Must-Know WordPress SEO Tricks

Many new WordPress users are under the impression that WordPress already takes care of search engine optimization (SEO) upon installation. However, the out-of-the-box WordPress installation that most people rely on doesn't offer the best SEO results possible. If you want your WordPress sites to rank as highly as possible on search engine results pages, adopt the following techniques to enhance your sites' placement in results from Google and other search engines.

Before you start, however, realize that even the most well-written article is meaningless if no one finds its content valuable. If you're not passionate about the content you're producing, it will be evident to your readers, and, over time, to search engines as well. The best way to address this challenge is to write well about what you're passionate about. I'll trust you to handle that, and turn my focus to technical considerations that can boost your search engine rankings.

It Starts with a Relevant Article Title

Nothing is worse than a great WordPress post with a lousy article title. When crafting a title, consider the following: What is the subject? Does the title speak to people, and offer something that search engines latch onto as well? For instance, check out the following examples:

The Ultimate Guide to Widgets is a decent title. It's descriptive, provides a sense of urgency, and indicates that it might serve as a guide. Contrast that with Widgets Gone Wild. That's a terrible title, unless it's an article about unruly widgets threatening to overrun Main Street; it's certainly not a decent how-to related title.

Think about highlighting your article accurately. Aim for less fluff in the title and more detail as to why it's an article worth reading. And don't cram in tons of keywords – that is, words you want your page to rank well on with search engines. Keep your titles simple and relevant.

You do, however, want to use keywords in the body of your articles. Gone are the days when you could simply stuff an article full of keywords to gain a great search engine ranking. To use keywords effectively, make sure they add value to the article in question. One approach to do this is to take the keywords from the title, use them again within the first few sentences of the article, and then a few more times within the article after that. When doing this, make sure your use of the keywords sounds natural and is appropriate. When in doubt, the safe bet is to avoid overusing article keywords.

H1 Tags

When it comes to the best practices for using H tags within WordPress, the single biggest task is to ensure that text within H1 tags refers to the most relevant title possible. However, the problem with a default WordPress installation is all H1 tags are assigned to the site title, which causes individual pages to miss out on relevant content opportunities. Individual page titles ought to be more relevant to the content of their pages than their website title happens to be. However, you can correct this problem by assigning your H1 tags to the post title for pages from within your theme.

To make H1 tag changes manually, first create backup copies of your existing header.php, index.php, single.php, and page.php template files. Then download the files to your computer and edit each as explained below.

1. Open single.php and delete <?php get_header(); ?>. Removing this header code in the single post file prevents the header from overriding your changes to the H1 settings for individual posts. Next, locate <?php the_title(); ?> and change the H2 tags to H1. Keep this file open – we're not done quite yet.

1. Open your header.php file and copy all of the text without making any changes, then close the file.

1. Back inside single.php file, paste the header text you copied earlier into the top of the single.php file in order to provide header information, since we removed the call to header.php.

1. Change <h1><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1> to <h2><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h2>. If you're already using H2 tags for subtitles, you could assign your WordPress site title to an H3 tag instead. Either way, you'll sort out the stylesheet changes later no matter which H tag you use.

1. Repeat this process on your page.php file so it matches the same H tag layout as your single.php file.

If your WordPress site is new and no one is visiting it yet, upload the changed files listed above to the server directly. You will immediately see how the stylesheet needs to be adjusted based on how the text changes turn out visually. If, instead, you're updating a live site, you would be wise to make sure you have a development subdomain set up ahead of time, such as dev.yourdomain.com, on which you can test your changes, or alternatively try them on your local machine, then update them to the live site. To set up a development WordPress installation, you need to create the subdomain, then install WordPress to the corresponding location on your server. Once this is completed you can pilot the changes to the theme there.

If the files you altered were changed correctly, your home page should look the same as it did before you started. In order to verify that the post and page file changes went well, create a test post and look at the page. The title font style or color may appear off. Don't panic – this is to be expected, because the changes we made earlier affected not only the H tags, but also how your stylesheet defined font settings for the page itself.

You can adjust your CSS code by editing your style.css file. First make a backup of the file, then follow these steps – but keep in mind that your stylesheet may be set up differently than the example below, so consider this example a rough guideline for your own changes.

