Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for WordPress
16 January 2008
The most difficult part of starting a blog is getting people to read it. Like most people who start blogs, I have friends and family who will check up occasionally and read my blog, but what I’m more interested in is getting the general public to discover my blog. There are a few ways to achieve this, which can include commenting on others’ blogs, using trackbacks to discuss an article from another blog on your blog (thus creating a link back to you from their site), and so on, but that’s not what I’m going to write about in this post. This post is concerned primarily with making your WordPress blog more effective in bringing targeted traffic through search engines.
Search Engine Optimization, as explained in the WikiPedia article on the subject, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines. This process employs a number of techniques to make a site’s content more accessible to search engines’ indexing agents (e.g. GoogleBot), and to make apparent the relevance of a site’s content to particular search keywords.
By default, WordPress structures your blog’s content in a pretty effective manner, but it’s not particularly great at optimizing content for search engines. Thankfully, there are plugins for WordPress that do the job very well. I recently did a search for third-party SEO plugins for Wordpress and found a couple that are quite effective and require very little technical skill to install and configure.
All In One SEO Pack: This is a great plugin, but don’t be fooled by its name because it isn’t the final word in optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines. Here are the highlights of this plugin:
- Easier interface for managing titles. The title of each and every post, page, and section of your blog is very important to search engines, and this plugin makes changing the title format very simple for everyone regardless of technical skill.
- Better management of article and page descriptions. Out of the box, WordPress uses the same set of meta data across all pages and articles to describe the content contained therein. This approach doesn’t make sense when each article is supposed to be unique. The All In One SEO Pack plugin makes it very simple to create unique descriptions and keyword groups for each article.
- Reduction of the amount of duplicate content visible to search engine robots. This plugin establishes simple rules for web crawlers that dictate which pages should and shouldn’t be indexed. It’s all done through one, simple interface, and all your bases are covered with a few flicks of the mouse.
This plugin is great because it does so much through one simple interface and it is simple enough for practically everyone to use and understand.
Google XML Sitemaps Generator: Adding a Google Sitemap to your blog is a fantastic way to get your content indexed by Google and other search engines. This plugin creates a document on your website which search engines use to discover and index your content. Each time you update your blog by adding a page or a post, this document is updated, too, and search engines are notified of the changes. The result is that search engines are better able to find the content on your site that is deemed the most valuable and relevant.
These two plugins do most of the schlepping involved in getting your blog noticed by the search engines. There’s definitely more that can be done - including writing content that is rich with keywords relevant to your subject matter - but by installing these two easy-to-use plugins you will be much better off than if you had only used the options built in to WordPress.
Tags: Blog, google, Search Engines, SEO, wordpress
Posted in Computing, SEO, Search Engines, Work, web | No Comments »
