tags indexed from using this methodology, not to mention direct linking to those Tag pages in order to encourage Bot visits and follows.
Great Article.
Mike
excellent article about basic SEO steps EVERY WordPress blogger should employ.
Thanks for the info. It’s exactly what I needed for my site.
Sam
Thanks for sharing..
Great tutorial Glen! All very useful info on SEO. I really like that you’ve pulled all of this information into one easy to use resource. Good job man! I’ve got it bookmarked!
I just read this. Being that I only have wordpress.com I will do as much damage as I can without a self hosted site. Great read. I’m pretty sure I’m going to come back and forth when it comes to a lot of this stuff.
thank you , I did your guide in my worldpress blog
Great tutorial… here’s a great tip for everyone here… we combined a keyword rich YouTube Username and URL for our WP site and have achieved incredible results… dominating the top half of Google page 1 for the term “video seo services”, including picture/video listings!! This is a great combo I highly recommend.
Mark
This guide is a must read for anyone interested in SEO and even for anyone serious about their website. The information is very accessible and easy to understand. Thanks a lot, Glen!
So much good information. I have this site bookmarked for repeated referral.
I really need to know how to make a post stay in the top position on my wordpress site. Any ideas?
Hi,
Can I do it also for my blog? wordpress.com or just for wordpress.org?
I just can’t do it by my self. Could you please advice me?
Thanks,
Ri
Just wordpress.org. I’m not sure which steps you can implement on the .com
Wow, Glen you have complied great post. To me it is TEN posts composed into one detailed easy to reference guide for everyone looking to enhance their WordPress sites’ SEO.
Great wordpress SEO tips, especially for a (SEO)beginner like me.
This is an awesome post, thanks so much for the great tips. Going to get to work implementing them all now, ready for our launch.
Thanks again
Bradley
Amazing post! Recently I have launched a Blog using wordpress. But I am using wordpress for the first time so I have got too many problems and searching for getting help about it. And finally I have got it. Thanks for your kind information.This is exactly what I need.
Thanks for a real no holes barred look at SEO. This is the stuff the GURUS charge thousands for and you have given it to us for free. Muchly appreciated. I will be sure to link to you from my site.
Thanks for your aritcle.
Wow. Glen thanks so much for writing this amazing post.. It seems you wrote this quite some time ago but I’ll continue to use it as a resource for many moons!
Just started my own business (free iphone/ipad apps) so this info is BIG for me right now! Cheers!
A great post in fact! That’s the sunny side of one’s writing, you write inside a lucid manner and I’ve no problem to understand what you have said, although I’m a novice. Maintain the very good work heading by carry on blogging new and entertaining posts.
Really enjoyed this post, can you recommend similar info for SEO for my own website? Cheers
thanks for the tips, now i can feel great change in my traffic
Seems to me there is a lot of work involved on your listthere and i just started my blog.So i must work hard to get something positive out of you seo list!!tnx
Good article. Thanks for tips
Hi Glenn.
Another great post thanks, I will be working my way through it making the changes to my site as I go. I would like to ask what plugin you would recommend for using Paypal on your sites please? Also, while searching for a new theme, what do you call it when you have the four picture adverts on the right hand side? ( I think you had them in the early days of Plugin ID)
Thanks
Chris
Excellent ! At this time, I don’t use wordpress, but by reading this comprehensive tutorial I have to try WP CMS and implemented this great tutorial.
Awesome !
I’ve read so much articles to make 301 redirect!!! And here is the whole code to edit .htaccess. Thank you for your job!
Very good article Glen, thank you very mutch.
Greetings from Sweden
Helio
Alt Attributes – I found a lot of value in the section regarding alt attributes. I read some time ago about the importance of using my keywords when saving an image but forgot about it until reading your post. I will start using them going forward. If I save a logo and my keyword is “social networking” – the image will be saved as socialnetworking.jpg
Thanks,
Lorenzo
as you know most of peoples read the stuff and never apply on their blogs. your post make me allow to apply on my blog there was not only reading… you break into many parts so i like that thing. i have applied almost everything step by step
So finally a local tech with the savvy to put it online – congrats friend. This kind of information is valuable to any website owner, in particluar if using WordPress.
Joomla has been the mainstay of websites for a long time but WordPress is definitely the way to go. Now all I must do is get my site sorted and optimised
thanks for tutorial.
very helpful.
After just reading your post from start to finish, there are certainly a few things I’ve overlooked and will implement, particularly no-following and pagerank sculpting – I’m trying to get the SEO right before writing some actual content which sounds a bit backward!
Hi Glen – a really good list, a lot more comprehensive than some of the others I’ve found on the web so I’ve added it to more SEO bookmarks list. Thanks!
I read your post carefully, and there are many things I could learn from it. There is a lot of new things that I know after reading it from beginning to end. Thank you for adding my knowledge of SEO…
Regards…
Great article! Learned a lot from reading it over several times! Thanks for the info!
thanks for sharing! i think keywords are important?
Glen,
This is really a great article. I thought I knew a little something about SEO, but I have recently started using WordPress for a couple of my sites, and this article is a big help. ViperChill is now on my regular read list. Keep up the good work!!
Wow, this is what I’m looking for. Thanks for sharing and nice info.
I like this post and I enjoyed read it. This information is what I’m looking for. Thanks for sharing.
Wow, I like this post. It gives me information that I never knew before. Thanks for sharing.
Fantastic! Glenn, Ive just read your blogging blueprint ebook and that in itself was outstanding info for beginners, but here too you have almost perfectly made beginners as well as seasoned wordpress users literate on wordpress seo guide. You have a follower in me
Great article. There is a lot of info to take in and some of the info I already knew but lots of new stuff to help optimize my blog thanks
Glen again thank you. I find myself coming back to your site quite often. especial when I am stuck on some thing. keep it up!
