SEO Guidelines

Most of the following suggestions are taken from Mihaela Licas eBook The SEO Book for WordPress 2.5 Blogs which gives you an excellent heads-up on which things to consider when you want your blog to play nice with todays search engines.

As a general thing, it should be pointed out that when a search engine bot visits the site, it can be compared to when a blind user visits a page and tries to make sense of the content. So, first and foremost, it is important to keep a semantic structure of the content, using h1-h6 tags for headings, p for paragraphs etc. Of similar importance is the depth of the page, most pages should be reachable in 4 clicks or less.

On-Page measures

This section covers measurements you can take to improve your SEO score that relate to changing content in the actual HTML which gets rendered in the browser.

Page Title in title element

This refers to the title displayed by the browser on the upper left corner of the browser window (or in the center, depending on which OS you are using). This tag is what Google and other search engines index in their results to link to your website. As this is the first thing a user sees from your website (the title in the list of search results) this is your only chance to encourage a search engine click on the result pointing to your website. By default WordPress shows a page title as Post Title: Name of the blog. The Page Title should not be identical with the title of your blog entry.

Guidelines for writing good page titles:

  • Do not stuff your page title with keywords
  • Do not write page titles that are longer than 67 characters (including spaces). You can, but 67 is the maximum number of characters Google will index and if your page title is longer it will appear truncated in the search results. Yahoo! is more tolerant (about 76 characters).
  • Write appealing page titles that summarize the content of the page.
  • Use simple language and try to give a logical meaning to what you write: a natural flow of the language, even when you use keywords

Installing the All in One SEO Pack WordPress plugin makes it easy to write custom page titles, blog titles, meta description and meta keywords individually for each page.

A brand name should come first in the Page Title only on the front page, but at the end on all other pages. Example (on the homepage):

klauskomenda.com

On a sub-page:

Module Pattern vs. Custom Objects « klauskomenda.com

Meta Description

The 156 description that uses your main keywords and convinces the search engine surfer that your website is worth a visit. A good description will appeal to surfers, making them click on your link, perhaps even bypassing the higher ranked search results in favor of yours.

The meta description tag needs to be page specific. Use a different one for every page of your site.
Do not stuff it with keywords. DO use your main keywords as they occur naturally in the flow of the text. If they index it, they’re not ignoring it. So the meta description tag does matter for search engines, so use it.

Meta Keywords

Keywords were very popular with search engines in the mid nineties, but after being abused by webmasters and stuff with keywords that did not relate to the site at all, it more or less lost its importance altogether. It can still be used for semantic purposes, reading out that contents could be used to cross-reference to keywords from one page to another. If you want to use that meta element, use an online keyword (term) extractor.

Your content, the stuff you write

Use the Inverted pyramid style to write with SEO in mind. The inverted pyramid style is a broadly practiced journalistic style: start with the conclusion to capture the attention of the readers. This is more a summary of the news and acts like a teaser.

Make sure that the first paragraphs of your blog entries are keyword rich and relevant to the content of the page.

You should be careful with the keyword density: if you use too many keywords, it might look like spamdexing and Google might penalize your site by not giving it the deserved SE rankings.

Write for your readers: use keywords as they occur naturally and you’ll be safe.

Give your article a title and make sure it’s coded between the proper h1-tags on the homepage, the title of the blog should be h1, but not on any other page.

From an SEO perspective it is highly recommended that you include the most important keyword phrase of your page in the article headline. if that does not work, just write a title that inspires people to read your article instead.

Avoid duplicate content penalty

Don’t copy content from other sites. It is unethical and Google penalizes duplicate content.

Use the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer to determine the emotional marketing value (EMV) of your Headline.

Off-Page measures

WordPress installation

WordPress should be installed to

www.domain.com or www.subdomain.domain.com

not

www.domain.com/wordpress/

Optimizing Permalinks

By all means avoid having URLs like this for content on your site:

http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123

This URL is meaningless from an SEO point of view, because there are no keywords in the URL that would convey a message to the user of what is behind that URL.

So it should be something like:

http://www.yourblog.com/%postname%

The reasoning behind this is actually more social related than to the behaviour of search engine bots. When a user sees a meaningful URL displayed below next to the tite in a list of search results, it is more likely that he or she will click on that result, as opposed to a result that contains a lot of obscure parameters in the URL. The search engine bot does not care if the URL contains mostly numbers or characters and also the significance of matching keywords in the URL with the actualy content of the site is very little to non-existent.

So good and meaningful URLs help the actual user, not the search bot.

Folder/leaf structure

The structure of a website can often be represented in an org-chart, consisting of the homepage at the top and then drilling down to the various sections, e.g. “About”, “Contact”, “Portfolio” etc. A good URL represents that structure. This means that a section within your site can be seen as some sort of folder, holding other documents/pages. This should be indicated in the URL like:

http://www.example.com/portfolio/

So-called “leaf”-pages, i.e. the pages that represent an item within that folder, should have a URL similar to this:

http://www.example.com/portfolio/normalised-page-name.html

When doing sorting on a page, this should again be represented in the URL. Examples:

http://www.example.com/news/most-recent.html

Pagination

  • First page should be like /category/sort.html, e.g. /news/most-recent.html
  • nth page should be like /category/sort-n.html, e.g. /news/most-recent-2.html
  • Clicking on link back to first page SHOULD NOT BE /category/sort-1.html

Search

When providing search functionality on your site, the word “search” should not be used in the URL, as search engines tend to not spider those pages. Use query strings instead, like:

/?q=search-terms&page=n

Again, watch out for first page – no &page=1!

Length of title and subsequently the title displayed in the URL

There are special situations when the search engines will penalize a blog entry for when the title is too long. Write a different post slug instead (in WordPress). This will allow you to have a long title for your entry and a shorter URL.

  • It also avoids spamdexing penalty since you don’t repeat the exact same keywords in both the page title and the URL
  • It provides search engines with relevant information of what your post is all about
  • It reduces the risk of URL wrapping when sent in email
  • Short URLs are easier to write down and remember

robots.txt

You can use a file called robots.txt to avoid indexing of pages you don’t want to have indexed. It should be put in the main root directory as robots.txt.

Creating Sitemaps

Sitemaps are particularly useful because they give valuable information to the search engine spiders on how often to scan your site, which pages are more important, which have a lower priority and so on.

The advantage of using Sitemaps is that you are able to view reports on crawl results and statistics. You’ll also see the most used search queries to find your site and the search queries that get the most clicks.

A plugin can help you create those Sitemaps, which should then be submitted to Google or Yahoo!.

Optimizing Images

Mihaela gives an in-depth explanation as to why you should even consider optimizing your images for SEO. Her most important points to remember are:

  • use keywords in the image file names
  • do not unite the keywords but separate them with dashes, not underscores
  • include keywords in the image ALT attributes
  • place the image in the immediate vicinity of keyword-related content
  • keep the number of unnecessary images per page as low as possible (unless you are displaying a photo gallery or product search results)

Pinging

Each time you publish new content on your blog, WordPress notifies ping servers about the updates, if they are defined. You can go to Dashboard > Settings > Writing to define these servers in the textarea headlined with “Update Services”. Insert in this box, one per line, each ping server you want to notify, with a big list to be found at wikipedia.org.

Another solution would be to use the services provided by Autopinger. This is free and quite flexible. You can either become a member and sign up for an automatic Ping Me button or submit your site manually.
You need to use such services because you need the Web to know when something happens on your blog. This has a lot to do with both SEO and SMO (social media optimization) as some of these servers index your news and provide for valuable links.

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