Secrets of WordPress and SEO

Using WordPress may be one of the easiest and most effective ways to maximize your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts. Let’s take a look at some of these WP-specific SEO tricks.

Anatomy of a Post

Here’s what the search engines are looking for when they’re crawling through your site and determining rankings:

• Titles: Keywords, the terms people are using when they perform a search, are very important in titles. Titles appear at the top of a browser window or in a browser window tab. The problem with blogs is that your headline automatically becomes the title unless you have a plugin that allows them to differ.
• Post slug names: The post slug is the virtual file name of a blog post. For example, the link to this post is http://www.apriltara.com/2009/01/secrets-of-wordpress-and-seo. The slug section of that link is “secrets-of-wordpress-and-seo”.  That’s the info search engines are interested in. If I’d named this post “You’ve gotta read this!” or just used the post ID number, the search engines would have no idea what the post is about. Be sure to use “pretty permalinks” so that you have more control over the slug because you’ll need to edit the slug for SEO purposes. You want to use important keywords in the slug, just as you do for the title.
• Headings: In your WordPress blog, you can use various heading levels when writing posts to break up the content into sections. Search engines pay attention to keywords in headings. Many people don’t know how to see the controls for headings in WordPress. You have to click on the “Kitchen Sink” button on your WordPress toolbar which looks like a small box with a bunch of small boxes inside of it. Many people have seen it but never clicked on it, mistaking it for some kind of color palette. Unless you have some WordPress plugins that add extra buttons to your post toolbar, the “Kitchen Sink” should be the last button on the right, just above the text area where you enter your post content. Once the second row of toolbar buttons is revealed, use the “Format” drop-down to set headings.
• Text content: Of course the content of the post must be relevant to a searcher’s needs. Use the same words in the post the searcher would use in a search (keywords). Use them as frequently as you can while still sounding natural. It may help to read your post out loud to yourself to make sure it doesn’t sound awkward. Think of it this way: if your searcher has a question, you want your post to be the answer.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much to learn about about optimizing your WordPress-based site to achieve excellent search engine rankings.

Tomorrow, January 7th, a study course covering SEO for WordPress will be available. WordPress SEO Secrets: Search Engine Optimization Magic for WordPress Blogs will walk you through all of this, step by step, using text materials as well as audio and video recordings. Stay tuned and I’ll have more info for you at launch time! I’ll be sharing the details on my blog and in my newsletter so be sure to subscribe to my blog via RSS or email and subscribe to my newsletter using the sign up box to the right.