Just launch two websites of wordpress, really a timely post for me, thanks for sahring
Hi there – really good post. As an digital marketer myself, I come across a bunch of SEO articles that are plain wrong. I’d just like to endorse the fact that your article is well written and has some salient points that any new person to SEO or WordPress should follow.
Hey Glen,
Nice article I’ve started installing All-in-One SEO for a number of clients and I’m going to try out some of your settings suggestions on a few customers this month.
Thanks for sharing and I’ve subscribed too.
OK, the WWW or NON WWW was exactly what I needed to know. Thanks for simplifying it for me, I have researched before, but didn’t really “get ” it until now
I like WP a lot, have bought Thesis theme and trying to make it look as good as its SEO is. I suck at design so far
Great interesting tip on SEO. I still don’t really understand track back and ping backs and there relevance. I look forward to reading more about SEO to further increase traffic to my site. Thanks
Really, it’s useful for me ….great post Glen
Glenn, the section on putting the code in for NOFOLLOW would be a great class to put a video up for Cloud Nine. step by step. I know code is sort of a scary place for a lot of us.
This is what I’m looking for.
Thanks for sharing and I’ve subscribed too.
I got alot of great info from this website. This will continue to help me build great backlinks and ranking with Google
A very comprehensive tutorial. I think you pretty much covered everything (except XML Sitemap).
I don’t believe in using Sitemaps
Very useful, I will keep the information in my (most useful) file.
great info
Thanks for sharing and I’ve subscribed
hey
Its a good article…but when I installed the plugin you suggested in my wordpress site..it ended up deleting couple of pages wherever I used it…I donno what is wrong..i now uninstalled the SEO plugin..but still the age is “blank”…if you can suggest me a way to get over this “blank” page on wordpress site it woud be great…
Great article with so much information. I have been building websites less that a year but use wordpress and think it is really easy to create a nice website and with so many plugins available it is very easy to customize. I think you have so much great info here and answered a lot of questions I had about the more subtle options within wordpress.
I’m not sure how evergreen this information is but it surely is a lot of stuff I wasn’t concerned about before, so I’m going to take advantage of this information seriously!
Regarding the permalinks structure in wordpress I was told to use the %postname% structure and then I took a marketing course and they implied the best way to set up permalinks was to optimize your categories and use this structure: /%category%/%postname%
I guess in the end not everyone agrees on something but thanks again on the follow/no follow data, it taught me a lot!
~Sergio
Thanks very much for the great article. I realized I am not implementing even 50% of what you shared here.
Appreciate the article. Your reference to noindex and the subsequent comments caught my attention for further research.
Great article!
Thanks a lot.
Hi Glen, Great article! Thanks so much for sharing your tips with us. Also great to see someone from the “Toon” doing so well, keep up the great work as now an avid reader…
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for bringing such insight and clarity to something that had been somewhat mysterious to me in the journey of my website development!!
Another reason not to abandon tag pages: those pages are good for telling Google what your articles are about. When it sees pages that are completely (respectively) focused on “marketing”, “seo”, and “inbound linking”, it has a pretty good idea what your article is about, if somehow your on-page clues weren’t enough. If you happen to be specifically SEO’ing on the keyphrase from one of those tags, it’s very helpful to keep those links.
When it comes to making use of this option (by Platinum SEO plugin)
Page Title: %page_title% | %blog_title%
I’ve removed the ” %blog_title%” though, as the blog post is long anyway, and Google won’t take into account the remaining text (e.g. blog title)
What do you think?
nice tutorial. thanks for sharing.
You recommend to noindex: tags, archive, pagination and other duplicate producing pages.
If I will also make noindex categories, so followed will be only blog posts. It will be worse or not.
Also how to make correct restrictions for /feed, /trackback? Thank in advance.
I have definitely ended up in traffic generation for a ages and then my buddy keeps telling me that all of us really should try (blank) voice broadcasting as a fabulous method to be able to generate qualified prospects. I simply believe this very hard to trust the fact this in reality actually works. Everytime When i receive 1 of those types of phone messages We just hang up instantly however he states just that it comes with a very cheap technique to bring in leads. I i’m nevertheless undecided nonetheless I am aware that these other methods we have been using tend to be simply turning out to be alot more (blank) expensive.
Hey Glen,
Super great article! Quick question for you.
Is there a way to add noindex and nofollow attributes to just ONE specific WordPress page? It’s a password-protected page that I don’t really want to be indexed in Google and other search engines.
Thanks!
The mattter of meta keywords vs. meta description is something that I have been curious about for sometime. From what you have explained, it is in fact the meta description that is more important for optimization…? How do you suggest formulating the Meta description? I have not tried Headspace, but plan on adapting the plugin ASAP. You mention that other search engines may find value in meta keywords still. Do you have any further suggestions to improve optimization from search engines besides Google?
I have been curious if meta tags or meta descriptions are more important. Any advice on how to write effective meta desciptions? I have not tried Headspace, but will certainly acquire the plugin ASAP. I thought this blog was very useful and appreciate the information. Thanks Glen
Great post if you are a beginner at wordpress, many useful tips!
Thanks for the great post. I am off to implement the 301 redirect for my blog
This is a very nice post. Lets me better understand how to optimize my website. but what about the comparison between HeadSpace and All In One SEO Pack? Which is best?
Hey man!
Your this article about SEO is awesome., I have a confution about wordpress Permalinks. You a here told that it’s format is http://website.com/blogtitle/ that is /%posttitle%/ but I heard that posttitle.html is more search engine friendly. Is It true?
If I set my Permalinks as htttp://website.com/%category%/%year%/%posttitle%/ this formate is good or bad?
Thanks again for your grate post!
