In the coming days and weeks I will also be adding additional articles featuring more intermediate and advanced WordPress SEO tips and eventually expanding more on off-site SEO factors and link building strategies.

5 Core WordPress SEO optimisation areas

1. Changing your WordPress permalinks
2. Optimsing WordPress page titles
3. Optimising WordPress meta description and meta keywords
4. Customising your "more links"
5. Optimise site name and description(s)

Thoughts on using WordPress SEO plugins

Almost all of the optimisation areas mentioned can be achiveved with plugins. Likewise pretty much everything the plugins do can be achieved through modifications to your theme. If you feel comfortable updating your theme and you don’t like plugins messing with your beautifully crafted HTML output then you’ll probably want to tweak your theme by adding relevant code snippets to do the majority of what the plugins can offer.

Personally I do a bit of both, I like to optimise my themes as much as possible but still use plugins to fill in the gaps. Plugins are particularly useful if you like to tweak titles or descriptions on a post/page level and can save you qutie a bt of time for repetivite tasks. A word of caution though, don’t rely 100% on plugins to create completely automated descriptions, they are never as good as handcrafted descriptions.

Start off with a well structured WP theme

If you’re creating a new site or want create a new theme for your site it helps if you can build your site around a WordPress theme that is structured and coded well. Starting out with a theme that is at least partially SEO friendly will save you time but it’s not required.

When selecting a theme either to use as a starting point or to use as it is have a peak at the the code of the theme first, both viewing the PHP files and the source code of the HTML output. Look out for a theme that is well coded and well structured, something that already includes title attributes on links and images has clear navigation and .

One important factor is to make sure your theme always lists your content before the sidebar when viewing the source code of your site, regardless of where the sidebar is located visually in the design. This ensures that crawlers look at your unique content first and the sidebar content is secondary as it tends to be listed on all pages of your site.

1. Change WordPress default permalinks

One of the first things you should do after a fresh WordPress install is to change the permalink structure. By default the WordPress permalink structure is ?p=<postid>. For both SEO and usability purposes you’d want your links to be descriptive e.g. /categoryname/postname or just /postname. WordPress permalink settings can be found in your WP admin interface under Settings > Permalinks.

Under common settings select "Custom structure".

• To display just the post title in your url use. /%postname%/
• Alternatively use /%category%/%postname%/ if you want to to include the category name before the post title.

Before you change your WordPress Permalinks

If you’re setting up a new blog with little or no existing content then changing permalinks is a no-brainer. Just change the settings before any of your content is indexed, However if you’re optimising an existing site then changing permalinks can have a huge impact unless take the necessary steps to setup up redirection.

Before you change permalinks on an existing website that has been established for a while consider the following:

• If your pages have Page Rank (PR) any change to the permalink will result in a loss in page rank for that page. If you setup a 301 redirect some of the page rank will normally pass to your new permalink but is a risk of some decay in page rank.
• Incoming links from other sites will return 404 errors unless you setup 301 redirection to the new permalink

WordPress Permalink Redirection Plugins

Now that you know the potential impact of changing established permalinks The good news is that this can be addressed relatively easily using plugins.

Redirection provides you with very granular control over redirects including ability to import a list or redirects from an existing .htaccess file as well as forcing either www or non-www prefix on your site for canonical urls. Once this plugin has been installed go to Tools > Redirection for settings.

If you’re usiing Platinum SEO Pack you won’t need a separate plugin as it includes automatic redirection for changes in URLs and permalink structure.

Keep in mind though if you do have significant page rank on some of your pages you may still lose some of the page rank even with a 301 redirect. This is typically more common if you migrate your site completely to a new domain and not really a problem when using 301 redirect for internal site changes. Personally I don’t really fuss to much about page rank, I mean it’s nice if my site or some of my pages get a little bit of a boost and it does seem to improve Google rankings a bit, however at the lower end of the specter PR1-5 it doesn’t really matter that much.

2. Optimising WordPress page titles

By default your WordPress page titles will typically include your site name on the home page and "Site name » Archive » Post title" for archives and posts. This is not terrible but it could be better.