1. First, reopen header.php and locate the H1 tags. Look carefully for something like h1 class="SomethingSpecific". Now copy the class string and open your style.css file. Using your text editor's search feature, look for SomethingSpecific. It will most likely look like this:

h1. SomethingSpecific {
font-size: 2.2em;
font-weight: bold;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
color: #f60;text-decoration:none;
}

You may see other similar entries that include something like this:

h1.SomethingSpecific a {
font-size: 2.2em;
font-weight: bold;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
color: #f60;text-decoration:none;
}

and

h1.SomethingSpecific a:hover {
font-size: 2.2em;
font-weight: bold;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
color: #f60;text-decoration:none;
}

1. Copy all of these examples from your stylesheet file, then repaste them into the same style.css file.

1. In the code you just pasted in, locate

h1.SomethingSpecific

Change it, along with the related a, a:hover, and similar entries, to:

h1.SomethingSpecificNew

1. Now you can edit the changed code and alter the font settings to better display what you want for your single posts and pages. You may find that matching them closely with your H2 configuration is the best bet. However, your stylesheet may require something completely different, so don't be afraid to experiment to see what works best for your needs.

1. Once you have settings that you think work well, test out your new stylesheet settings by revisiting single.php and page.php and changing:

h1 class="SomethingSpecific"

to

h1 class="SomethingSpecific2"

1. Save the files, then upload them to the server and refresh your site pages in a browser to verify everything went smoothly.

This CSS example is designed to help you locate your H1 and H2 classes for needed alternations. Don't be afraid to play around with your stylesheet a bit; after some practice, making adjustments will become second nature to you.

WordPress SEO Plugins

When combined with the tips above, using WordPress SEO plugins can help you boost your search rank. Two plugins that I've used successfully are All in One SEO Pack and Yoast WordPress SEO. All in One SEO is easier to use, while the plugin from Yoast offers greater overall SEO functionality.

Both plugins can help you set a useful title format. Just as selecting the right kind of title is important, so is making sure that you're formatting it for search engines and people alike. I have found that using a "Post/Page Title | Site Title" approach provides the best experience for everyone involved. It's useful to the casual website visitor, as it clearly shows the name of the post or page along with the name of the site. For search engines, this approach emphasizes that the post or page title is the key to a search query, while the name of the website provides a supporting role.

To set this format in All in One SEO, go to Settings -> All in One SEO -> Post/Page Title Format and choose %post_title% | %blog_title% or %page_title% | %blog_title%. With Yoast WordPress SEO, go to SEO -> Titles -> Post/Page -> Title Template and choose %%title%% | %%sitename%% for both post and page titles.

You can leave the category, archive, and tag title formats as they are. So long as they appear in a format similar to what you set up with your post and page titles, you should be good to go.

Perfect Permalink Structure

By default, the permalink structure in a fresh WordPress installation looks something like this:

http://yourwebsite.com/?p=123 

Instead of this obscure URL format, you're going to want a permalink structure that looks like:

http://yourwebsite.com/titleofpost

or

http://yourwebsite.com/category/titleofpost

Not only do these URLs look better to the casual observer, they also provide some SEO advantage. To change to this improved permalink structure, go to Settings -> Permalinks -> Custom Structure and set the style to /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%. Having used both permalink structures, I can't say that one outperforms the other in any measurable way. Use the style you feel best appeals to your readers.

Once you've settled on the permalink structure you want to use, the next step is to make your .htaccess file writable. One common method is to log in to your server via SFTP and give the file writable permissions (set to 777). When you then refresh your permalink settings page, you'll notice that the small gray box that appeared at the bottom of the page is gone, indicating that once you have successfully given the .htaccess file writable permissions, WordPress will allow for the permalink changes. Remember to return the .htaccess file's permissions to 644 when you're finished; not doing so creates a massive security hole.

Canonical Tags

Another area where a standard installation of WordPress falls short is with canonical tags. Canonical tags provide search engines with the preferred version of a web page. Without them, websites that use variables at the end of a URL can find themselves dealing with duplication penalties from some search engines. An example of this would be something like this:

http://yourwebsite.com/titleofpost/?sfdsfjsdlfjslj

Even though ?sfdsfjsdlfjslj is merely a variable at the end of an actual WordPress URL, search engines like Google can sometimes count URLs with variables as a second version of the same webpage. This can lead your site being hit with a search engine's content duplication penalty.

