Guest article introduction.
Many of us have finally woken up to the fact that search engines usually favor authoritative, original content…well, for the most part. Long past are the days when you could fake your way to the top of results by gaming the system with clever linking and awkward copy jammed with keywords. But still, the most cleverly written, useful blog post can get overlooked without some attention to search engine optimization (SEO). You may even be reading this very blog due to some savvy SEO’ing, because, when we launched this WordPress blog, my partners and I searched for a WordPress SEO consultant to help us. We were delighted to find Brad Spencer - a humble dude who, to the best of my knowledge, understands the new challenges of SEO and happens to be the world’s most skilled WordPress search engine optimization expert. Here are six of his best tips.
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A WordPress SEO philosophy
by Bradley Spencer
The editors of this blog were so enthusiastic about the search engine optimization (SEO) work I did for “Marketing on the Japanese web” that they’ve asked me to write about it here. Over the last couple of years, I’ve developed my own set of changes to a standard WordPress blog that get it higher in search rankings, and therefore, viewed by more people. Even though I’ve SEO’d many blogs, it’s always exciting to see how “Google and the Gang” (my term for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others) can really give better rankings after a few simple tweaks. It’s like magic! But it isn’t magic. It’s just a few surprisingly easy techniques.
First, despite popular belief, WordPress isn’t optimized for search engines right “out-of-the-box.” WordPress is a great blogging platform, a good Content Management System (CMS), and one of the best tools in the SEO’ers or web developer’s toolbox. Plus, it’s free. But, it just doesn’t do SEO that well without some customizations.
Now here’s the good news: WordPress can be easily modified so your blog absolutely dominates your niche, that is — assuming your content is authoritative and relevant to your niche. (If not, maybe you should find another niche.) By making a few quick changes, adding a few plugins and cutting away some of the extra crap — you can reach the people searching for the information you offer. Better yet, you can often end up on Google’s first page, the Holy Grail of search engine placement.
Although I won’t go over the entire step-by-step process required to make all of the changes to WordPress you’ll really want to make (you can find that in WordPress SEO Blueprint), here are some basics to help you develop your blog template.
WordPress Search Engine Optimization: Six tips for success
Know your niche and target key words:
You’ve probably learned in life that you can’t be everything to everyone — and this goes for the Web as well. Before you develop your content, make sure that you understand your niche and understand what words people will search on to find you.
There are some free tools that can help you, such as Keyword Discovery, NicheBot Classic and WordTracker. These free tools analyze a small sample of search data, but even that small sample can show you the exact words people type into search engines. Just type in what you think people might search on and take note of the number that appears by the phrase. Now try some synonyms and alternate phrasings. Again, the free tools analyze a small sample set of search data, so don’t assume that low numbers by your key phrase mean no one is searching on your phrase. Instead look at where different phrases rank relative to each other. Factor in the words used by your competitors or partners. Then, narrow down the right phrase(s) to focus on in the SEO process. Avoid the urge to squash many terms into one place. Focus on just one or a select few — and you (and your readers) will be happier with the results.
Build your content:
The best way to use WordPress, both for usability and for search engine rankings, is to approach it just like other web projects. Build “pages” for your main content. Then regularly add “posts” to support your main content. You never want to put really important content only in your blog, because blogs, by definition, are an ever-changing landscape and great content will quickly disappear as you post new great content. Put the important stuff on a permanent page.
For an example of this, look at my SEO and Web design site at BradleySpencer.com. You’ll see that all of the most important pages are linked to from the sidebar, and if you read the posts, many of them will link to the more important pages within my domain. That’s the way you want to slowly build content, links, and link popularity.
Hacking your themes:
Make sure the search engines know exactly what your page is about. To do this, you’ve got to focus your site around your relevant search terms and make sure your “Title tags” and “Heading tags” are correct. This is going to involve some hacking of the template (in WordPress, templates are called “themes”.)
Warning: If you’re hacking your theme, you’re going to need to know some HTML and PHP. If you’re bright and have a lot of time and interest in this sort of thing, you can jump right in and play around and figure your way around HTML and PHP in a couple of weeks or months. For the remaining 97% of WordPress users, you’ll want to find someone who can do this for you.