• Page titles should ideally be no longer than 60-70 characters, this is a general guideline from Google and it’s not an absolute requirement but you should try to stay below 100 characters.
• The reason this is important is because if your page titles are longer they will be cut off in the SERPs (search engine results pages). If your title is longer than 70 characters Google will typically cut it off before 69 characters and end with …
• If you have a long site name and category name(s) and these are listed first then you run the risk of your actual article or post title being cut off or disappearing completely.
• Search engines also tend to weight keywords early in the title a bit higher and you’d to ensure that your carefully crafted post titles are visible and given all the emphasis possible.
• Your <title> should be as close as possible to your <h1> page/post title. By starting with your post/page title the first part of your <title> will match your <h1> post title.

Personally I’d avoid including categories on post or pages as it tends to make the titles too long.

Opimising your titles with plugins

If you’re using Headspace2, All-In-One SEO or Platinum SEO Pack it’s very easy to set your titles either in the global settings for the plugin or on an individual post level. I prefer the following title structure:

• Home page: %blog-title% | %tagline%
• Posts: %post_title% | %blog_title%
• Pages: %page_title% | %blog_title%
• Category pages: %category_title% | %blog_title%

The settings screens for page titles are pretty much identical for All-in-One SEO and Platinum SEO Pack. The settings screen for Headspace2 is quite different and offers more control but is perhaps slightly more difficult to use for beginners.

You can also change settings and write custom titles and descriptions on individual posts or pages. If you add a title or meta description to an individual post it will override the global settings.

Customising WordPress titles without using a plugin

To display the title on your home page or front page as “Blog title | Tagline” and single posts or pages as “Post/page title | Blog title” just add the following code to you header.php replacing the existing <title> tag.

<title>
	<?php wp_title(''); ?><?php if(wp_title('', false)) { echo ' | '; } ?><?php bloginfo('name'); if(is_home() || is_front_page()) { echo ' | '; bloginfo('description'); } ?>
</title>

3. Setting up site name and description(s)

This might seem obvious and very easy to do but it’s something that can easily be overlooked.

• On your home page use H1 for your site name and tagline
• On all other pages change the site name and tagline either to an h3 or lower or wrap it in a div, personally I prefer changing it to a div as the site name is not what is important on subsequent pages and unless you’ve got an extremely well known brand it’s not what people will be searching for either.

To only display your blog name and description as h1 and/or h2 on your home page or front page add this code snippet to your theme header.php

    <?php if (is_home() || is_front_page()) { ?>
        <h1 id="blog-title"><?php bloginfo('name') ?></h1>
        <h2 id="blog-description"><?php bloginfo('description') ?></h1>
    <?php } else { ?>
        <div id="blog-title"><?php bloginfo('name') ?></div>
        <div id="blog-description"><?php bloginfo('description') ?></div>
    <?php } ?>

Make good use of the category descriptions

Spend some time writing descriptions for all your categories. When using wp_list_categories(); which is typically used in your main menu or category listing WordPress will by default use the category description as the title attributes for each category. I also like to add the category description as an H2 or H3 on the category archive pages in my theme. Category descriptions can also be used as your meta description on category archive pages. Category descriptions can be edited in your WP admin interface under Posts > Categories.

To display your category description on your category archive pages add the following to you category.php page.

	<?php $categorydesc = category_description(); if ( ! empty( $categorydesc ) )
		echo apply_filters( 'archive_meta', '<h2 class="archive-meta">' . $categorydesc . '</h2>' ); ?>

Alternatively if you don’t have a category.php page your can add the folloing to your index.php file or archive.php file.

<?php
	if (is_category()) {
		$categorydesc = category_description(); if ( ! empty( $categorydesc ) )
		echo apply_filters( 'archive_meta', '<h2 class="archive-meta">' . $categorydesc . '</h2>' );
	}
?>

4. Optimising WordPress meta descriptions and keywords

Customising description meta tag in WordPress

Meta tags have little or no impact on your actual search engine rankings. However your meta description in particular will influence whether people find your site listing in search results interesting enough to click through to your website. Google and other search engines will use meta description as the text you see below the title of the search result in the search results page.

• Home page: Make sure your home page includes a meta description that describes what your site is about.
• Categories: For category archives you can use the category description
• Posts: On single posts you have multiple options. If you’ve added excerpts to your posts then they’re ideal candidates for meta description.