Canonical tags can counter this problem. Using a simple code, you can make sure that no matter what variable happens to be added to your WordPress URL, the proper URL is the one being referenced.

Add the code below before the </head> tag in the header.php file of your WordPress template:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://<?php echo $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] ?><?php echo parse_url($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],PHP_URL_PATH); ?>" />

With this change, when a search engine visits this URL:

http://yourwebsite.com/titleofpost/?sfdsfjsdlfjslj

The search engine will see the URL as:

http://yourwebsite.com/titleofpost/

Using rel="canonical" allows you to assign the real URL for each page safely, and without any risk to your WordPress SEO.

SEO-Friendly WordPress Categories

Many sites use WordPress categories ineffectively. Poor category usage tends to happen when content creators assign posts to more than one category. On the surface, this might sound like no big deal. In reality, however, using categories incorrectly can prevent search engines like Google from awarding you sitelinks because they can't understand the WordPress site's content layout.

The best approach when dealing with WordPress categories is to assign each new post to one category that makes sense in relation to that post. For example, if I were creating a post on WordPress plugins, I'd assign it to a category called WordPress or Plugins – but not to both categories.

Another consideration is to make sure all of the links for your categories are listed on your homepage and on each post and page. This provides a clean experience for your readers and allows search engines to index your content hierarchy in a logical, fluid manner. Also, it's OK to rely on subcategories, but don't check off more than one subcategory option within any given post.

Nofollow and Dofollow

Another common mistake WordPress authors make is to allowing affiliate links to pass search engine rank. By linking directly to an outside page, you're essentially vouching for that link as a trustworthy source. Where things get confusing is in trying to determine whether search engines agree with the value of a link you're vouching for. For example: If I am running a WordPress site that shares the benefits on the latest laptops, I might want to monetize my website with affiliate links. However, some search engines may see type of link as a paid link, as you're potencially going to be compensated for its use. With search engines such as Google, you will likely lose some of your page value for making such a decision.

A dofollow link is any unaltered anchored web link on your WordPress site that sends someone to another post or another website. When most people create an article and use an anchored link as a reference point, they use basic HTML that links the most appropriate word to the link. This is usually considered to be helpful to your readers, so search engines won't penalize you.

However, you may be penalized if you link to a site that isn't seen as relevant to the article or might be perceived as a "paid link" – that is, a link that you're compensated for. Even if an affiliate link is relevant to the reader and offers value, allowing that link a "dofollow" pass isn't a good idea. If you're linking to a questionable website, I recommend amending your anchor link. Instead of using this:

<a href="url"></a>

Go with this instead:

<a href="url" rel="nofollow"></a>

By attaching a nofollow link, you're letting the search engines know that you are not vouching for this link. Using a nofollow link protects your webpage and your entire WordPress website from being devalued for being greedy. As a rule, if you're unsure, add nofollow just to be safe.

Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools

A sitemap is an XML file that is used to inform search engines when fresh content is ready to be crawled. Creating a sitemap for WordPress is relatively simple, thanks to the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. To get started with it, download and extract the plugin code and upload it to your wp/plugins directory. Then:

1. Create empty files named sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz inside of your root directory.

1. chmod the permissions for these two files to 666.

1. From within the plugins section of your WordPress dashboard, enable the plugin.

1. Browse to the plugin configuration page and build the sitemap for the first time.

Once the two sitemap files are in your root directory and have the correct permissions, you should have a working sitemap. You can then submit your sitemap to search engines using Webmaster Tools for Bing and Yahoo! and Google. Once the search engine providers receive your sitemap, you can use their Webmaster Tools to monitor your WordPress site's performance.

If you take advantage of the WordPress SEO tips and tricks we've covered here, you should see your site's search engine rank rise. However, as I said at the start, the tips here are not a replacement for compelling written content. Rather, they raise the likelihood that search engine visitors looking for similar content will see what you have to offer.

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