Quick & Dirty Wordpress SEO Checklist
Posted on February 5, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, SEO, Wordpress |
So you just installed Wordpress, and you’d like to SEO it out asap. Here is a quick list to SEO out any Wordpress install.
A Good Theme
This is a very important aspect of your sites SEO. You need a quality theme. When looking for a good theme, here are some points you need to consider.
- Clean and valid XHTML & CSS. This isn’t a “must”, but it ensures that search engines won’t have a difficult time reading your site. Doing this can only benefit your site.
- Visit my post on Standards Compliance Design to find links on the benefits of standards compliance design.
- Uses proper XHTML/HTML architecture. Only one H1 tag per page. Uses H2 for post titles.
- Use this code from Court’s Keyword Sniping Theme to produce a dynamic and unique H1 tag:
<h1>
Keyword
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> | <?php the_title(); ?><?php } ?><?php if ( is_page() ) { ?> | <?php the_title(); ?><?php } ?></h1>
- No hidden links
A good resource for quality themes is Courty’s SEO themes. If you’re targeting a keyword, check out her keyword sniping theme.
Settings
Ok, now you have Wordpress installed, and you’ve gotten your theme uploaded. Now you need to run though the Wordpress options and optimize the settings.
- Blogroll: Wordpress comes with a series of links listed in your blogroll right from install. Get rid of these right away. Do not waste your link juice linking to anything that you don’t consider a great site. Don’t waste these links linking to some A-list blogger who will never link back to you.
- Options -> General: Enter both a keyword rich title and tag line.
- Options -> Writing: Scroll down to update services. Click the link “Update Services”. Copy and paste the list on that link into the box under update services in your options. This will ping different services each time you update your site.
- Options -> Privacy: Select the first option. You want your site to be visible to search engines.
- Options -> Permalinks: This will remove the defaut dynamic links and replace then with readable permalinks. This will allow you to include keywords in the actual address of the page. Do this before you make any post. There is a link on that page that will take you to an explanation of the different tags. I use: /%year%/%postname%/ If you are confused, just select the 2nd option “Date and name based”.
Plugins
We’ve basically pushed Wordpress to its limits. From this point on we’re going to focus on extra things we can do to improve upon the basic Wordpress install. The following list are recommend plugins for SEO. Some people may suggest other plugins such as related posts, but I consider this list the minimum that you need for any set up.
- All in One SEO: If you are not using this, you are at a HUGE disadvantage. This is a must have. It automates many SEO functions. It also adds easy access to meta tag options directly from the edit post page. This is a MUST!!!
- No-WWW: Install this. Trust me. If you want to learn more about why this is useful, read my post on preferred domains.
- Google XML Sitemaps: This generates a valid XML sitemap for your blog and pings search engines each time you post/update.
- HTML Sitemap: This creates a HTML sitemap. This is different than the XML sitemap. It is an actually page and can be seen and read easily by humans. It also provides an easy means for a search engine to crawl your site.
Robots.txt
Prevent duplicate content! Learn more about How to Prevent Duplicate Content in Wordpress with a Robots.txt.
If you’re too lazy to read, just make a robots.txt with the following code:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /comments/
Posting Tips
Now we have your Wordpress all tricked out! Its time to start posting. Here are a couple of ideas to keep in mind when posting:
- Use keywords in your post titles.
- Use keywords in your post text.
- Internal link to other pages on your site regularly
- Use relative keywords as anchor text when doing so
- Link to your homepage with your site keyword in the anchor text
If you need keyword help, get the 6 Must Have Keyword Research Tools
I also cannot stress enough, only use ethical SEO practices.
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