How to Improve Wordpress SEO in 3 Steps

Wordpress blogs make for excellent content management systems (CMSs), and they make excellent starting points for a wide variety of websites today. They are super easy to setup, easy to maintain, and fairly easy to optimize for search engines. However, while optimizing a Wordpress blog is relatively easy — it’s amazing how many people overlook some of the most powerful SEO elements while they are setting up the blog, and even while they are creating new posts.

I want to take a few minutes today to go over 3 areas where you can improve the search-engine friendliness, if you will, of your Wordpress blog. Even if you have seo-friendly permalinks in place, which this short guide assumes you are using anyway, you’re still missing out on a lot of keyword targeting power if you use the default Wordpress setup.

Before I get into the suggestions, though, I want to outline the problem. The problem, even if you are using permalinks that include the post name in the URL (which you should be), are really holding you back SEO-wise if you rely on the default setup.

I’ll use this post as an example. If I were using Wordpress’s default setup, the three most important on-page elements of this page would be identical. This is how things would look:

Page title How to Improve Wordpress SEO in 3 steps
URL http://www.inowebmarketing.com/2008/12/how-to-improve-wordpress-seo-in-3-steps/
Page Heading How to Improve Wordpress SEO in 3 steps

However, with a cursory look, you can see that this is not how I have setup these important on-page elements. Instead of using the default settings, I’ve taken it upon myself to improve the keyword targeting power of these ever-important elements. While I can’t say that duplicating the page title in your URL and <h1> heading will cause you problems, as I haven’t personally seen this problem myself; I have seen the benefits, first hand, of expanding my blog’s keyword targeting power by using variations of the same concept in the page title, page name, and primary heading.

Now, this post probably isn’t the best example because “wordpress seo” isn’t all that great a niche, at least if you look at estimated search volume for the phrase, especially when you compare that to the number of listings relevant for that phrase. Nevertheless, they’re still important tips — especially important in higher-demand, lower number-of-relevant-listings keyword markets.

So, I want to show you what I do, and how I do it — this way, you can work on improving the SEO friendliness of your Wordpress blog as well.

Wordpress SEO: Page Titles

Your web page’s title, whether it is on a Wordpress blog, or it’s a static HTML page, is very, very important. According to some of the world’s brightest SEOs, the page title was 2008s number one positive ranking factor. If your page title is garbage, or less-than-keyword targeted, you’re not going to have the results that you potentially could have, bottom line.

For this reason, and the reason of improved clickthroughs from the SERPs (search engine results pages), having a title that not only captures your visitors’ attention, but is focused on your primary keywords, is of the utmost importance.

With Wordpress, there are a couple of options for you, or maybe more, if you want to develop unique title tags. Here are a couple of notable, and worthwhile, Wordpress plugins that will allow you to manage your post and pages title elements:

• SEO Title Tag
• All-in-one SEO Pack

Personally, I use both. I’ve been using the SEO Title Tag plugin for quite a while, and I liked it better than the title rewriting options of the All-in-one SEO pack. However, the All-in-one plugin allows you to add meta descriptions whereas the former doesn’t… so if you have to choose one of these — I suggest the all-in-one SEO pack.

To create a unique page title, while you are creating a post (or a page), you just need to enter in the page title in the proper location. Here’s a screenshot showing the fields for the two plugins mentioned in Wordpress 2.7:

The Power of Page Names for SEO

Page names, also called the page or post “slug”, or the permalink, is the address that shows up in your browser’s address bar. The importance of a web page’s name cannot be understated — it wields a significant deal of keyword targeting power within a few, short characters.

Page names act like the anchor text, or descriptive text, used on links — internal and external. Which, if you’ve been around SEO for any amount of time, it’s likely that you’ve heard about the power that keyword-rich anchor text can have on a website’s rankings for keywords in search engines.

As an example of the power of a web-pages name, I’ll use an applicable, and recent, example of the power of incoming anchor text. A little bit of background, though — I am setting up a content writing website that charges $10 per article for a 400 word article. I won’t be writing on that website in the future, but I’m trying to build up a little bit of traffic / visibility for it. In my efforts, I was able to receive a link to that website, 10dollararticles.com, from a highly-visible 3rd party website. However, my name, Rob Ferrall, was used as the anchor text.

You can see here from a screenshot of my name being “Googled”:

That the aforementioned domain ranks for my name, even though my name is not anywhere on that page. That is the power that keyword-targeting holds, not only in incoming links to your website, but in the page names as well.

This phenomenon is apparent with many websites using their domain name only — even a brand new website, if the domain name is relatively unique, can rank highly for the words in that domain name because domain names, and page names, largely appear to act as incoming anchor text. This rings true even if the words that show up in the domain / page name are not anywhere else within the text on that page.

When used properly, using keyword-targeted page names can help improve that page’s keyword targeting power substantially.

Use of <H1> – <h6> Headings

For me, personally, I don’t put a lot of stock in the <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc. tags, though I certainly still use them — especially in longer content such as this 1,400+ word article. While I think that headings tags are weighted more than other on-page elements, I don’t see a substantial difference between content that utilizes headings tags, and content that does not. I tend to believe that you’re more likely to see a negative affect from the blatant “over-optimization” by using repetitive headings than you are to see a substantial positive affect by using headings “properly” — but that’s just a personal belief that I share with some prominent SEOs. SEO is fluid, and what works in one niche, and what works for one search engine, may not work in a different niche or a different search engine — so, your findings on this point may vary

Personal feelings aside, though — if you’re going to use headings tags, and most, if not all, Wordpress blogs use the <h1> tag for the post title unless you modify your theme — use them to your benefit. In other words, do not make your post title identical to your page title, and don’t make it identical to your permalink “slug” — target a variation of your primary keyword phrase, or at least change the order of the keywords around a bit.

If you would like some insight about keyword usage in certain on-page elements from experts’ point of view, I suggest that you read through the keyword use factors on SEOMoz starting at the section I just linked to. Read through what expert SEOs have to say about things, and you’ll better understand the importance of what I am saying today.

Better keyword targeting, and SEO, for Wordpress Blogs

If you think about this from a user’s perspective — it just makes sense. People do not search for the exact same thing even though they may be looking for the exact same thing. For instance, even though this blog post is about Wordpress SEO, people may use different phrases to find information on Wordpress SEO:

• How to opimize wordpress blog
• seo for wordpress
• wordpress blog optimization
• search engine friendly wordpress
• etc.

People do not use the same words to search for the same thing, and by mixing up your page titles, page names, and post titles — you are better able to target a wider audience through search engines.

Wordpress is an excellent content management system, it’s user-friendly, and easy to setup — which makes it a great choice for website owners with any level of HTML/CSS or programming experience. However, in order to get the most out of your Wordpress blog, from a SEO perspective anyway, you need to tweak a few things, add a few plugins, and take a couple of extra steps.

Optimizing Wordpress isn’t difficult, and hopefully this guide here will give you the insight you need to improve your blogging experience and ultimately your natural search engine rankings and traffic.