BrokerThemes

Basic WordPress Configuration

WordPress has features that will help you to customize your site to get the best results for SEO optimization. The way that the WordPress software is designed it already has a good optimizing system which allows every single page to be indexed. Below are some minor changes which will help to enhance your WordPress blog even more.

Permalinks Structures
Permalinks are the permanent URL’s to your blog posts, and categories. This type of link is what another blogger uses to link to your article or post. A permalink is also used when you send a link to a post or story by email. The URL to each post is permanent and should never change.

By changing your permalinks to either

/post-name/

or

/category/post-name/

and installing a redirection plug-in you are making them work as SEO permalinks without having to do anything else.

You should also configure your root domain; just enable one, you shouldn’t enable both due to the fact that some search engines can not handle both. Another thing to do to your permalinks which will increase your WordPress SEO is to install the SEO Slugs plug-in. This plug-in automatically removes stop words from your slugs after you have saved a post, which means you won’t have really long URL’s when you do a sentence style post title.

Optimizing Your Titles
A search engines usually puts more weight on the early words. You should have your keywords towards the beginning of the page title to maximize your chance of being ranked higher. When people scan the result pages when search for something if your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more visible and could be clicked on more often.

Optimizing Your Descriptions
To start out with, you should give each of your categories a good description and also write good descriptions for each post or page that you are wanting to rank with. These descriptions are very important because they are the key to enticing people to click on your post or page.

You need to make sure they are concise, informative and that it gets their attention.
Descriptions that are hand written are the best way to get people interested in your site. Automated descriptions usually just pick the first sentence and sometimes the descriptions might be completely wrong. To have control over your descriptions and to use them to generate higher rankings and traffic to your blog you should stay away from automated descriptions.

Optimizing Images
Images are often overlooked when doing SEO optimization; however, you can use them to increase your traffic from the different image search engines. To make your images effective you should use good alt tags and names for the files which have your images in them. If writing your own good quality image tags is too time consuming, there is a plug-in that can you can use. The SEO Friendly Images plug-in will automatically add the post title or the image name to the image’s alt and title tag, which will save you time and effort.

Template Optimization

There are certain things that seem rather minor but are very effective in SEO template optimization. Below are a few adjustments you can make to improve the template optimization of your WordPress blog or website.

Adding Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are links found above the title post which should be added to your site and should link back to your homepage and to the category where your post is located. You want to use breadcrumbs because they allow search engines to determine your site structure more readily. Another reason is to make it easy for users to navigate through your site.

Check Your Headings
Headings are used to make it easier to determine what the topic of a page is. Heading are ranked in importance by using the range of h1 to h6, with h1 being the highest.

Usually the themes used in WordPress already have the correct rank, your post should always be an <h1> and so should your blog’s name when it is on the front page and on a single post. It should be no higher than <h3> when on category pages.

Cleaning up Your Code
You should keep your templates clean so it is easier for users to cache these files on the first load. Cleaning up your code will also make it so search engines won’t have to download these files most of the time. To clean up your code you should take all of the JavaScript and CSS files that are located in your template files and move them to external files.

Increase Your Speed
The number of pages a search engine can spider through on your blog or website depends on how fast your site loads. This is an important factor because the faster it is the more pages it can spider through.

To make your blog faster you should clean up the code and get rid of broken plug-ins and themes. If you make the header.php file do less queries and have your stylesheet, pingback, and feed URL’s static you will notice that your blog will run faster.

Another way to speed up your blog is to a use cache plug-in; you should notice quite a difference after it is installed. Another factor that sometimes goes unnoticed is your hosting provider or package. If you want to get the most optimization out of your blog you need hosting that can handle and sustain high loads.

Reevaluating the Sidebar
You should reconsider site wide links on every page and limit them to your homepage; this can be done with some widgets also. Since Google and some of the other search engines heavily discount your site wide links there isn’t really a good reason to have them anywhere but on your homepage. Search engines will also discount links on single post pages because they are not related to the topic at hand. These will not help your page ranking so you might as well keep them on the homepage too.

If you have widgets similar to the above mentioned, you should place them only where they will do the most for your SEO template optimization. One solution to this problem is to use two sidebars, one on your homepage and the other on your sub pages. The only other option would be to write your own specific plug-ins designed to be able to designate where your links can be placed.

Offsite SEO

When most people think about SEO for their blogs or websites the first things that usually come to mind is keywords and content. While these are two very good ways to get higher rankings and increase traffic, going offsite to increase the SEO for your site is a smart move.

Go Offsite and Follow Your Commenters
Going offsite means actually following your visitors to their websites and leaving a comment on their blog. Make sure when leaving comments pertaining to their articles that your comments are insightful and interesting, thus giving you more visibility and recognition. This may seem like a lot of work but the benefits could be tenfold.

The percentage of people who actually comment on a blog is very low, around 1 percent. With the percentage this low you have to follow the commenter because if they took the time to comment then they must be really interested in what you have to say. Therefore, you should take the time to comment on their site, which could lead to new leads, prospects and to forming a network. All of those things are vital aspects of having a successful business.

Use Twitter
For those who are not familiar with Twitter, it is a chic or modern form of micro-blogging or chatting. All of the “in” people are there and most of them read their “tweets” religiously. You can use WordTwit or Twitter Tools with your WordPress blog and all of your posts can be announced on Twitter. People who use Twitter love to comment on this site, so you will probably get some comments and more traffic to your site.

Find Related Blogs
If one of your goals is to get higher rankings for specific keywords, you should go to Google Blogsearch and enter in your keywords and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those words. The next step is to go to these blogs and read them and post interesting comments. You can also follow-up their posts by doing a post on your blog and link it back to them. This is the key to getting the links needed to increase your ranking. The key is communicating and becoming part of the network or community in which you have a common bond.

The more offsite SEO work you do the better your ranking will be and you can also increase the number of visitors to your site. Using offsite SEO is the way to get people in your niche market or your target market familiar with your services and products.  By putting yourself out there you are becoming more visible and will be more recognized in your field. Being recognized leads to building respect and trust among your peers and consumers.

Another benefit from offsite SEO work, which is not so obvious, is you will be more knowledgeable about the current market in your field of expertise. By reading other blogs and researching topics in your market you will know what the consumers likes and dislikes. You will also be up-to-date on new products and services. This is a good way to build a network and to also know what the competition has to offer. Overall, even though doing offsite SEO is hard work and time consuming it may well be worth it in the long run.