Great post. Thanks for article…
Just did this for my guild’s site – we’re working on some Guild Leadership products to take the success we’ve had and use it to teach other people how to increase their experience playing World of Warcraft, or any other games that involve large organizations. Nerdy, I know, but so incredibly interesting.
I had a lot of fun messing with the google keyword tool and I hope I get scanned soon to see if our rankings have increased at all. We got some great search traffic in December/January for some guides we put out, but it has tapered off as they have become less relevant. Next time we do a media blitz, I’ll be much more ready to capture the extra 3k visitors/day!
Thanks for the post Glen – always a joy.
Your article on SEO for wordpress has helped me out. I saw some of your posts on bodybuilding.com and sent you a PM. Check it out sometime when you get a chance. You can see my site at http://www.transformingtim.com/ – i’m still in the process of getting the ground work up but I have a decent start.
Fabulous to read all these great tips in once place. I look forward to reading more of your blog.
Thanks!
Hi, Glen
I just started my blogs. I must say your articles gave me bunch things to do with my wordpress.
Thanks
Hi,
I am so glad i found this blog, its has given me a lot of insights
Got to learn many things about WP seo from your wonderful post.
Thanks for the share Glen
Keep coming back to this one Glen.
It’s become a classic.
Thanks for that 301 redirect, I can never remember the right configuration.
Like I say… a classic.
Hello,
I have carefully read every single word of your post about WordPress SEO. Though the post is really informative for the majority of Bloggers but there was nothing new for me except your advice to turn on pingback. I am already implementing all the steps you shared in this post. BUT THE PROBLEM IS EVEN THEN I AM NOT GETTING MUCH TRAFFIC.
My keyword reasearch is good, my content is good, my URLs are keyword optimized all I lack is “backlinks”.
But I have different experiences with making backlinks. Whenever I make a backlinks my site gets out ranked from top 30 SERPs.
You have my email address now, please email me if you have any suggestion for or simply reply to my comment right here. I will check back soon.
Thanks
You need links
Yes, backlinks are often the key to driving traffic to a site, and from my experience guest posting has been the most productive way to spend my time.
I actually have a network of thousands of blogs to submit my articles to for backlinking purposes. All I have to do is write the articles, and admittedly I can get quite lazy in this area. The one hitch is that the articles MUST be unique, not-spun content. The blogs I submit to would never allow authors to submit spun garbage to their sites.
Anybody interested in learning more about guest posting can contact me anytime…
bizz888 at Yahoo
I’ve been following Glen for years now, and his advice on setting up and maintaining my WordPress sites has been invaluable. I’ve also managed to learn a few backlinking strategies along the way (white-hat stuff, to be sure) that have helped my main blog approach 1000 unique visitors a day.
Awesome info. Thank you Glenn.
Unquestionably believe that which you said. Your favorite reason seemed to be on the internet the simplest thing to be aware of. I say to you, I definitely get irked while people think about worries that they plainly don’t know about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and also defined out the whole thing without having side effect , people can take a signal. Will probably be back to get more. Thanks
Sick post. Using Alt has helped image search tremendously, although converting image search is tough.
It is a great post! thank you for a useful guide
Wow, found some good hints here, including that 301 redirect issue! Thans for the info pal!
Great article, thanks for sharing some really useful pointers about word press.
I like it, such a great article thanks
Hello! Thank you so much for sharing this post, I finally got the difference between www and non-www sites, I’m a beginner in SEO and of course I didn’t know this fact either. This article would definitely help such newbies as I am!
under the permalinks section… was there supposed to be a link for a re-direction plug in, so as not to lose previous posted links on the web?
Thanks – Ron
I’m working on both getting more traffic for my fiction site and putting together a business site. Do you still recommend All in One SEO for optimizing WordPress sites?
I still use it
My site using wordpress engine and I am very lucky to find your web site. Your article is very useful. Thank you for share
Hey Glen
I think this is one of your most popular posts. I have one query. My site is hosted on wordpress and I want to give 301 redirect to one of the inside pages. How to do it?
Wow, thanks Though it’s a whole lot of ideas to implement, I’m sure that it’s gonna boost my traffic like crazy. I once did the mistake with not specifying SEO friendly permalinks and now I’m suffering. Actually my traffic is
Thanks again!
This helps a lot, thanks. Most of the stuff I already do but I picked up a couple SEO nuggets that I will implement on my sites.
Hi Glen,
I’m just getting my website started and working on the seo part of it and you have given me great, great information I can’t tell you how thankful I am that I found you. You have helped me tremendously because I’m working on a low budget basically everything free but your information is just explosive thank you so much for taking time out of your life to give up such great free information.
I will continue to read on to learn more
Thank you
I have a wordpress blog and I think your article is very useful for me. Thanks
Hi glen, I did what you said about the interlink and once I saved the .htacess my site was giving me a 404 error, i tried to remove the code and i leave it as it was before but did not work… I can not access my site
please replay.
Thanks for the info. This is very useful to improve my blog
kill I have a wordpress blog and I think your article is very useful for me. Thanks
Got to learn many things about WP seo from your wonderful post.
Thanks for the share Glen
Thanks. Using a stats tool is good to see which pages are getting search traffic and then work on increasing their rankings. If that’s what you mean, then good suggestion and I’ll add it to my update.
I’ve been working on my blog for months and I had no idea that I was missing almost half of these suggestions. Some of them were a little confusing, but I think I’ll get the hang of it!
Let us know if you have any questions.
Thanks Krista
Please let me know if you have any tips for improving spammy link removed
Not spamming blog comments would be a start
nice post………..its so informative and educative.
Wow thousands of dollars a month on your site? That’s awesome. Thanks for the tips and keep up the great work!
Excellent post, ive used the headings as a check list just to remind me. I’ve also just purchased the Thesis framework which I’ve heard is a “must have”.
