Tips of Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines

So, you have this amazing WordPress site, but for some reason the search engines just don’t show you much love. You post killer content, make it easy for users to share via their social networks, and people are subscribing to your RSS feed, indicating that they’re like what they’re reading. If you’ve tried everything to drive traffic to your website, and search engines still ignore your site, maybe you need to evaluate how search engine friendly your website is.

In this article, I will go over a few steps you should take to optimize your WordPress installation for search engines. While WordPress has good SEO features out of the box, these tips will help you maximize your search engine results while also making sure your site is the best it can be.

1. Optimize your titles

By default, WordPress usually puts the title of your blog before the actual post title. Since most search engines only display the first 50-64 characters of your <title> tag, you want the actual blog post title to come first.

For example:
Tips for Making WordPress Friendly to Search Engines - YourSiteName.com

is better than:
YourSiteName.com - Tips for Making WordPress Friendly to Search Engines

Always be sure that the title of your post comes before anything else. Two main reasons are:

1. Search engines will like you more if the title of the post comes first. This helps them put more importance to the keywords in the title.

2. A descriptive and optimized title is one of the most important aspects of your page SEO. The title lets the search engine and users know exactly what this page is about before they visit it.

Use the All In One SEO plugin to keep the proper title formats over an entire blog without having to edit any template files.

2. Use good meta descriptions

Most bloggers who use WordPress never do much on the SEO side for meta descriptions because they believe that the auto generated descriptions that comes standard with WordPress is good enough; but that’s not truly the case if you’re concerned about effective keyword indexing on search engines.

Your best chance of getting a high ranking on a per-post basis is by manually typing in a good description for every article you write. Again, I would suggest using the All In One SEO plugin as it allows you to do this very easily. By combining a keyword-rich title with a matching description, you are bound to see an increase in search traffic.

3. Rewrite your URLs with permalinks

Permalinks are enhancements to your existing URLs that can improve search engine optimization by presenting your post, page, and archive URLs as something like:

http://sixrevisions.com/tools/managing-your-fonts/

rather than
http://sixrevisions.com/?p=423

Changing the default web addresses/URLs that WordPress generates to something more readable is effective to search engine optimization because it is presumed that URLs are taken into consideration when indexing and prioritizing search results. Often, these URLs are called "pretty URLs" because they’re much more readable and gives the users a clue as to what the web page will be about. (As in the above comparison of URLs)

Making your permalinks friendlier and readable requires little more than a short trip to your WordPress admin panel. Once you are there, go to Settings > Permalinks and edit the settings

4. Generate an XML Sitemap for search engines

An XML Sitemap is a listing of all the pages and posts on your website. This helps the search engine crawlers get a machine-readable structure of your websites. Having a properly structured sitemap has great benefits in the search engines.

5. Describe your post images meaningfully

Another often-neglected item in WordPress SEO is using proper and keyword-accurate alt and title attributes with images in a post or page. Adding a short description of your image using proper keywords can boost your search engine hits through image searches like the one from Google Images. Since you are using WordPress, adding alt and title attribute values to images is easy.

While saving your image, be sure to give a short and simple name with a dash between each keyword. For example, if you have a picture of a California Redwood tree, name it appropriately, such as california-redwood-tree.jpg or california_redwood_tree.jpg instead of something vague and non-descriptive like postimage03.jpg or screenshot20.jpg.

Once you place your image in a WordPress post or page, it will automatically use the title given as the proper alt description.

If it does not fill it in automatically, you can type a description in the title input field. By implementing these image attributes, it will also make it easier for people who use a screen reader to browse your site.

6. Link to related posts

One favorable method for helping search engines find content that is relevant to a given web page is adding a "related posts" section that links to other posts that have a connected subject.

By doing so, you also have the primary benefit of showing your readers other posts that they may want to read as well.

Many WordPress plugins will automatically generate a list of related posts for each of your posts. There are way to many too mention here, but you can find a list in the WordPress plugins section at WordPress.org just by searching "related posts".

WPSwitch currently use the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and it works very well. This is our favorite because it gives you a templating system that allows control over how the related posts are displayed.

7. Use good keywords in post headings

Search engines give more weight to keyword items depending on what type of heading that is being used. To get the most juice out of your titles, make sure the post title is an <h1>.

The name of your blog should only be an <h1> on your front page. On single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an <h3>, some even choose to use other HTML elements such as a <p> element to keep the markup semantic. The title of your site does not need to carry as much weight as the topic you are writing about. To make sure your site name is only an <h1> on the home page,

Headings are super easy to edit and are found in the single.php and page.php and various archive pages of your WordPress theme. If your current theme does not use headings in this manner, I suggest you take a few minutes to make this easy change.

