10 SEO Tips for WordPress – the Basics
Toma 
More and more people run their own blog and many of them use WordPress. That is the reason I decided to put together a small articles with some basic tweaks that you can make to any WordPress theme in order to have an SEO friendly WordPress blog.
You can also use plugins to enhance the functionality of your blog and make it SEO friendly but I prefer to do it myself. This way I keep the modifications to a minimum number – just what I need – and I also maintain control over what I’m doing. You don’t need programming knowledge: I’ll give the code and tell you where to place it. It’s easy and you only need 5 minutes (top) to make it work.
The basics of SEO apply also here
Just like any other website a WordPress website has to have proper titles for its pages, proper metatags, proper anchors and so on. So the basics of SEO also apply to a WordPress theme.
- Watch the titles of your articles. Most WordPress themes will display the title of your article after the title of the blog. This is not good for SEO. So, what you need to do is make a small adjustment. Open your WordPress admin page and go to Theme Editor. Access the file header.php and where you have the tags
<title> … </title>
replace it with
<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(�name�); }
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ‘ – ‘ ; bloginfo(�name�); }
elseif (is_single() )
{ if(get_post_meta($post->ID, “title”, true)) {echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “title”, true));}
else {single_post_title();}}
elseif (is_page() ) { if(get_post_meta($post->ID, “title”, true)) {echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “title”, true));}
else {single_post_title();}}
else { wp_title(��,true); } ?></title>
This piece of code will help your SEO on your blog with two things:- When someone access an article, the browser displays only the title of the article
- You also have the possibility to set another title for a page then the name of that page. Why is this useful: let’s say you have a page “Work With Me”, you don’t want a title like that because in terms of SEO will not get you any benefit. So, you can create a custom field called title and create an interesting title that also targets some real keywords
- Description Metatag and Keywords Metatag. Every article should have unique description metatag and keywords. It doesn’t matter for your rankings but it will matter for readers who will see the description metatag in a search result right under the title. This tweak is done via custom fields that you can add to each of your posts. To take advantage of this, go to the admin page, theme editor and open the file header.php. Use this piece of code so that the information you pass in the custom fields “description” and “keywords” to be taken into account:
<meta content=”<?php echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “description”, true)); ?>”>
<meta content=”<?php echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “keywords”, true)); ?>”>
Remember to use this code as a replacement of the existing one. You don’t want to end up with to definitions for a description metatag, for example. - You need SEO friendly URLs. The standard URL structure from WordPress is not that good for SEO or readers. So, you need a small adjustment. Go to the admin page, Settings > Permalinks and check Month and Name. This way your link structure will look in a descriptive way not only for search engines but for readers too
- Build a tag list based on your keyword list. It is important to use any opportunity you have to target keywords. By building a list of tags based on a keyword list you’ll make sure that:
-
- All your tagging stays consistent
- Articles are grouped under a descriptive tag
- The anchor text for a tag is a keyword that people are really searching for on the web
-
- Build a category list based on your keyword list. Just like in the case of tags, categories are another place where you can use your keywords for better SEO results
- Build a Sitemap. Use a plugin like Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress (http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/) to generate an xml sitemap. It will help your indexing process.
- Add similar posts to the end of each article. Use the similar posts plugin. This way you’ll not only generate a better functionality, but you also determine the search engine bot to crawl other pages of your WordPress blog. It will add relevancy to the source page.
- Use your top landing pages as “engines” for the rest of the blog. An SEO tip for top landing pages is to use them to pass link juice to other pages: link to other related pages from your top landing ones
- DO NOT LINK to another website, from your blog, with the keywords you are trying to rank well for
- Use keywords when setting your WordPress title and tagline. This title will be the title of your main page so, as an SEO tip, you may include your most competitive keywords in it.
Your turn
Here are my SEO tips for WordPress. What would you add to this information? What is your opinion? Share it with us in comments bellow.