Great info as always. I love your site, I have been using your advice in setting up my new blog website and building my business brand. Thanks for all your help.
Wow this is quite the post (page). Thanks for the recap on all the SEO efforts needed for starting a WordPress site
Thanks for your information. It will help me a lot from SEO point of view.
I come back to this post time and time again, thanks for the go-to resource for WP SEO Glen!
Great post Glen, I had got as far as using the FV SEO plugin for most of our client blogs but there are still a bunch of tips in here which are new to me.
Am off to browse the rest of your blog. If there isn’t already an article there about sites that can measure and report on your SEO efforts, would you consider doing one? I seem to get contradictory info from several and get confused as to what to do next!
I come back to this post time and time again, thanks for the go-to resource for WP SEO Glen!
Thanks for the recap on all the SEO efforts needed for starting a WordPress site
WordPress is the best
Hi Glen,
I have signed up with wordpress.com. But after trying to download some of your software, I found out they don’t allow downloads. To do this I needed to sign up with wordpress.org
You haven’t mentioned this, is this correct or am i missing something?
Also I have been reading your site for the last two weeks. can’t stop now. Hopfully It will help me become a succes.
keep up the good work
paul
Fantastic Glen,
I always rely on this kind of extensive guides of yours to check if I have got everything right.
Nice one!!
Thanks,
Daniel.
Great article and share !
Thanks for your article . It is help me and very useful.
Awesome tutorial! I am running some websites in wordpress platform. Your tutorial post is very helpful for seo. Thanks a lot!
If you want to change non ww domain to www one, then you can do it from wp admin panel:
Settings – General and under the WordPress address (URL) and Site address (URL) just add
WWW and all your non www pages will be showed with www without losing any traffic.
I did this on my site and it was successful, And yes this types of settings are 301 redirect in newest wp.
James
what seo plugins are good besides all in one seo? how about seo ultimate? also, do you recommend using google xml site map plugin too?
How can get top with google? Using this tips are good?
I read more than 100 WP tute and this is one of the best and detailed WP SEO Tutorial I found online. Thanks for sharing. I must say this tute is for everyone from bigginer to wp developer! thanks again!
Thanks.. This really works…
Thank you this article has tons of useful advice. Please keep posting especially on the million dollar project…Greetings.
Well right now I am confused about the nofollow attribute.
However, I followed advice from other posts and I they worked, so probably I am going to use this one as well. Thank you for the article……
Hi Glen
found out about you from reading the Guardian. Glad I did. We use WordPress for all our CMS websites and even some small ecommerce sites. We do generate xml sitemaps automatically, but use Webmaster tools to monitor client sites for any link issues etc. Where WordPress makes SEO strategy so easy is by the number of excellent plugins, such as Google Analytics Dashboard Widget, various social media plugins to import twitter feeds, ‘like’ posts etc.
May be worth a post on some disadvantages of WordPress e.g. site speed. database calls are not optimised, although caching can help. Google has give more weight to load time now.
cheers
Nigel
Hello!
This is was of the most helpful articles I have ever read on SEO. It pretty much sums it up, SEO in a nutshell is a great alternative title for this post!
Until next time, all the best and adieu!
Glen:
The content you deliver is amazing. Reading your blog is always a great investment of my time. I told myself that I am going to read one post of yours a day until I have read everything on Viper Chill. Thank you for making me a “smarter” internet marketer.
I firmly believe that new internet marketers who are struggling to make their first dime would be so much better off if they would stop reading emails and stop buying IM products for just one month — and then spend that time reading all the content in this blog. There is gold in this blog — and it will not cost them a dime.
Hey Glen,
I still keep forgetting all of the advice on this post for new sites, this should be a sticky not only on my faves but on your site too!
Sergio
Powerful article …
Hi Glen,
I’ve read your post very deeply, really you have described everything in very well and proper manners. let me ask something to you that you are talking about all in one seo pack actually I’ve newly start to seo work on my website and i am using yoast seo plugin for my website, I am not quite familiar with this plugin so Could you please visit my website(www.ghulaman-e-abutalib.com) and give me any suggestion regarding this plugin or you can publish a new post about yoast plugin such as you posted regarding all in one seo pack so in this way I’ll be growing my website with your fantastic and precious advices.!!
I’m waiting for your response!!
Best Regards
Syed Taqi
Looking forward to implementing most of these tips and tricks, thanks for the ideas!
awesome post .. and thanks for sharing
Great article! Very useful and helpful I learned things that I never knew before. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Hi Glen
Very useful article (and my checklist now
Now could someone help me with this:
i need to delete some(a lot) posts from one of my blogs, will it hurt my SEO?
and what is the right way to do it?
appreciate your help peeps
If you want the basics of SEO for WordPress sites this is an excellent resource! Lots of good tips for newbies and a few nuggets for more advanced users too.
Fantastic article! After stacks of SEO library books – and online reading – this is the article that finally ‘lifted the fog’ and allowed us to set up our website. We cannot thank you enough! Shawn
LOL i was not aware that i can make my read more as nofollow !! This my reduce home page link juice pass !
Informal posts about managing WordPress sites, I was making some mistake in permalink which I have to correct now.
Hey Glen,
as usual, you truly delivered with another over the top post.
I thought I already heard just about everything there was to know about SEO for my WordPress blogs, but I learned a thing or two from your post.
So, that was really cool.
There is one thing that I have been researching on and experimenting with lately that I don’t think anyone covered yet….
and that is redirecting your 404 error page to any page of your choice. For instance your homepage, or any other page that you want to get ranked better for.
Instead of the dead links that are in your blog and from others linking to you with bad links, you can redirect that link juice to any page in your blog that you choose, rather than to your 404 error page.