Adding custom meta descriptions in WordPress without a plugin

If you prefer to add this directly to you theme yourself then use the following code snippet:

<meta name="description" content="<?php
		// if home page output blog name and description
		if (is_home()) { bloginfo('name'); echo " - "; bloginfo('description');}
		// if single page output either excerpt if available or post title
	    elseif (is_single()) {
        	// check if excerpt exists for the post and output it if it does
        	if (!empty($post->post_excerpt)) {the_excerpt();}
            // otherwise output the post title
        	else {single_post_title('', true);}
        }
        // if category page output the category description
 	   	elseif (is_category()) {echo category_description();}

        // if it's any other page display this generic description
		else { echo 'Add your own generic site description here';}
	?>"
 />

You can do the same thing for pages, search results, tag archives or date archives with the following conditions:

• Pages: is_page()
• Search results: is_search()
• Tag archives: is_tag()
• Date archives: is_date()

You can also use custom fields to customise your own meta description on individual posts. First replace the elseif (is_single()) the following snippet to the

	<meta name="description" content="<?php
		// if home page output blog name and description
		if (is_home()) { bloginfo('name'); echo " - "; bloginfo('description');}
		// if single page output either excerpt if available or post title
	    elseif (is_single()) {
           	$custommeta = get_post_meta($post->ID, "MetaDescription", true);
        	// checks ot see if the custom field MetaDescription is not empty
            if ($custommeta !=='') {echo $custommeta;}
            // check if excerpt exists for the post and output it if it does
        	elseif (!empty($post->post_excerpt)) {the_excerpt();}
            // if there's no custom field or excerpt output the post title
        	else {single_post_title('', true);}
        }
        // if category page output the category description
 	   	elseif (is_category()) {echo category_description();}

        // if it's any other page display this generic description
		else { echo 'Add your own generic site description here';}
	?>"
 />

Using keywords meta tag in WordPress

Whilst the description meta tag is useful, the keywords meta tag offers very little benefit for rankings or otherwise. In the early days of search engines this meta tag was often used and abused and as a result most search engines no use it for ranking purposes. Google has specifically stated that they do not give any weighting whatsoever to meta keywords, for further details see Google does not use the keywords meta tag in their ranking.

Even though there’s very little evidence that meta keywords will help your rankings it certainly doesn’t hurt to include some relevant keywords in your keywords meta tag. The a quick and simple solutions for this in WordPress is to just list your tags as your meta keywords on individual posts.

Automatically adding meta descriptions and keywords in WordPress using plugins

If you’er using an SEO plugin like Headspace2, Platinum SEO Pack or All-In-One SEO Pack you can set these to automatically add meta descriptions to your site based on a set of rules you can define. They will also allow you to override global settings and customise meta descriptions and keywords on individual posts by via an additional admin panel on the edit posts or page screens.

5. Customising WordPress "more links"

Using the <!-- more --> quicktag in WordPress allows you to limit the content shown from a post on your home page, archives or search page. By default the anchor text for more links will just say "read more" which is not great for internal linking. A better solution is to make the anchor text more descriptive and include the post title it’s linking to. This will is not only good for your internal site SEO but can is also a stronger call to action for your readers.

Customising WP "more links" with plugins

If you’re using Headspace2 or you can go to Settings > Headspace then select Page Modules and drag and drop the more text module into the page module. This will add an option to specify the more text on a post by post basis. Personally I prefer to just use the post title but if you really like to tailor more links on a granular level then Headspace2 will make it easy for you to do so.

Customising WP "more links" by editing theme files

If you want to insert something similar in your own theme open up the index.php file, locate where your the_content() is being called and replace is with the following code. This will set the more text to …continue reading “post title” adding quotes around the post title as well as wrapping it in a <strong> tag. It also adds a span around the anchor text with a title attribute listing the title again.

<?php the_content('<span class="readmore" title="Read full article ' . get_the_title('', '', false) . '">...continue reading <strong>"' . get_the_title('', '', false) . '"</strong></span>' ); ?>

Or alternatively you can use something a bit simpler like:

	<?php the_content("Continue reading " . the_title('', '', false)); ?>

If your design does not easily accomodate long anchor text or you don’t want to display the long anchor text for practical or aesthetic reasons then I suggest you at least include a title attribute on the more link. This won’t be as effective for SEO purposes but it’s better than nothing and it will assist your users.