Clean out links that aren’t crucial:
Ideally, links should go to your own site OR to high-quality content on another relevant site. Other links aren’t always helpful and could be hurtful. For example, “Blogrolls” are horrible for SEO purposes. I never use them. If you have to link to outside sites that aren’t really in your niche, put them on a separate page, not in a widget column. See how this blog has tucked outside links away on this page: About Marketing on the Japanese web.
The best way to clean up your links is to understand all of the links on your site — and to clean out the outdated, irrelevant and dead links. To do this, go to http://www.dead-links.com/ and run a search on your site. Dead Links is designed to ensure that all of your links are still good, but for our purposes, we just want to look at the list of links they find.
Once you get that list from Dead Links, go over it with a fine-toothed comb and make sure every single link is important and relevant. Naturally, give special attention to links that are actually in your articles – don’t delete things that are relevant just because they go to someone else’s site. Careful outside linking is actually good for SEO. But any link that comes up again and again on many pages, such as with a blogroll widget built into the theme, is a big no-no.
Now that you have compiled a list of unwanted links, you’ll have to go through your site, find them, locate any buried in your theme and delete ‘em.
Avoiding Duplicate Content:
Search engines don’t want to see the same article in many different places — then it looks like syndicated, not-unique content — and the search engines give higher rankings to unique, relevant content. The problem with WordPress is that it’s easy to end up with the same article on a bunch of different pages. You might have it showing on the homepage, on its own single page, in the archives, on a tag page, and on and on. See the problem?
Avoiding duplicate content may push you to look really closely at your particular blog and its goals — and to think differently about how you promote your content. You may need to make tough decisions that go against your marketing instincts to constantly promote your great content everywhere you can. Just trust that with proper SEO’ing, people will find your great content, even if you don’t put it in their face many times. My suggestion for the general WordPress population is always to use the “read more” tag when you write a post. This means that only a few sentences of your post will display on your homepage. This will force the spider to go into the deeper pages to scoop up all the good content, and that’s what you want. This is called “deep indexing.”
Pinging the Right Places:
Google also cares about who you know — and who knows you. If many people are linking to your content, it indicates that it’s relevant and helpful to many people and Google will rank it higher. But you shouldn’t wait for people to find you and link to you. “Pinging” is the automated process of telling any website that receives blog feeds that you wrote something new and you want them to know about it. In the case of the search engines, pinging tells them to crawl and index what you just wrote, so it will show up in Web searches.
You’ll want to ping a lot of places so that your content gets indexed and distributed to more sites and people. The best way to do this is to update your pinging services within WordPress. All you have to do is replace the default list with the list you find here:
http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/11/21/a-list-of-rpc-and-rpc2-to-ping/
[Ed. note: 2004?? Is this outdated information? If so, the reader is advised to find similar, more recent lists]
Conclusion:
These are some of the most important WordPress search engine optimization tactics that you can use to help Google and the Gang know what your blog is all about. Want to know more? As I mentioned, I’ve written a step-by-step guide to installing plugins and how to optimize your blog. Check out my ebook here — it’s called the WordPress SEO Blueprint.
May each and every one of you enjoy the blogging ride and may the major search engines smile on your most authoritative, relevant writing.
All the Best, Brad
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Further reading on WordPress SEO
WordPress.com Subdomain Spam With Tags?
Maximum SEO with Wordpress h1 header tags
Wordpress SEO and Google Adsense
Bloggers on WP - Upgrade to the new version Wordpress 2.5.1
Managing Web Content With SEO Copy Writing!
5 Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress
Professional WordPress and SEO service
SEO for WordPress Blogs White Paper
Life is Too Short for SEO Optimization
WordPress 2.5: Changing Saved Page Slugs
WordPress SEO and Blog Marketing
Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips
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About the author
- Bradley Spencer is an internet marketing consultant in Columbus, Ohio and author of WordPress SEO Blueprint. He’s also knowledgeable about recreational vehicles, the enneagram, and who knows what else.
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