I just recently wrote a post about it on my blog, and there are several WP plugins to redirect your 404′s. Or, you can use a very simple 301 redirect code which is what I’ve done.
Cheers!
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this WP plugin the other day.
The Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress. Pretty cool plugin with a lot of options.
It notifies and allows you to handle any problematic links that you may have in your blog. – Links that lead to sites or pages that no longer exist, or too slow at loading. Things of that nature. If you take care of them, should help improve your SEO for your blog.
Just wanted to help make this post literally, “The only Guide You will ever need”.
I’ve been advised against that by some smart friends.
Thank you for the kind words though!
Great tuto !
Hi,
Your website has been really helpful, thank you very much. I have implemented all your suggestions but do not know if they’ve made a difference yet – since I have only done most of them today.
I have one query:
Do you really mean to use “anchor text in links from other websites”? I have put anchors in our links to other websites but am unclear how I would put anchor text in links from other websites?
Cheers,
Kathy
Thanks for giving this much detail here – I’m off to tweak some things on my site now!
Just wondering – do you pay any attention to Alexa scores? Some say it’s worth keeping an eye on, and trying to reduce, as an indicator of traffic – what are your thoughts?
cheers
Tanya
Am I mad at this article? yes. You’re my man.Keep it up.
Wow Glen,
Ive been a long time reader of viperchill but I haven’t really commented on anything to this point. As always fantastic work!
I was having trouble ranking my keyword for the longest time and I couldn’t figure out why. I was doing all the right things but nothing was working. I applied these tips and I jumped 80 spots in google! I was worried
Thanks for relieving me!
Should I nofollow the category links to prevent them from getting link juice?
Awesome as always Glen, you practice what you preach because every piece of content you write has some relevancy to what I do even the older stuff!
Couldn’t agree more, I spend hours going through the posts on here and EVERYTHING is related to me in some way! Thanks Glen, time to sign up to the RSS etc.
Actually worthwhile post. Spend interest
Blog posts without dates SUCK
Hello there comment dates
This post is still highly relevant, so don’t worry about it.
Can’t remember when he posted it but Matt Cutts said there is no need to set nofollows to internal pages as it has no bearing on seo. Not sure about other engines…
If we believed every word Mr Cutts says we wouldn’t get very far!
Glen,
As always great post!
Two questions:
1. When I reviewed my index.php I found two areas where <a href="” was located. Should I add nofollow just for the Read More button and not touch the blog title? Wouldn’t the blog title be indexed by a typical sitemap crawl?
2. Do you have an example of your sitemap? I’m confused on what I should emphasize when building one.
Thanks,
Mike
craaaazy helpful!
thanks so much for posting. I’m a total newb at SEO and the learning curve is getting easier when I find post like this that lay it all out for me. A++ and have a great one!
Thank u very much for the great info!
I am new to WordPress and slowly getting there with regards to SEO and e-commerce. A blog like this was really helpful.
I have a question though: how long does it take to get ranked in the top 10 search results assuming you do a good job at SEO? Anybody?
I loved this information. Thank you.
its awesome!
Great SEO tips for wordpress – nice and simply put, just like wordpress itself
Thanks very much!
Good post mate. But the problem is that I have tried all these things at my best and I am unable to improve my search results. It seems I am missing something or maybe I am doing something wrong. Thanks a lot for sharing anyways.
This actually helped me alot when I first started my niche website! thanks glen
I am not a very tech savvy person but as I dig deeper into the back end of my website, it is posts like these that make my life easier and help us to save some money as well. Thanks for sharing your knowledge:)
Hi,
I want to post directly to my wordpress blog from my desktop, specifically from Command prompt.
I know there is a protocol called xml-rpc, but that is of no help to me, as I don’t know what on earth it is. Any help would be appreciated.
Glen, my blog is on on blogspot and has poor results, should I go to wordpress?
Really useful material here, and quite comprehensive as well.
The structure I use for permalinks is:
/%postname%-%post_id%/ which seems to work well.
You have received a massive number of replies – congratulations! Looks like I had better sign up!
Hey Glenn,
I’m so grateful to have recently discovered you from Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income site. I’ve already read through your CloudBlueprint series and also purchased the OptimizePress product to create squeeze pages.
Although late to your WordPress SEO guide – just wanted to say thank you. I love learning more about the WordPress platform and discovered something new from your guide (which is the Nofollow the Read More Link).
Thank you again and can’t wait to devour more of your content.
Barry Wong
The steps and code under ‘www or non-www’ worked like a charm! This is one of the better WP SEO resources on the web. Thanks!
I really enjoyed reading tour article. It is very informative and educational. I am going to implement some of your ideas in my wordpress blog. Thanks alot
Thanks to share these tips to increase and imprive blogging. Difinetly it will help to increase traffic and most poplular websites for business purpose. SEO is most important things when blogg post on website, which kind of things to keep in mids that is most usefull.
Thanks that’s really a great post. I really enjoyed the post.
Another wicked post , you want to write a book Glen , this stuff is gold , easy to understand and a winning formula for a well ranking website . Thanks again , Ronnie
Hi there.
Now, with penguin how do you recomended to manage the inside-post links?.
In all my entry’s i never use “no-follow” tag, even if is wikipedia page, google’s page or a big page… in fact i never use that tag, and i dont know if im loosing my link juice.
What do you think about it?.
Thanks.
Very helpful post.
Very useful info here, im new to SEO and reading this has saved me throwing my money into the gutter im sure.
Great beginner post – love all the details too, a great starting point, I was surprised at some of the things I have missed too!
I have done certain things but i just unable to increase my traffic ,Please see my website and please suggest me what things are currently most vital that are needed to do.Please …..Please
Just caught up with your site it really has some great tips and info.. Im always amazed at the number of websites that offer tips on wordpress / SEO but very few offer quality like this! learnt a few thinks today so it was well worth the read!!..
