WordPress is a well optimized system, and it’s probably the best CMS package out there, not only in terms of its publishing capabilities, but also in the ability to help you rank on search engines.

Although WordPress is a great product and the default settings are pretty good, there are certain things you must do in order to help you rank better in Google and other search engines.

Note: The settings, options, and screenshots shown in this post will be based on WordPress 3.2, but many of the ideas and principals should match older (or newer) versions of WordPress.

Permalinks & Meta Tags

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks For Better SEO

The first think you need to think about whenever you start a new WordPress website is the permalink structure. A permalink is simply the URL to a specific page or blog post in your website.

Whenever I start a new WordPress site the very first thing I do is change the permalink structure. I recommend that you start in the same place. The Permalinks Setting can be found under Settings => Permalinks.

By default your permalinks are set to show by id number, which is not “friendly” to human users or search engines.

These URLs end up looking something like this: http://marketingunfolded.com/?p=123.

Search engines read your permalinks, and use the information found in them to better understand what your page or post is about.

I prefer to use the title of the post as the default permalink. You can change this in the permalink common settings by clicking on the “Custom Structure” radial button. In the corresponding text box you must enter /%postname%/. Using this will give you a nice keyword rich URL that search engines love.

Permalinks using the title of your post end up looking like this:
http://marketingunfolded.com/seo-for-internet-marketers.

Another option that you might consider is the /category/post-name/ structure. This setting gives you a URL that contains the category name, then the name of the post.

To do this change the “Custom Structure” to /%category%/%postname%/.

I prefer not to do this since your URLs can get pretty long, and I like to keep them as short as possible, but I have seen many people do it.

Having these “friendlier” URLs will also help when some users decide to link to your page using the URL as the anchor text. So if your URL contains related keywords words in the URL, then this will help users and search engines understand what the page is about more than an ID or oddly named URL would.

Keep in mind that the URL to your page or post is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the document’s title and description, usually in green. Like the title and description, words in the URL on the search result appear in bold if they appear in the user’s search query.

WordPress Meta Tags & Alt Tags

Optimize your Titles Tags for SEO

A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page or post is. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.

By default, WordPress uses your “Blog title » Blog Archive » Post Title” for the title of your page or post. You really should consider changing this. Search engines put more weight on the first words of title tags. For better results you should consider adding more relevant keywords first.

Your title tags appear in 3 places, in the search results, in the user’s browser tabs, and in the bookmarks a user creates on their browser. On a Google search result, the title tag is the same as the blue link on the search results page.

I highly recommend changing the title tags of all you pages and post to reflect the keywords that you are trying to rank for. If you use the Thesis Theme this is a piece of cake. When writing or editing a post, Under “SEO Details and Additional Style” you can not only set your custom title tag, but you can set your Meta description and your Meta keywords as well. This way you can make sure your WordPress titles are actually helping your SEO.

If you do not have the Thesis Theme then you can install a plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast. Actually the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin gives you a lot more features for your SEO needs.

When writing your title tags make sure you avoid choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page, also avoid using default or vague titles like “Untitled” or “New Page”.

Optimize Your Meta Descriptions

Your Meta description is not only one of the first things search engines look through when a user makes a query, but it is also one of the first things users read before they click on a link.

Usually the Meta description gets auto-generated by the search engine using a sentence of your page or a post, and it bolds the keywords used in the query. This might not be the best option for all of your pages.

For best results it is recommended that you write your own description, so that you make sure all your keywords that you are trying to rank for are included in your Meta description, and you write an engaging description that makes people want to click onto your page.

The Thesis Theme offers an easy solution to this, you just enter your desired description in the “Meta Description” under “SEO Details and Additional Style” text box and you’re done! (I love Thesis)

You could do the same with WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.

WordPress Image Optimization

Something extremely simple that can make big differences in SEO is the name of your image files. Instead of uploading an image named “image01.jpg”, name it something relevant, something that has keywords you want to target, keywords that are short but descriptive. Something like “wordpress-seo-settings.jpg”.

Another important part of WordPress SEO for internet marketers that is often disregarded is the alt tag on images. By writing good alt tags for your post images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a lot of extra traffic from image search engines.

Alt tags are basically a description that you give an image, this description is read by search engines and disabled people who might visit your site using a screen reader. This screen reader will read to them the alt tag of an image, helping them understand what the image is about.

Adding alt tags is simple, when you add an image to your post or page you can set your alt tag (alternate text), and the title of your image:

The “title” of your image shows up as a speech bauble when you hover over an image (hover over the image above to see it in action). It is recommended that you always add an alt tag, and add title tags if the image is also a link to another page. This will help search engines know what the link is about, while alt tags will describe the image.

