- One of my favorite things about WordPress is the ability to easily add new functionality by just installing a plugin. Basically it’s open source so anyone can whip out a plugin as long as they understand the WordPress API. Plugins can only go so far though especially when it comes to optimizing your blog for search engines which is where the Definitive Guide to WordPress SEO article steps in.
- Talk about a great checklist of items to
- maximize your SEO…this is the best list
- I’ve come across yet. Some of his items
- like the “read more” SEO tip are pretty cool.
-
Check out the article and plan on spending some time optimizing your blog just like I’m about to do myself.
-
Ready to super charge your blog? Check out our partners professional premium WordPress themes!
-
If you like this post then please consider subscribing to our eBlog Templates RSS feed. You can also subscribe by email and have new templates and articles sent directly to your inbox.
-
Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They’re diluted by one simple thing: comments.
-
4.1 Pages instead of posts
-
You’ve probably noticed by now, or you’re seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually… not a post. It’s a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a “daughter”-page of our WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that’s where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.
-
That’s why we decided to make our most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you’ve changed.
-
4.2 New wine in an old bottle
-
If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like this one did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:
- One of my favorite things about WordPress is the ability to easily add new functionality by just installing a plugin. Basically it’s open source so anyone can whip out a plugin as long as they understand the WordPress API. Plugins can only go so far though especially when it comes to optimizing your blog for search engines which is where the Definitive Guide to WordPress SEO article steps in.
- Talk about a great checklist of items to
- maximize your SEO…this is the best list
- I’ve come across yet. Some of his items
- like the “read more” SEO tip are pretty cool.
- Check out the article and plan on spending some time optimizing your blog just like I’m about to do myself.
- Ready to super charge your blog? Check out our partners professional premium WordPress themes!
- If you like this post then please consider subscribing to our eBlog Templates RSS feed. You can also subscribe by email and have new templates and articles sent directly to your inbox.
- Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They’re diluted by one simple thing: comments.
- 4.1 Pages instead of posts
- You’ve probably noticed by now, or you’re seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually… not a post. It’s a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a “daughter”-page of our WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that’s where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.
- That’s why we decided to make our most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you’ve changed.
- 4.2 New wine in an old bottle
- If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like this one did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:
- create a new page with updated and improved content
- change the slug of the old post to
post-name-original
- publish the new page under the old post’s URL, or redirect the old post’s URL to the new URL
- send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you’ve updated and improved on your old post
- wait for the links to come in, again;
- rank even higher for your desired term as you’ve now got:
- more control over the keyword density
- even more links pointing at the article
- the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it’s content and ranking
-
Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you’d lose the comments on the old post, which is in our opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but we think it can be done in everyone’s benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Facebook, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that’s exactly what you got!
-
4.3 Linking to related posts
-
Internal linking is incredibly important to help Google understand your site structure. You should not only show related posts under your post, but also create links in your text to other related posts. The more links a post or page gets, the more important it will be to the search engine. In Yoast SEO we now have a text link counter, if you see that one of your essential, or cornerstone articles, has very little links, you can start working on that right away.
-
In Yoast SEO Premium we even offer an internal linking tool that helps you find the right posts or pages to link to.
-
4.4 Go easy on the tags
-
One of the most common issues we encounter on sites is the overuse of tags. Note that a tag in and of itself does not improve your SEO. The only way it improves your SEO is by relating one piece of content to another, and more specifically a group of posts to each other.
-
7 Off site blog SEO
-
If you’ve followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you’ve got a big chance of becoming successful, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn’t. Go out there, and talk to people online.
-
7.1 Follow your commenters
-
There’s been a movement on the web for a while now that’s called the “You comment – I follow“. They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to “reward” your visitors. Now we do agree, but… That get’s you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog… What we do advocate though, is that you actually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.
-
If you think that’s a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That’s a group of people you have to take care of!
-
7.2 Use Twitter
-
Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the “cool” people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.
-
To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.
-
7.3 Find related blogs, and work them
-
If you want to rank for certain keywords, go to Google, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you’ll need to rank is to be a part of the community.
