WordPress software comes
ready to embrace search engines. Its features and
functions guide a search engine through the posts,
pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl
your site and gather the information it needs to include
your site within its database.
WordPress comes with several built in search optimization
tools, including the ability to use .htaccess to create
apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling,
and pinging. There are also a number of third party
plugins and hacks which can be used for search engine
optimization (SEO).
However, after tweaking WordPress to your likings,
you may find yourself dragging in search engine rankings.
WordPress isn’t exactly the most SEO application
out of the box, either.
Here are some basic guidelines to ensure your WordPress
blog is search engine optimized.
Good, Clean Code
Make sure your site's code validates. Errors in your
code may prevent a search engine from moving through
the site successfully.
Content Talks
Search engines can't see a site. They can only read
a site. Pretty does not talk to a search engine. What
talks to a search engine are the words, the content,
the material in your site that explains, shares, informs,
educates, and babbles. Make sure you have quality
word content for a search engine to examine and compare
with all the parts and pieces to give you a good score.
Write Your Content with Searchers in Mind
How do you find information on the Internet? If you
are writing something that you want to be found on
the Internet, think about the words and phrases someone
would use to find your information. Use them more
than once as you write, but not in every sentence.
Learn how search engines scan your content, evaluate
it, and categorize it so you can help yourself get
in good favor with search engines.
Content First
A search engine enters your site and, for the most
part, ignores the styles and CSS. It just plows through
the site gathering content and information. Most WordPress
Themes are designed with the content as close to the
top of the unstyled page as possible, keeping sidebars
and footers towards the bottom. Few search engines
scan more than the first third of the page before
moving on. Make sure your Theme puts the content near
the top.
Keywords, Links, and Titles Meet Content
Search engines do not evaluate your site on how pretty
it is, but they do evaluate the words and put them
through a sifter, giving credit to certain words and
combinations of words. Words found within your meta
tag keywords listings and within your document are
compared to words found within your links and titles.
The more that match, the better your score.
Content in Links and Images
Your site may not have much text, mostly photographs
and links, but you have places in which to add textual
content. Search engines look for alt and title in
link and image tags. While these have a bigger purpose
of making your site more accessible, having good descriptions
and words in these attributes helps provide more content
for search engines to digest.
Link
Popularity
It is not how good your site is, it is how good the
sites are that link to you. This still holds weight
with search engine favoritism. It's about who links
to you. Blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks are all
built into WordPress. These help you link to other
people, which gives them credit, but it also helps
them link to you, connecting the links. The number
of incoming links your site has that have been recognized
by Google can be checked by typing link:www.yoursite.com
into Google (other search engines have similar functions).
Other ways to generate incomming links to your site
include:
• Add your site's url to your signature on forum
posts on other sites.
• Submit your site to directories (see below).
• Note: Leaving comments on blogs will not help
with this, since all modern blogging tools use the
rel=nofollow attribute. Don't be a comment spammer.
Good Navigation Links
A search engine crawls through your site, moving from
page to page. Good navigational links to the categories,
archives, and various pages on your site will invite
a search engine to move gracefully from one page to
another, following the connecting links and visiting
most of your site.
Stay Connected
Besides building backlinks, it's important to build
actual connections with other bloggers and readers.
Post regularly on other sites and get to know the
people at the top of your genre. Stay up to date with
the latest WordPress SEO techniques with Ontora
Web Marketing.
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