There is a plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, which can automatically add the title of the post or page to the image’s alt and title tag if you want to save some time, but I would recommend that you do it by hand for better results.

WordPress Post & Page SEO Optimization

Understanding & Optimizing Headline tags

Heading tags (not to be confused with the title tag) are used to present structure on the page or post to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with h1, for most important, and ending with h6 as the least important. (I have rarely used h5 or h6, but they are there in case you need them)

Heading tags usually make the text they contain larger, this becomes a visual cue to users that this text is important and could help them understand something about your content. However you should not use headline tags as a way to emphasize or decorate the text in your content, CSS is much better for that.

Using multiple heading sizes in order to create a hierarchical structure for your content makes it easier for users and search engines to navigate, and understand what your page is all about.

It is recommended that you only have one h1 tag on any given page. This is usually reserved for website name on your home page, and your post or page title on all the other pages.

Search engines give the words used in the various headings more weight in determining the topic of a page. The keyword or phrase that you are trying to rank for should appear at least once in an h1 tag, and related keywords should be used in the other headings.

When you are writing your content, think of it as if you were creating an outline. Put a lot of thought into what your main points are and use that to decide where to use heading tags appropriately.

Usage of H tags:

H1 = Page or Post Title
H2 = Section Heading
H3 = Paragraph Heading
H4 – H6 = more subheading

If your theme is not showing an H1 tag for your post or page’s title then you will have to edit that through the theme’s post.php and page.php files. You don’t have to worry about this if you are a Thesis Theme user.

Optimize the “Read More” Link

Using a keyword rich “read more” link will give you an added bonus to your in-page SEO. Usually you add “read more” tags by clicking on the “read more” button on your editor’s tool box. If you switch over to the HTML view of the editor you will see that WordPress inserted the “read more” code, which looks like this <!--more --> . If you add a phrase inside of it, you will be able to have a keyword rich “read more” link.

For example adding <!--more Learn more about SEO--> will create a “read more” link that reads: “Learn more about SEO”

If you use the Thesis Theme then you do not have to worry about coding this by hand, Thesis already has a build in “read more” text box in which you can just simply type your desired keywords into it as you create the page or post.

This option in the Thesis Theme is located in the create/edit post page under “SEO Details and Additional Style”

If you do not have the Thesis Theme, and you don’t want to manually code the “read more” tag every time, you can download a plugin called HeadSpace which will, among other things, allow you to replace the default “read more” link with something meaningful. But I would rather stay away from plugins, especially if you can use a feature built into your framework, like you can with Thesis Theme.

Breadcrumbs

The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors find the content they want quickly and effectively. Good navigation can also help search engines understand what content is important.

To help the navigation of websites, people often use “breadcrumbs“. Breadcrumbs are links that are usually above the title of the post or page they look like something like this:

You should always try to link your breadcrumbs to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If you are a Thesis Theme user, you can get a small piece of code from DIY Themes that will create some amazing breadcrumbs for you. This is what I use on this site.

If you are not a Thesis Theme user, and you want to use a plugin for breadcrumbs I recommend using WordPress SEO by Yoast, which also adds breadcrumbs to your site.

Pagination

Another great way of helping your users and search engines find your content more quickly and effectively is to use “pagination“. Pagination replaces the “previous page” links from your WordPress site with a numbered links to the previous pages.

Having a home page or category page with pagination will assure you that you will have a page that robots can crawl with ease. If you only have a “next page”, or “previous page” link, robots might not crawl posts buried 10 pages deep.

If you add pagination you can have links to all your pages from your homepage or category page, making it easy for the robots to crawl your site without any trouble.

As with almost everything else adding pagination to your Thesis Theme is very easy. Check Out Art of Blog’s Video tutorial on adding pagination to your Thesis Theme.

If you would rather use a plugin you can download WP-Paginate to add pagination to your WordPress site.

Related Posts

Another way to link to relative content is by linking to your old related posts. This will not only help your visitors find content that they will be interested in, but it will make it easy for search engines to get to your older content.

If you have the Thesis Theme you can check out this tutorial by Kunal C from SearchTechWorld that explains how to add related posts with thumbnails, which is what I currently use on this site.

If you don’t have Thesis, or you just want to download and install a plugin, then I would recommend Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Advanced WordPress SEO Techniques

Avoiding Duplicate Content

One of the few drawbacks WordPress has when it comes to SEO is that by default WordPress creates a lot of unnecessary duplicate content. Search engines really don’t like duplicate content and WordPress loves to create it with its out-of-the-box default settings.