-
A good SEO campaign relies on not only implementing changes but also measuring the impact of those changes, seeing what works and doing more of that. Two great Analytics packages to measure results are Google Analytics and getClicky. Useful plugins for these analytical packages are MonsterInsights and our Clicky plugin.
-
You can also measure results by tracking rankings, the problem with rank tracking though is that it’s hard to determine “real” rankings because of personalized and localized search results. Really the best outcome of being great at WordPress SEO is to get more traffic.
-
Another great source of data is Google Search Console. One of the relatively simple tricks we always give people is the following:
- go into Search Console;
- go to “Your site on the web”, then “Search queries”.
- Click on “Download this table”.
- Open the CSV file you get in Excel.
- Replace all the instances of “<10” in the Clicks column with 9.
- Select the entire first row and click the filter button, usually the icon is a funnel:
- For the average position column, choose “greater than 5”, sort Ascending.
- Then for the “Clicks” column, sort Descending.
-
You now have the keywords people are finding you for in the results pages where you rank below #6 The fact that they clicked on your result proves that they found your result interesting: see if you can optimize any of those terms so you’ll rank higher than a #6 average rank: use the Page Analysis in our SEO plugin to improve the page, improve the copy, ask others to link to you, etc. Be sure to read our article about cornerstone content as well.
-
This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your WordPress site. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There’s a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you’ll have to actually domost of it and create great and compelling content in the process.
-
If you want to keep updated on the latest news about WordPress, SEO and our plugins, then subscribe to our newsletter right now. You’ll get a free eBook!
-
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-
post-name-original
Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you’d lose the comments on the old post, which is in our opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but we think it can be done in everyone’s benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Facebook, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that’s exactly what you got!
4.3 Linking to related posts
Internal linking is incredibly important to help Google understand your site structure. You should not only show related posts under your post, but also create links in your text to other related posts. The more links a post or page gets, the more important it will be to the search engine. In Yoast SEO we now have a text link counter, if you see that one of your essential, or cornerstone articles, has very little links, you can start working on that right away.
In Yoast SEO Premium we even offer an internal linking tool that helps you find the right posts or pages to link to.
4.4 Go easy on the tags
One of the most common issues we encounter on sites is the overuse of tags. Note that a tag in and of itself does not improve your SEO. The only way it improves your SEO is by relating one piece of content to another, and more specifically a group of posts to each other.
7 Off site blog SEO
If you’ve followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you’ve got a big chance of becoming successful, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn’t. Go out there, and talk to people online.
7.1 Follow your commenters
There’s been a movement on the web for a while now that’s called the “You comment – I follow“. They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to “reward” your visitors. Now we do agree, but… That get’s you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog… What we do advocate though, is that you actually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.
If you think that’s a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That’s a group of people you have to take care of!
7.2 Use Twitter
Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the “cool” people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.
To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.
7.3 Find related blogs, and work them
If you want to rank for certain keywords, go to Google, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you’ll need to rank is to be a part of the community.
A good SEO campaign relies on not only implementing changes but also measuring the impact of those changes, seeing what works and doing more of that. Two great Analytics packages to measure results are Google Analytics and getClicky. Useful plugins for these analytical packages are MonsterInsights and our Clicky plugin.
You can also measure results by tracking rankings, the problem with rank tracking though is that it’s hard to determine “real” rankings because of personalized and localized search results. Really the best outcome of being great at WordPress SEO is to get more traffic.
Another great source of data is Google Search Console. One of the relatively simple tricks we always give people is the following:
You now have the keywords people are finding you for in the results pages where you rank below #6 The fact that they clicked on your result proves that they found your result interesting: see if you can optimize any of those terms so you’ll rank higher than a #6 average rank: use the Page Analysis in our SEO plugin to improve the page, improve the copy, ask others to link to you, etc. Be sure to read our article about cornerstone content as well.
This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your WordPress site. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There’s a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you’ll have to actually domost of it and create great and compelling content in the process.
If you want to keep updated on the latest news about WordPress, SEO and our plugins, then subscribe to our newsletter right now. You’ll get a free eBook!
x