How can i make my blog labels and categories and comments nofollow?
is there any single thing to turn it off?
Really resource article, you’ve covered all the things, we’ll follow these tips, which plugin do you prefer – All in One SEO Pack OR WordPress SEO by Yoast?
Great article. I have found some really useful info here. I find my images appear on google quite quickly compared to software like magento, so there for I use both. I have wondered though does it make any difference to backdating articles? Say I published something today, but made the date a few months ago, will it still appear as well in google do you think?
Thanks again
Good morning, Glen.
I’m speechless – awed and overcome. No wonder my blog is struggling to get off the ground. I don’t even know half the words in this post, let alone use them!
Is there a glossary somewhere?
I think this a post for printing and going through paragraph by paragraph until I’ve learnt the language. Then I’ll start working my way through the list on a ‘just do it’ basis.
Look out world – Linda’s on the loose. Mind, it’ll probably be 2020 before I get to the point of making any impact.
But thanks for solving my ‘what shall I read this winter’ problem – it’s all here on one page!
Kind regards,
L
It’s really a complete guide for search engine optimization.Thanks for the informative post.
Hey,
Excellent work. you have explained all the things in one post.
From basics to Search engine optimization process, All cleared.
Great post.
Saif
This is an awesome guide about seo but you should have explain a bit more about nofollow archive and post tags. Its really confusing to me . Thanks !
It’s really awesome I love your tips as I am a beginner it helps me lot
Hmm it seems like your website ate my first comment (it was super long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I submitted and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog.
I as well am an aspiring blog writer but I’m still new to the whole thing. Do you have any tips for inexperienced blog writers? I’d genuinely appreciate it.
Thank’s for the really nice article..
Now, i am using rel=”nofollow” for read more on my blog..
This is an awesome guide about seo which helps me a lot. Its really confusing to me . Thanks !
thanks for sharing, glen. i bookmarked this article and always check back when i have questions about SEO. hopefully google considers most of this still, even after their penguin, panda and whatever update
Glen, thank you so much for all of the great information you provide. I just built and launched my very first website, and I am loving reading and learning all I can about SEO and building a business online. Thanks for sharing your success!
Thanks for sharing this information. Hopefully it sends me on the right track as far as SEO.
Thanks for the information. Just looking to create wordpress seo website so any information is good to know.
Great suggestions but isnt this more for wordpress.org than wordpress.com?
Hi Glenn,
great post.. I might be a few years too late reading this but i still find this information very useful. I have started using wordpress, I was on blogger before, I have a wordpress.com blog that’s doing reasonably well.. Its been a few months and now that I am comfortable with using wordpress.com and understand SEO basics I was thinking of monetizing my blog (didn’t start off with this intention), but I understand that wordpress.com blogs can’t use advertising. And to start off another blog at wordpress.org might be like doing all the hard work again (I would do it if there is no other option).. But I am guessing there must be a way that allows users to use advertising, does using premium wordpress.com themes solve the problem?
I know the question might not be relevant to your post, but then using seo is about bringing more users and making money off your site.. and i am so curious about this… please help.
I own a company and the domain name is already taken and used by another company that only uses it to redirect people to there main site. So they dont even need it. I contacted them and they are willing to sell me the domain name. She told me to make her an offer and I am trying to figure out a ballpark figure to offer her. Please be realistic. Thanks.
I have a google website created and would like to give it a better domain name so people can find it better and it looks more professional. I’d like to do this cheaply, but every site has different gimmicks. I also want to make sure it is legit. Any suggestions?
Hi Glenn,
Thanks for a great tutorial. I will try to implement these lessons for my website.
Regards,
Aadil Bhesania
Tips and helpful hints. I like the idea of not having a time stamp on my blog posts based on my content. Thanks for sharing. Hurrah! After all I got a web site from where I know how to actually obtain useful information regarding my study and knowledge. Thanks!
Mr.MakingUsmile
Very useful information. I totally agree all in one seo pack is by far the greatest.
Thanks for sharing – I have a few blogs and I’m always looking for quality information that will help me set them up properly.
Glen
Thanks Glenn,
I wish I’d seen this 6 months ago when I started m blog. I slowly but surely learned the long way how to implement some of this stuff. I’ve never heard of no-follow though!
Thanks for the good advice
Awesome post, great job on the details.
You really left little or nothing out.
I have vastly improved over the last couple of years,
but sometimes the plugins can be tricky with the settings,
especially when your not highly knowledgeable in regards to
coding of any kind with the exception of some .html which I simply had
to learn to survive!
Thanks,
David
This helps a lot, thanks. Most of the stuff I already do but I picked up a few more SEO tips that I will use on my sites. Thank You
This is a really awesome post!! Just the kind of info I was looking for.
Thanks so much
Great article again, I had no idea about the 302/301 redirects.
Thanks again.
Very nice read. Thank you for the information.
Excellent post.
It really helped simplify the important aspects of SEO, and the tips are very easy to implement. I will be referring back to this in the future I’m sure!
Thanks a lot.
Jake Johnson
What a great post. And a great website. Thanks for that much information in one spot (for free) :-). Helps me a lot with my website (not a money making one … just a normal site :-).
Hey Glen, your post is evergreen in a sense that despite the rapid updates by Google still your post answers all the questions we have for seo optimizing a WordPress Blog. Thanks for writing such killer posts.
Thanks for this useful information, you can never have too much information about how to rank in the search engines. I read everything I can on SEO and some information is just not useful or relevant. You provided a lot of new ideas for me to consider, and to that I say thank you very much!
Glen, thanks for a great post, I really enjoyed it. Very generous of you to share with everyone!
It’s crazy after so long that these are still some pretty sound principles. Thank you Glen.
