5 SEO Techniques To Sky Rocket WordPress up the Search Engines

WordPress is pretty good at SEO as it comes. However you can make it fly by ensuring you get these 5 key SEO techniques right. Follow these to insure your website is as visible as it can be to Google, Yahoo, Bing and the others.

1) Get a plugin or a Theme that makes SEO easier

You’re life will be a whole lot easier if you use a plugin or Theme that makes it easy to change your SEO options. One of the most popular and well supported plugins is the All In One SEO Pack.

This plugin gives you control over all the key settings including Page Titles and Meta information.

All in One SEO gives you loads of Options

Another way to get the options you need is to use a Theme with inbuilt options. For example themes (like the one powering this site) by the wonderful WooThemes include all the options you need in the backend..

WooTheme Framework SEO Options

2) Set Your Page Title

Page titles are one of the most important aspects of SEO. Google and the other engines use the keywords in your page titles as the primary indicator of what the content of the page is about. Configure your WordPress site so that it always inserts an accurate page title or even better, specify a page title for each post and page.

Your Page Title is a Really Important part of SEO

3) Watch Your URLs

The second important part of SEO optimisation is the URL of your pages and posts. Search engines use the keywords in the URL to decide on which keywords to your rank the page for. It’s therefore crucial that you include the keywords, usually the ones you specified in your page title, in the URL.

You might need to update your permalink settings as by default WordPress uses number rather than words. You’ll find the options under Settings -> Permalinks. Here’s how to set it use category and post names in the URLS.

Permalink Settings for SEO

To make it easier make sure you label up your categories using the keywords you want to rank for. If you take a look round this site you’ll see how we’ve structured the site to ensure optimum visibility.

So for example targeting the keywords:

“Business WordPress Themes”

the business category has the url:

101bestwordpressthemes.com/business-wordpress-themes.

Meta Tags – Still important

Meta tags used to be the only thing that the search engines really used to index and rank pages. Nowadays they read the Page Title, URL and body of the text to find out the most relevant keywords. However this doesn’t mean that you should neglect them. Personally I still believe they have an effect and they can certainly have a negative effect if setup incorrectly.

The easiest way to implement them is to configure your Plugin or Theme to use the post or pages tags as the Meta Tags. Alternatively you can specify them for each page. Ideally your meta keywords should match the Page Title, URL and overall content of the page for maximum effect.

WooTheme Meta Keyword Settings

Generate an XML sitemap and submit to Google

Google Webmaster Console is a great way to get feedback on how your site is doing with Google. It gives you information on crawl errors, keywords, site speed and tons of other really useful and interesting stuff.

Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard

Of course there is a number of plugins around that can generate the feed for you. I like this one by a German guy whos name I can’t find. It’s a great plugin which includes lots of options and generates a cool sitemap.

Loads of XML sitemap options

Take a look at the 101 sitemap feed here.

You may want to include a human readable sitemap. These are also beneficial when it comes to SEO and also useful for real people. I use another great plugin by Dagon Design which can also include a link to your XML.

Hope you find these tips useful. We’ll be expanding on WordPress SEO in later posts. If you have any questions or comments please leave em in the box below.