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18 Comments to “10 SEO Tips for WordPress – the Basics”
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Great post! I’ve had a lot of demand for WordPress sites lately. This will really help minimize the bloated coding while still optimizing.
Thanks.
Toma,
Nice refreshing suggestions. So how would it affect the code you are suggesting above if you used the All in one seo plugin. Do you still need the plugin or would the two work together. Thanks again.
Kevin
Thank you all for your comments
@Broaddog – I really don’t know if there is some odd interaction with the plugin. I like to use this method because I have control of the code. A plugin might be harder to tweak. My suggestions also refer to things that are not related to plugins, such as tag lists and categories. Bottom line: this is the only thing that I need for my basic technical SEO in a WordPress theme (unique titles, description metatag and keywords metatag). The rest are things that you have to do in each article you write and are no related to any plugin. Thank you for your comment!
Thank you. I was searching for someone to provide simple beginning steps. This is it. Finally. Usually, plugins just don’t provide adequate info to be sure that you have even used the plugin correctly. And, SEO issues are known to be important. I’ll be following your posts just to improve what I do.
Toma
I like the idea of having better control over my blog. I currently use the Al1-In-One-SEO plugin but don’t like some of its features so I’m going to give your suggestions a try.
I’d like to ask a question.
I have trouble placing pictures where I want then to go in my blog. If I place them say top left the text starts beneath the picture not along the side then wrapping below the picture. Do you know how to overcome this?
Best Regards
Woody
@Dan – thank you and I hope I’ll be able to always use useful articles
@Web-Hosting-Woody – thank you for your comment. You have two choices:![]()
tag (should be at the beginning of the article) and add the following code style=”float: left; margin-right: 10px;” The margin-right: 10px; is to have an extra 10 pixels until the text starts
1. after you insert the image, go in the html view of the post. Find the
2. the more elegant way, so that you don’t have to add that code every time is to go into your CSS file, find .postContent img and add the follwoing
.postContent img {
margin: 10px;
border: 3px solid #CCC;
margin-right: 10px;
float: left
}
You’ll also have a border around your image. Hope you find this useful. Let me know if you have other questions.
I like the elegant way but there are about 30 .css files in WP. Can you be specific about which css file?
Thanks for taking the time to help.
BR
“W”
@Web-Hosting-Woody – I’m talking about the main .css file of your current theme. In your case it might be the file style.css from your Vistalicious theme. I can’t be 100% sure but the theme itself doesn’t have too much .css files.
Wow it worked! Thanks very much for the help Toma.
Click on my name to see.
BR
“W”
@Web-Hosting-Woody – really glad I was able to help you.
Good post thanks,
Most say thoght I don’t undrestand the rantionate behind
Pint 9. DO NOT LINK to another website, from your blog, with the keywords you are trying to rank well for
I would say this is a good thing to do?
@DynamoAsh – here is the reason. You are making great efforts to rank well for a certain keyword (you invest time/money, create keyword targeted articles, market those articles, trying to get backlinks). In time your rankings for that keyword improve. This means that the search engines consider your website to be a trusted source and relevant for that keyword. When you link to a competitor of yours with the same keywords you are basically telling the search engines that the trusted/relevant source (your website) is telling everyone that this other website is relevant for the same topic. The effect will be that the other website will rank better and at some point might out rank you because of that. I hope I managed to explain it clearly.
One suggestion I would make is ensure your keyphrase is a category and then change your permalink structure to
%category%%post% as opposed to date and post. That way every URL on your Blog always has one of your keyphrases in.
Take care with the other relevant plug-in because it can take people off your site. For those like me not prepare to muck about with the stylesheet – too many sharp knives there – your suggested tweak can be achieved via the All In One SEO plug-in plus in survives a theme change.
Great post.
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This is swell in terms of google. Nada appears to bother against it than that!This is just what was warned about some years ago at the big hack con about seo in ’95.
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