WordPress creates archive pages for each author, category, tag, and date, resulting in a lot of duplicate content. This basically means that a single post can appear in up to as 4 pages besides its own single post page.

You can solve this problem by allowing robots to “spider” the page but not index it.

If you have the Thesis Theme you can easily change the following settings to “noindex“. The “noindex” options are under the Thesis Theme’s Options under “Site Options” > “Robots Meta Tags”>

If you don’t have thesis you can use WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin to add the no index tags to your archive pages.

Having archives set to noindex means that search engines will follow your links but will don’t display your noindex archives on the search results.

Some people prefer not to do this and solve the issue by having only excerpts of your post on these pages. I actually do both, I like how the excerpts look, but you can do one or the other to avoid duplicate content.

Have a useful 404 page

A 404 page is the page that a user gets sent to when they try go to a page that doesn’t exist on your site, because they either followed a broken link or they accidentally typed the wrong URL. By having a custom 404 page that guides visitors back to a working page on your site you can greatly improve your user’s experience. Your 404 page should have a link back to your homepage and you could also provide links to popular posts or pages on your site. I’ve done this to my 404 page by adding helpful links and even a search bar, If you have the Thesis Theme then you can check out my post on easily creating custom 404 pages with Thesis.

Offsite WrodPress SEO

Everything we’ve discussed up to this point is considered ”onsite SEO“, Which is basically the SEO efforts you do as the webmaster of your site. This includes having all the proper setting and tags that make it easy for search engines to crawl your site, and find out exactly what each page is about. Some consider this the “easy part” of SEO.

The second part of SEO is a bit more complicated in the sense that you now depend on others to help with your SEO efforts. The biggest part of “offsite SEO” is to get other high ranking websites to link to you using “anchor text” that describes your website with the keywords you are trying to rank for.

Finding Back Links to Point To Your Site

Getting other website to point to you is the absolute number one way to rank high on search engines. The websites that link to you will determine how high you rank, and what your will rank for. Unfortunately not every link is valued the same; when it comes to building links there are still a few rules of thumb. One link from a high quality site is worth hundreds from a poor site.

Good links don’t come cheap. You can get a Fiverr and someone will provide you with thousands of forum profile backlinks, or other low quality links. But these links won’t help you much, especially if you are trying to rank for tough niches.

Blog spam links are also pretty much pointless these days; the Google Panda update is making sure techniques like this don’t work quite as well anymore.

The best links are the ones that people give freely based on the valuable content that you provide them. Focusing on creating quality content and marketing it will help others to link to you.

There are some places where you can post content and receive some good backlinks. You can try doing some of the following to get started on building your backlinks:

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to not only get quality back links but traffic as well! Guest blogging basically means that you write a blog post for another website, and in return they give you exposure to their readers which results in traffic to your website, and a link back to your website.

Finding places to guest blog might not be as hard as it seems, most people love it when people offer to post content for them, it saves the bloggers the time to write new posts. I actually offer guest blogging spots, but you have to meet my level of quality to be featured as a guest blogger.

I recommend that you find the biggest blogs in your niche and read through their contact information to see if they allow guest blogging. If you do not see anything about guest blogging send them an email, the worst that could happen is that they simply will say “no”.

Web 2.0 Properties

Hubpages and Squidoo are web 2.0 properties that allow you to post content and allow you to place backlinks to your site. They do have limitations on the number of links you can place and where they point to, but they should be a good place to start. The websites get a lot of view make it possible for your content to get viewed by a lot of people if you write something truly valuable. Up until recently, the webpages on these sites ranked in the first page of Google for many search terms, but the new Panda Update pushed a lot of these back.

Forum and Blog Commenting

Forum profile links, and spam blog commenting might not be your best backlinking strategy. But actively participating in various related to your niche can help bring traffic and backlinks to your website. If you provide value to the conversation that is being had by other members, then you can be assured that people will click and share your link to others.

You should properly read the blog and add something valuable to it. Apart from the back links, you will also get an opportunity to share and know valuable information related to your domain knowledge on various forum sites and blog websites.

Deep Link Building

To rank high on a search engine you need more than a bunch of links pointing to your home page. You will need some “deep links” which are backlinks to your site which point to a page other than your home page.

Many people make the mistake to only focusing their backlinking efforts to their homepage. A much better SEO strategy is to build relevant backlinks from high authority sites which target related pages of your site.

Conclusions

As you might imagine, this is just the tip of the iceberg when you’re talking about SEO, but if you follow the techniques used in this article you will without a doubt rank higher in search engines.

I would love to hear you thoughts and comments, please leave them below and don’t forget to share this article with your friends!