Architect Web Design

How to write searchable wordpress titles and posts

The main focus of a blog are its posts and its content. These are the two main pillars that will support your blog, and if you get them wrong you will suffer by having low search engine rankings and very few visitors.

What makes a good blog post title?

This is an important question – when I first started blogging I make the mistake that I’m sure lots of people make. I wrote smart titles. By smart I mean they were generally witty/a play on words – which is by no means a bad thing, say if I were writing a magazine column or editorial piece. But there’s the problem – writing for the web isn’t about writing clever as there’s no context.

For example if I read the title – ‘Ford says you can have any colour – especially black because it’s cheaper’ in a motoring magazine, that’s fine because I know I’m reading a motoring magazine and I expect these witticisms about cars/car makers. However this title would not work on the web because someone would need to type into a search engine the words from the title. Let’s face it – that ain’t gonna happen!

Use this as a general rule if you want to SEO your Wordpress blog as the titles used in Wordpress aren’t just used as the heading tag on a page. The posts in Wordpress use the title of the post to populate the <title>, <meta> and URL (if you follow my SEO tips). So make this your main searchable term – I cannot stress that enough!

Another example, going back to cars, if you have a blog post about learning to drive and completing a three point turn you should use the title – How to complete a three point turn. While it is tempting to write Turn your 43 point turn into a 3 point turn – only do this if you do not care about search engine optimisation. Or in extreme cases if you must, put this as a sub heading and not the title of the post itself.

How do I write good blog posts?

This part is up to you to keep the reader engaged, entertained and educated – just remember the 3 E’s!

However – remember those keywords you put in the title? The ones everyone searches for? Yes, these need to be in the blog post content too! When writing stay on topic and reuse your keywords. The last point I want to make about blog posts – they must be unique. Stealing content from other blogs/websites will only get you banned from the search engines. It’s fine to quote and reference – just name your sources, but your site will rank a lot higher if that content is unique!

That brings this mini series of How to set up Wordpress for SEO to an end. But don’t worry these are just the basics – there are plenty more SEO tips to get your blog to the top of the search engines!

Also, incase you missed them: SEO Wordpress part one and SEO Wordpress part two.

wayne Wordpress SEO blog, free seo tips, search engines, seo, wordpress

Wordpress Meta Tags and a Robots.txt file

Continuing on from my previous post Wordpress SEO Part 1 here is what you need to do to make sure Search engine robots find what they are looking for.

Meta Tags in Wordpress

When Wordpress was first released, you had to be quite technical to SEO it. This was because no Meta content was added by Wordpress itself. If you wanted Meta Tags you had to manually code them in. While there are still some uses to that, now with Wordpress 2.8 it is much easier.

In Wordpress, go to Current Theme Options from here you will now be able to enter Meta Description and Meta Keywords. These two fields form the homepage Meta tags of your blog. Choose wisely, and focus on keywords that appear frequently on the page and in posts – not just terms you want to rank high for.

I’ll cover Meta Tags in more detail later, for now you will be able to give the search engines some general information about your blog by using these Wordpress Meta Tags.

Wordpress Robots.txt file

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content

Sitemap: http://architectwebdesign.co.uk/sitemap.xml

Above is the current Robots.txt file for Architect Web Design. This .txt file (Plain Text created using Notepad) is placed in the root folder of a domain and is a web standard telling search engine robots and spiders which pages they can/cannot look at and index.

So you can better understand my Robots.txt I will explain what each line means. Remember the ‘Disallow’ command means to skip this location:

User Agent: * = This command tells the robots to look at all the pages of your website

Disallow: /cgi-bin = The CGI bin of your web server usually contains scripts that your server runs in the background, no need for the search engines to look in here

Disallow: /wp-admin, /wp-includes, /wp-content = These folders make up Wordpress, but should not be indexed. The admin folder is excluded for obvious reasons but the other two folders need to be stopped from being indexed as if they are read by the search engines your ranking will drop due to duplicate content. Search engines hate duplicate content as they see this as spam – you could even disappear from search engines because of this!

And finally the last line of your Robots.txt file should be pointing to your XML sitemap. Haven’t got a XML sitemap? Don’t worry, I’ll cover that in a later post – the important thing to remember is to stop search engines indexing pages that they shouldn’t. This will keep your SEO good, your rankings high and make sure you aren’t labelled a spammer.

More on Setting up Wordpress for SEO next time including: Post titles and Post content.

wayne Wordpress SEO blog, free seo tips, meta tags, search engines, wordpress