WordPress is the most popular CMS in the open source market today. We hear talk about it all the time in news blogs and social media feeds. It’s powering many popular digital magazines such as Joystiq and Engadget.
Out-of-the-box functionality is activated to allow for articles to display clean URLs and ping remote servers for crawling. There are a few structures which aren’t often covered for proper WordPress SEO that I’ve detailed below.
Correct Type Formatting in your Theme
WordPress offers countless free themes for download and many designers give their creations away for free, too. With so many resources it’s no wonder nobody bothers to create unique themes for their blogs anymore. Customizations are easy enough and page layout can really affect how your blog performs in the rankings.
Google checks blog posts when crawling to see how headers are influencing page content. You always want to keep track and set up each heading accordingly.
The top heading for your story should be set with an
h1 style and placed towards the top of the page. Obviously Google will understand the hierarchy set between the deeper headings (h2, h3…). Using formatting tags such as strong and em will help Google pick out related or important keywords from your body text.
Optimize Images for Accessibility
WordPress is all about accessibility and prefers to run in all systems evenly. There has even been a few WP mobile themes being released for free.
One great SEO requirement is the addition of title and alt attributes to all images on the page. When Google’s bots crawl through content they are unable to detect what an image represents unless the filename hints at anything. The better way to accomplish this would be setting title and alt attributes in place of speculation.
Google Images is heavily indexed based on alt and title attributes. Be as descriptive as you need. Google will not penalize you for using too many words unless you stuff your alt/title attribs with useless junk keywords. And even in that scenario you may still get picked up by Bing/Yahoo! and see some interest.
Another way of attributing values to images is through IDs. Classes and IDs are mostly used to connect objects in HTML DOM with CSS selectors. Google takes note of these and over time may use this information to your advantage. For example if you give an image the ID “featured-post” robots may perceive this content to relate more to the full post and generate its ranking higher among search terms.
Fix your default 404 Page
How many times I have visited a page running WordPress and found no 404 replacement I can’t even count. This is a nuance not only to users but bots trying to crawl your page. Good SEO Analysts understand how important a 404 error report is on any website.
When Google finds a page which isn’t existent anymore it must understand this to mark the query as dead in its database. This makes it so when users search for keywords relating to that page it won’t rank higher in SERPS than live websites. 404 error pages can direct users with links elsewhere (home page, searches, etc) but don’t truly help otherwise.
This can all seem a bit confusing, but luckily WordPress has things taken care of. Check their extended Plugins library for useful links and downloads. A particularly helpful setup is 404 SEO Plugin which will display a custom 404 error to bots and similar crawlers while also displaying helpful links to real visitors.
Build a Google-Sensitive Sitemap.xml
Google will always look for a sitemap.xml file in the root directory of your WordPress installation. This is a standard XML file containing nodes to hold data about each of your pages and their structure. Google can trace hierarchy, titles, and URLs for all of your blogs pages.
Generally Google will crawl these every so often based on how frequently a website updates. Google won’t crawl your RSS feed or other syndication method unless it contains new information. Sitemaps have been around for years but have caught the attention of web enthusiasts early on.
Another great plugin free by WordPress is Simple Google Sitemap XML. This plugin will parse all of your blogs’ current pages and generate a dynamic sitemap.xml file in your root directory. The real ease of this plugin comes with the auto-update functionality.
As you create new pages and posts for your blog this plugin will automatically create a new file every time. There are even options for pinging Google and other SE’s for re-crawling.
Backlinks all around
One SEO technique some don’t utilize at all is the power of backlinks. When Google sees links going from articles all pointing at your domain it shows a lot of credibility. Most SEO gurus know these asbacklinks and they can prove vital in your SERPS.
How you rank based on a certain keyword is crucial in showing where your blog will place among competitors. A funny example is through the Google query click here. Adobe Reader and Flash Player take up most of the page results. This is caused by so many backlinks pointing to those pages with the text “click here”.
Linking stories between your own pages on your website helps for Google to catalog a bit more for what your posts are about. As an example creating a link to an older post about web design with the keywords “digital design tips” may cause that article to rise a few ranks for these keywords. This tactic shows the most promise when accomplished on an already widely-acclaimed blog with a good reputation among Search Engines.
Always Use Post Tags
Tags in posts are the easiest way to cram in a few extra keywords before Google gets their bots on it. Posts are controlled not just by the category/categories they are published into but also accompanied tags. With these you can form complex tag clouds and integrate unique structures into your line of posts.
Google can understand these tags by crawling the most popular and widely-used for data about their links. How many posts are filed under any given tag displays a level of credibility to most SE’s. Google will hold a post with the tag “Ajax” to a higher degree if the tag itself has 15 publications instead of 2.
Another useful nugget is how Google ranks tags. Although your blog may be frowned upon for running posts with upwards of 5-6 categories, there is no such limit on blog tags. The best setup would be to place every post into 1 set category and break up smaller ideas into tags. You’ll see a lot more backlinks and your posts will rank higher for selected tag keywords (these can be literally anything).
Hopefully these tips can get you off on the right foot to building a powerful SEO-structured blog. WordPress has truly revolutionized the way we work with websites and allows for so many powerful customizations. I can only expect to see greater rates in the future accompanied by more powerful plugins.
