In a previous post I covered 5 SEO tips for beginners. Those tips still apply to SEO and WordPress so make sure you check out that post as well. So in no particular order here are 5 SEO Tips for WordPress websites.
Use Images in Your Posts
Using images serves multiple purposes:
- You get to use keyword-rich “alt” attributes, “title” attributes, and filenames for the images themselves.
- Your site will also start to show up in image search engines.
- Helps break up the text on the page making it more visually appealing leading to a higher probability that users will actually read all of your content
Write Compelling Titles
The title of your page or post should contain the keywords that you want to rank highly for. Once you get your content to rank well in Google or other search engines you also have to get the user to actually click through to your website. Look at the titles of other similar websites in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Which ones are getting you to click through? Ranking high will get you nothing if nobody actually clicks on your link.
Use Tags for Extra Keywords
After WordPress 2.3 was released you have the option of including tags. This allows you to assign keywords to your blog posts. Each tag gets its own webpage so you’ll be generating your own keyword-oriented internal backlink pages.
Install the WordPress SEO Plugin
This plugin by Joost de Valk is just awesome. It really makes Search Engine Optimization super easy.
Once installed the plugin:
- Allows you to override title and meta tags on your homepage as well as your individual posts
- Lets you add “noindex” to your category and/or tag pages to avoid duplicate content
- Sets up a 301 redirect right in the post or page if you need it
- And more
Use “Pretty Permalinks”
Pretty permalinks changes the default file structure of WordPress from numbers in your URL to basically keyword URLs and it’s super easy to do.
To enable or change them, first login to your WordPress website, then go to Options > Permalinks.
Never have them set to “Default” or “Numeric”. You should set them as either:
- Post Name Only: To have your URL be the same as the title of your post or page select “Custom” and type /%postname%/
- Category Based: If you want to separate your blog/website into multiple topics, then category-based URLs is what you want. To set it up, select “Custom” and type /%category%/%postname%/
SEO is a huge topic so I will be covering it some more in the future. If you have another tips you’d like to share please feel free to comment on this post.