Setting up Wordpress for SEO – Part 1
How to set up your Wordpress Blog
First it’s important to search engine optimise your blog because it’s a free way of generating traffic for your blog/website. You could always use Google Ad Words to drive traffic – but that’s what I would call Plan B.
There are several important considerations when starting a blog and setting up Wordpress for SEO here are 2 of them:
- Choosing a SEO ready theme
- URL structure
Choosing a Wordpress Theme - While Wordpress out of the box is pretty good SEO wise there are always improvements that can be made. It is important to choose a good Wordpress theme (or even better to create one yourself) that is fully suited to SEO. So, how do you tell a good SEO Wordpress theme? Things to look for:
- Header tags in descending order e.g. Title of blog in <h1> tag, posts in <h2> tag and sub titles in <h3> tag. Not all Wordpress themes have these in the correct order due to style/design of the blog so watch out. It is also acceptable to have the post titles in <h1> and then descend from there
- Text links, not images – as any SEO will tell you ‘Text is worth more than images’. This means Lists being used for Navigation, Titles etc. This way search engines can read the text itself and not just the ALT tag of the images. This will also help load times of pages
- The ‘order’ of the page. By this I mean which content is read first by the search engines. On this blog for example the bots read from left to right starting with this the main content and then moving on to the less important side bar – always something to consider as some themes have more than two columns and change the order of these on the page.
URL Structure – By default the URL structure of Wordpress is as follows:
http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123
See why thats bad? Ideally your pages should be given a name that is a keyword as this name will be read by the search engines. To change the URL structure (known as Permalinks in Wordpress) go to Settings > Permalinks. Then select the Custom Structure option. Now type in:
/%postname%/
This will create the URL structure:
http://www.yourdomain.com/title-of-post/
This is a much more Search Engine Friendly way of displaying URLs in Wordpress.
In parts 2 and 3 – robots.txt, meta tags, post titles and post content.
More Wordpress SEO tips coming soon.