8. Avoiding duplicate content with robots.txtWith WordPress showing the same posts on multiple pages like the index, tag pages, archives, author pages, and category pages, it is very easy to have duplicate content. Duplicate content, in the eyes of search engines, is frowned upon. By creating a robots.txt file, you can completely avoid this issue.

A much easier way if you are not code-savvy is to use the Robots Meta plugin. This modifies the default one made by WordPress from your original install.

Best Online SEO Optimization Tools

The purpose of Search Engine Optimization is to bring more traffic on your web site.In the world of today there are different tools available which help you out in order to bring more traffic on your web site.With the help of Search engine optimization tools your site can easily be ranked in search engines. Following is a list of tools given which helps in SEO and getting your web site ranked in Search Engines.

1. Google Keyword Tool :

Google Keyword is free tool for helping advertisers are searching for online and the related words that they are also using in their searches, the basics of the Google Keyword Tool will be outlined. The keyword tool will tell you the various keywords that Google will pick up when searching that site with a search engine spider. This can be a helpful way to find out the keywords of any website and how Google will see that website’s contents

2. Meta Tag Generator:

This tool is very useful for those who are new in Search engine optimization. Meta tags are considered as the most important factor by search engines. This tool helps out in ensuring that your meta tag is correctly made or not?

3. Check Server Headers:

This tool Check server headers and verify HTTP (Hyper text transfer code). Basically there are seven HTTP status codes named, 200 OK, 301 Moved permanently, 302 Found, 304 Not Modified, 404 Not Found and 410 Gone. These seven codes are primarily interested from search engine marketing and indexing perspective.

4. Domain Age Checker:

In search engine optimization domain age of your website is indeed the most important factor. Older domains always get some edge by search engines, infect in SEO work on the principle old is gold. This tool will help you out in order to find exact age of your domain. You can also use this tool in order to know about your competitors or if you are interested in purchasing of some domain.

5. Keyword Suggestions for Google:

Keywords are the basic building blocks of SEO. This keyword Suggestion tool will help you out in order to choose such keywords which are most popular and similar to your selected key term. Usage of this tool is so simple. What you need to do is simply enter the key term and then this tool will query information via different Google searches and provide you detail analysis against that keyword.

6. Robots.txt Generator :

This tool is capable to generate robot.txt file for your web site. The purpose of robot.txt file is this that it can hide such directories or files which you don’t want to show to search engine spider. The purpose of this tool is to generate a basic text file you, which you can change according to your demand. This tool is ideal if you want to hide your some directories and files from robots of search engines.

7. URL Rewriting Tool :

This tool helps you out in conversion of dynamic URLs into static looking html URLs. Static URLs are usually considered better than Dynamic URLs because of many reasons. In search engines static URLS are mostly ranked better than dynamic ones. Search engines needs lots of time in order to index the content of dynamic pages whereas indexing done quickly ion static pages. For end users point of view static URLs looked friendlier.

8. Back Link Checker:

This tool provides you details of page rank of your back links by counting them. The use of this tools is so simple. What you need to do is simply put URL of your site plus Google APIKey. In case you do not have any API key, then you can find it out at www.google.com/apis. They are completely free and so easy to get.

9. Number of pages indexed:

This is a very important tool which provides you information about how many pages of your site has been indexed by the search engines till now. So you can get the idea that which pages are indexed and which ones are still left. This tool is made in such a way that it can support all major search engines including Google, Ask, AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, Alltheweb, Hotbot and so on.

10. Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool:

This tool is very specially designed for the researchers Adwords. This tool provide good and quick idea about the organic search and competition. It can shows results in the form of a graph. So you can get an idea about what you want to target. This tool also give information about all sort of Adword stuff like ad prices etc.

SEO Misconstrues In Web Designing

One the core challenges of a web designer exists on-site search engine optimization behaviors. It abides very ontological that the web site should charm communicative bargain additionally should be well-optimized. The search engine crawlers should be adept to absorb along with accumulate direction by crawling the page because that it will be indexed in the search engine.

In the discipline of web designing, there are frequent common search engine optimization perplexes acted by the designer.

Overuse of Ajax:
Facilitation of Ajax technology in web designing breakthroughs depicts dynamic appear along with co-action to the site. although, the search engines detect it adverse to crawl or index pages with Ajax content which is loaded essential duration or actively.



Unfriendly URLs:
URL or Uniform Resource Locator is the unique address to your website. Friendly URLs are familial among search engines as well as online audiences. It will be at ease to recall additionally conduct.

Keyword Attentiveness:
The content in the website should be avant-garde additionally beginning. At the equal duration, it should additionally adhere optimum cohesion adjunctly keywords for the text to be searchable and indexed by the search engines. addition alertness should be allocated ergo that key phrases are not existence allayed in the content.

Complying along with balanced SEO actions along with optimized web designing will effect in advantageous ranking, atmospheric traffic rate and bigger benefits for your business affair.