When i’m searching on google to write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the WordPress SEO plugin, i found this so useful post. Very big thanks Glen, what i need in one place.
Hi Glen,
I just wanted to stop by and say hello.
I have been here quite a few times and received lots of great tips for my WordPress sites.
i have come quite a way since my first visit Glen. I have about 15 sites up and running, and I have actually been making decent money for about the last eight months now.
It amazes me though how hard it is to convince people when you have really found something good.
I joined two membership sites where I learned how to really optimize my sites and do my linking, both on and off site. However, when I try to explain this to people they look at me like I have three heads?
Maybe I do, I guess I should check that?
Anyway Glen, things have been going great for me. I am still working my butt off to stay up to speed with all the constant changes online!
Take care, and thanks again Glen for all your nuggets of gold!
David
Hey mate, great article. Even tho I’m a few years late. I have been trying to learn SEO.
I’m just having a little trouble figuring out how to implement some of the stuff.
Like the redirect URL or 301
Do you do video tutorials on any of this?
Thanks again
Craig
Good post, but could you share some updated advice on Google+ and author rank? Do you think this will start affecting Google’s algorithum in the future. Matt Cutts had made some strong signals that Google was heading this direction last May. Bill Slawski gives a good overview on http://www.seobythesea.com/.
Love to get your feedback also
This is a very helpful post.
Before I thought my On-Page SEO is already good enough but not until I read this post,. I learned more SEO strategies that I think would greatly help me as I start my SEO campaign.
I love the 301 permanent redirect. I haven’t thought about doing this before.
Very timely article Glen.
Thanks a lot.
Great post Glen, i have been using some of these setting on my new site and it is already doing good in the serps.
Looks like you have outlasted the 2 SEO experts you referenced in this post.
They both stopped posting in early 2012.
Great post. I am beginner in wordpress and it helped me a lot.
It is great post, i have optimized my wordpress sites as per the instructions provided in this post now i wonder my site is ranked on good positions on Google.. it is really helpful guys
Hey Glen, no idea why it took me so long to start reading your blog. Great content and useful. Also, is there a pitfall to me utilising the sites I have built for others as a place to do my own “guest blogging”? I have been considering doing free ghost writing for the clients who are willing to let me put backlinks to my site.
Great resource for people like me who are starting out. Thanks for the great info.
A great overall guide for WordPress SEO.
Another EPIC post, need to start writing more of these myself.
Wonderful article for newbies. Implemented almost 90% of your recommendations and already obtaining results.
Hey awesome post Glen, but tell me how updated is this guide? Do you update it at all? Judging by the date of the earliest comments 2010 is a long time ago in Google world
Cheers,
Mel
It’s still very relevant, Mel
A comprehensive and complete guide especially for beginners. I will include this link in my blog. Keep up the good work, Glen!
Thanks I’m gonna check my alts in the images. What would you think is the reason for sudden drop in visitors?
Good post Glen,
I wonder if you were rewriting it today, would you swap out the All-in-one SEO plugin in favor of WordPress SEO by Yoast. And would you include a paragraph on rel=author?
Cheers
Stuart
thanks for sharing, glen. i bookmarked this article and always check back when i have questions about SEO !
We prefer All In One SEO because it’s less complicated. We have had some pretty good success with it. I do have to say we haven’t really tried Yoast though.
This post is amazing. I launched 2 weeks ago and I’m so glad I found you early in the game. Thank you!
Hi Glen,
GREAT stuff! I’m just getting my blog up & running & you have some incredibly helpful posts on your blog, thanks!
I use the no-follow tag like crazy. Should I stop doing so altogether? Or should I use it as I am doing now. Every post page by me has at least five to six no-followed links. Is it good from SEO viewpoint?
I have just started to write in one blog since one or two months which is made using wordpress. I just read your articles and found it very useful for me in the sense of SEO purpose. I am really feeling nice to read this article about WORDPRESS SEO. Thanx for providing such useful articles….
Thanks for the great information….
Hi Glen,
Nice article! I read this post twice since I don’t have good idea about SEO. Still meta keywords have any influence in PR?
Thanking you.
Not really, no.
This is really good information – thanks!
Am going to implement them soon…
I can apply these techniques with other (non wordpress) websites as well ?
Where relevant, yes
This is the best resource I have ever seen on SEO, can’t wait to implement these tips.
Hi Glenn!
Nice tips you presented here!
I usually also connect sites to Google+ and Google Maps, but even I learned a few new things here
Hi Glen … I really enjoy reading this post, Thank you.
Hey Glen,
Great Stuff once again. I really enjoy your content. I have a bunch of friends who ask me where to find marketing information and i always recommend viperchill!
thanks again
At least a year on and I’m still looking at this article for advice, talk about evergreen Glen!
Hi Glen,
Do you think Breadcrumbs in wordpress is useful for SEO?
If yes, should we add rel=nofollow in the breadcrumbs links?
Thank you for your reply.
Leo
Thanks for sharing your WordPress SEO setup information, though i have to see if it works for me or Not
How to disable comments on pages in wp??
Mahendra, if you haven’t found your answer yet try this;
http://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments/
Great tips, already do most of them but there are a few that I don’t so will try and see what the results are like.
This is an amazing list of SEO information. It doesn’t matter how much you know, there is always SO much more to learn! There are definitely a couple of tips here that I need to be implementing so I will be getting straight onto it.
Thanks for the article, it is very helpful !
I was looking on how to link website and http://www.website together on the web but haven’t find it. Now I did.
Lately I’ve been going on an “SEO binge” and reading every article out there about it. I appreciate you writing one specifically for wordpress. It’s statistics are lacking and it does not hook up to Google Analytics like my other blog does. So this is a nice way to find out how to be pre-emptive and make my site as SEO friendly as possible! Much appreciated.
