Wordpress SEO: The Only Guide You Need
Written by Glen, this post has 162 Comments
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.
If you enjoy learning about SEO and want to take your knowledge to the next level, then Sebastian and David are two people I recommend you follow.
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.
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.
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/)
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.
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.
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
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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!
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
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.