<?php the_content('<span class="readmore" title="Read full article ' . get_the_title('', '', false) . '">read the full article</span>'); ?>

Customising WordPress "more links in Thematic

If you’re using Thematic just add the following code to your functions.php file. This will add a span around your more link with a class to allow you to style it differently with CSS. It also adds a title attribute to the span with the name of the post it’s linking to and includes the post name in the anchor text with the prefix …comintiue reading “post name”.

function childtheme_more_text($content) {
	$content = '<span class="readmore" title="Read full article ' . get_the_title('', '', false) . '">...continue reading "' . get_the_title('', '', false) . '"</span>';
	return $content;
}
add_filter('more_text', 'childtheme_more_text');

Bonus Tip: Install the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin automatically creates special XML sitemap and submits it to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com. Using an XML sitemap is a great way to ensure that the search engine robots will find and index all of your pages. It’s great to ensure new sites are quickly indexed and equally useful for blogs with frequent updates to ensure that new pages and posts are indexed. Using an XML Sitemap does not guarantee that your pages are included in search engines, but it does provide helpful hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site which is particularly useful if your site structure and internal linking is a bit shoddy. The plugin uses Sitemap Protocol 0.9 defined by sitemaps.org. It’s an open standard with support from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Summary

That’s it for now, the optimisation areas covered will improve your general on-page SEO for WordPress and hopefully give you a bit of a boost in rankings. In the next article I’ll be covering Canonical URLs and how to avoid duplicate content, how to format your posts using semantic HTML, tips for cleaning up your code and more.

Having a well designed functional website is great, however it will do you little good if nobody can find it.
Regardless of what you are trying to achieve with your website you will always need traffic; and the largest source of website traffic will almost always come from search engines. In order to increase the amount of traffic your website receives from search engines your site needs to rank well for relevant search terms across multiple search engines.

The higher a Web site ranks in the search results of a particular search term, the greater the chance that the site will be visited by a user. Few Internet users click through beyond the first or second result pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is vital for directing more search engine traffic toward the website.

The 3 core aspects of Search Engine Optimisation

SEO can roughly be divided into the following three categories or aspects.

• On-Page Optimisation

• On-Site Optimisation

• Off-Site Optimisation

In addition there are two “schools of SEO”

• White hat SEO

  White hat SEO refers to the ethical practice of SEO. White hat SEO relies on original and quality content whilst adhering to guidelines provided by search engines and targeting keywords and phrases that are relevant to the content on the website.

• Black hat SEO

  Black hat SEO refers to unethical use of SEO, employing questionable or prohibited techniques such as various spamming techniques. This type of SEO may provide short term benefits but tend not to work long term and if caught may incur penalties and even being completely delisted by search engines.

You could of course argue that there is also a third grey area, which is true, but I prefer to look at it more as a white hat approach that is utilising a few questionable tactics that may not be explicitly banned by search engines (yet).

Consider your goals carefully before turning to the dark side

Delving into grey or darker areas is not just a matter of personal choice and risk management. Whilst utilising some of these tactics may reap some temporary short term gains they will most likely come back to haunt you and cost you in the long run. If you site is getting lots of traffic but most of it are for non-relevant terms then very few of your visitors will convert to users or customers.If your content is relevant to the terms visitors used to find your site you’ll find that your bounce rate won’t be through the roof and you’ll convert more visitors to users, members or customers.

If you’re considering outsourcing your SEO then make sure you’re comfortable with the tactics and strategies they’ll be emplyoing on your behalf. The end result could not only be loss in search engine rankings but also damage to your brand. Back in 2006 Google banned the corporate BMW website in Germany for spamming search engines. BMWs website was nowhere to be found in Google for quite some time resulting in traffic dropping off to a trickle and causing great embarrassment for the company. The poor choice by BMW’s marketing department when selecting an external SEO agency still serves as a cautionary tale years later.

Google’s advice on the matter:

• "A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you."
• Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?""
• See Google’s webmaster guidelines for further reading.