Very good article. I am a new follower!
Thanks for the info. Now I have a blueprint to set up my current WP sites.
Great post again Glen!
I’m quite new with blogging and your products and posts have been great help to me.
I’m so thankful what you had written here in VC!
thanks sir for sharing this great article
i am really very happy after reading
Very good stuff regarding wordpress seo, The links and resources posted by you in the blog are very useful and informative. Thanks for sharing, Carry on with good continuation.
Hey Glen,
Only just found your blog through Becker and glad I did.
Only thing is I’m not gonna get any work done for a while as there’s so much awesome stuff on here to read.
Cheers.
Really good clear article. Nice touch including the extra recommendations to follow. More research for me. Thanks
Great post. I’m new to WordPress. Will refer to your tips as I build out my site!
I build a WordPress sites with use of this information. It’s help me lot. Thanks for sharing such awesome info with us.
Great article and it forms a very nice checklist for the websites we build in WordPress. Thank you!
Wow, this is such an in-depth post on SEO. Glen, you have such a great passion for SEO.
Thanks for an amazing post as usual Viperchill.
This article is amazing, It explains each and every point. I really liked the whole book and especially wordpress feed part.
I leave a comment each time I like a post on a site or I have something to valuable to
I actually do
And, if you are posting at additional
contribute to the conversation. It is triggered by the passion communicated in the article I read.
And after this post WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need.
I was excited enough to create a thought
have 2 questions for you if you don’t mind. Is it only me or does it give the impression like some of the remarks come across like left by
brain dead individuals?
online sites, I’d like to keep up with everything fresh you have to post.
Would you make a list every one of all your shared sites like
your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
After reading this post know i understand the importance of Alt Tag,before i ignored the Alt tag.Thanks Viperchilli for useful post
Hi, I am from Argentina sorry my english us very bad. Questions… all this information that looks great, this updated 2014?
Hye Glen,
Thank you so much to share your tips.This is an extremely insightful post. This makes me feel pensive and I like that. You know it is very helpful to everyone in SEO.
Great tips. I will be suing this for all my WordPress designs and will be using the SEO tips on all of them.
Great Article. This is Really Nice and helpful Post. Thanks for Sharing with us.
Thanks for the tips, I’ve been looking to improve our SEO and hope by applying some of these will eventually improve our rankings.
This is Really Nice and valuable Post. i am Hardly Recommended This Post as a New Blogger. Thank you for Sharing With us.
Waou it is soo great thank you a lot for everything,the info is useful,i should start doing it too…gracias!!!
Thanks i for the tips!!I just plain love what you are doing thanks
I like it when individuals come together and share views.
Great blog, stick with it!
This is Really Awesome Article. I Learned Many Important Thing about WordPress SEO from This Post. Thanks you So much for Sharing with us.
I liked this article, but what’s up with your recommendation to Sebastian? You should probably take that down.
Hi Glen,
I have learnt a new new thing from your post of using No follow tag to the Read More links which is passing unnecessary link juice to the same page. Thanks for the information.
I have used the “All-in-One SEO Plugin” on WordPress. I also have the experience with the SEO Plugin by Yoast.
Personally, I feel the Yoast is a bit ahead of the All-in-One SEO pack. Nevertheless, the latter isn’t bad at all.
I like SEO Plugin by Yoast a lot !
Very good article Glen, thank you very mutch.
Hi!
Thanks for your blog. I installed the WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk plug-in for my client’s site listed above, but even though we’ve adhered to the instructions and have registered the site with with Google, Bing and Yahoo along with a myriad of others, the site isn’t appearing in the results pages when the main keyword phrase “northern california labrador rescue” is entered. Any suggestions?
Thanks for your help!
Your title tag is way too long, for starters.
Have you been focusing on link building?
Just leaving a comment to clarify that I have updated the post
Thanks for the descriptive post, Glen.
I have been using WordPress SEO by Joost,. do you also have a ready reckoner wrt recommended settings for the plugin? Thanks!
Thank you Glen for this nice and useful post! It’s been very helpful, I’m going to use this and your other suggestion, and also share it with my audience, but considering the time that has passed since it was published, would you suggest some other plugins or tools for WordPress SEO? Thank you!
Thank you vey much Glen.Its very useful for me to improve.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks for the insight here. I use YOAST SEO and I’ve been very happy with it so far. Are you aware of any limitations with it or how it compares in general to All-in-One?
Nope. Yoast is as good as they get!
Hi Glen,
I read this post some months ago and still consider it the best guide to SEO techniques. I appreciate this free information that lets me be focused on what is important for ranking in Google.
Thanks a lot and all the best
Pablo
Thanks Pablo!
Dear Glen,
Viperchilli is one of my favorite informative source for my blogging career. This WordPress SEO article is very good. Nofollow for Read more links and 301 redirection is very important. I got detailed information from your article. Thank you so much for this sharing.
Regards
Satish Kumar Ithamsetty
I made a huge mistake. I wanted to put my title post before the blog name. I did it and it worked for some post, not for all. Trying to fix it now I have several lines in the Template-edit HTML area with the “title” word, so now, the easy “find the code and replace with” is not possible for me. How can I make all my post title’s to go before the blog name? and remember I don’t know anything about coding so I may not know what to look there.
Simple, easy to read, easy to understand, interesting! I am a nerd when it comes to SEO but I learned pretty quickly on Viperchill
Wow, I knew about specifying our preference for www or non-www through Google Webmaster Tools but I didn’t know we needed a 301 redirect.. thanks so much for putting together and updating this guide!
Nice article to for beginners
Glenn,
Nice post. but can you suggest a way to link building effectively. as i feel down when my links add no value to my seo efforts. I am going down when i put efforts and it is kind of 50 percent work in it.