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Making your blog (or website) stand out on the web is hard work so how can a small business make the most out of their website, gain free advertising on major search engines and increase their profile without having resorting to unethical means? Well for starters you could watch Matt Cutts talk about Google. Frankly I think few people in world understand the search engine giant better than Matt, so if you’re serious about making it to the front page of Google listen to him talk about fighting web spam. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, Lisa Barone did a great summary of it.
WordPress has a wonderful article published on their codex about optimizing websites for search engine ranking, and Nathan Rice has written what I would call the easiest guide to WordPress SEO on the web.
Here’s what you have to keep in mind when optimizing WordPress based websites for search engine spidering:
- Keyword Density – Use rich keywords through your articles, pages and content. Keep in mind that keyword stuffing your pages will have a negative effect.
- Meta Keywords – Using descriptive keywords and key phrases will help your business increase presence but again, be very careful. Search engines want to see keywords relative to your subject.
- Meta Description – Try to use the same content as your Title tag or H1 as a description, the description is meant to be representative of your page content.
- Optimized Titles – Use your title well. The title of your article should be displayed in H1 tags, within the Title tags and of course, the Meta Description. Your title should be descriptive but less than 64 characters.
- Duplicate Content – Control your duplicate content. Remember that Google will penalize you for repeating content. By default, WordPress will duplicate any content you place in multiple categories so make sure you’ve used the proper Meta tags to control your content
- Permalinks – By default WordPress wants to use ?p=12 as as your URL’s. Fix this under your Permalinks setting to ensure WordPress uses keyword rich slugs.
- Google Web Master Tools – Most people don’t realize that Google actually provides tools for Web Masters to improve online placement. Learn them, use them.
Do you have any other resources for people looking to improve their placement with WordPress? Please let me know.
gilagratisan on October 31, 2008 at 5:56 am
nice tips in your blog. iwill visit your blog cause im still newbiew
Money Academy on January 23, 2009 at 12:20 am
i see that you are expert in this so i trust in you :) , you have any comment about platinum SEO pak plugin because i use it in my blog .
Money Academy’s last blog post..New updates in my blog in feeds ( feedburner ) and twitter ( i added logo )
malcolm coles on February 08, 2009 at 8:04 am
Are you sure about the keyword rich permalinks? Google doesn’t say it used keywords in URLs as a ranking factor, and it now says is has no problem with dynamic vs static URLs. You might want keywords URLs for humans, but don’t think you need them for SEs.
malcolm coles’s last blog post..SEO friendly URLs: myth and fact
Christopher Ross on February 08, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Hi Malcolm, that’s a funny question. Google’s come out and debunked this post as a myth (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html) but I’m not 100% convinced yet. You’ve got a great post there as well (http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/seo-friendly-urls-myth-and-fact/) so I think we’ll have to see over the next few months how it all plays out.
malcolm coles on March 27, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Cheers. I had a dream about SEO friendly URLs last night. I think I need to get out more!
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Christopher Ross on March 28, 2009 at 9:51 am
@malcolm … I have to admit I’ve never had a dream that the reason I didn’t get pull up at the pub was because my title wasn’t properly keyworded. :)