On-page SEO methods

On-page SEO involves, among other things, using keywords and key phrases to optimise the following:

• Page titles (i.e. the title tag)
• File names (i.e. the name of each html page)
• Alt text (i.e. the alt attribute on images)
• Anchor text (i.e. the text used in your links)
• Meta tags (in particular meta description but also in a lesser extent meta keywords)
• Site structure & Navigation
• On-page text (text placement, use of keywords, keyword density and proximity)
• Heading tags (use of h1, h2 etc.)
• Semantic HTML ( use tags for the specific meaning attached to them, e.g. h1, h2 for headers, ul & li for lists etc.)

On-Site SEO methods

On-site SEO involves the structure and navigation of the site itself and deals among other things with the optimisation of:

• Site structure and information architecture
• Site layout (placement in the code in the of a site can have an impact on the amount of search engine benefit contributed. E.g. elements such as on-page text higher up in the code of a page is given more weighting than elements far down in the code)
• Site navigation (text links, logical structure, navigational scent paths)
• Site map (accessible site map that will assist search engines to find and index all the pages of your site)

Off-Site SEO methods

Off-Site SEO refers to techniques, strategies and factors that do not actually occur on the pages of the site being optimised. Search engines rate the importance of your site by looking at other sites that link to your site. Getting a link from another site that has similar or relevant content and is well ranked is viewed by the search engines to be an endorsement of your site.

Inbound links

The amount of other sites that are linking to your site, the benefit from a link will greatly differ depending on the site linking to you.

• Sites with similar or relvant content have a higher impact
• Sites with a high ranking or authority will have a higher impact
• Sites with little or no ranking and no relevancy will have little or no impact

Link building strategies

• Reciprocal linking (asking for links from on-topic sites in return for linking back to them)
• Directory listings (getting listed in various online directories in on-topic categories)
• Writing content for online publications (this will usually allow you to link back to your site)
• Syndicating content (using RSS or similar technology to syndicate your content across multiple other sites to receiving inbound links as well as additional traffic)

Getting indexed

In order for your site to be ranked at all it first needs to be indexed by a search engine. To get indexed a site first needs to be visisted a search engine spider (aka. search engine crawler). Proper use of SEO methods make your website more search engine friendly by assisting search engine spiders to find and index all the pages of your site and to identify what each page is about. However making the site spider friendly should not be done at the expense your human visitors, it is vital that your site is user friendly as well as spider friendly. It won’t help you much if you can get a lot of traffic to your site if none of them are able to use the site correctly or find what they are looking for.

1. Human friendly (good legibility, quality unique content, ease of use etc.)
2. Spider friendly (alt text, meta tags, header and anchor tags, semantic markup etc.)

Summary

The most important thing you will need for your website is content. Without quality unique content your site will offer little of value to neither users nor spiders. Humans are quite happy with content such as video or images however search engine spiders are more particular about the type of content and prefer text above anything else. The majority of your SEO efforts should go towards quality content that is structured well and can be easily accessed and read by your users as well as your friendly neighbourhood search engine spider. Taking a bit of time to properly format and structure your written content will pay off in the long run. If you have something unique and interesting the quality of your content will help you when trying to get inbound links. You might even start getting a few links without asking for them.

But what exactly does semantically correct HTML mean? HTML is a markup language, and as with other languages, HTML tags and attributes can have a meaning (semantics) attached to them. Typically HTML elements can roughly be categorised into the following:

• Semantic elements (cite, code, em, p, strong etc.); have specific meaning attached to them
• Presentational elements (b, i, font, br etc.); do not have any meaning attached to them and only alter visual presentation

When using semantic markup your content can be read and interpreted by software. Why is this important? Humans can easily distinguish elements on a web page purely from their visual attributes, and it’s normally easy to identify a header or a paragraph on a web page. For software it’s not that easy, in order for content of a web page to be machine friendly it needs to be contained within the relevant semantic elements. E.g. p for paragraphs, ul for unordered lists, h1, h2 etc. for headings and so on.

Common Structural Semantic Elements

Benefits of semantic markup

• SEO benefits; semantic markup makes it easier for search engines to find and index the content on your pages and increases the chances of your site being ranked better for relevant topics.
• Accessibility; your website is more accessible; semantic markup .
• Flexibility; easier to change the layout with CSS, the markup is simpler and easier to handle.
• Maintenance; plain, structured code makes it easier to edit and make changes rather than searching through multiple nested tables.