Here are a few quick jottings on making your WordPress enabled site or blog more search engine friendly. These are garnered form my own experience of building WordPress blogs and ensuring that they get into Google and elsewhere.
- Sitemap Plugin
At the very least you need to ensure you have a sitemap plug-in installed. The one that I use is Google XML Sitemaps, and which not only automatically generates your XML sitemap but also ensures that Google, Bing and Yahoo are pinged every time you update the WordPress. In your WordPress make sure you put the focus on your homepage, posts and pages, and reduce the importance of other so-called archive and category pages. With your sitemap generated, it’s worth making sure that you go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and submit the sitemap, as well as to other search engine admin panels. - Robots.txt
Make sure that you setup a robots.txt file in your web root and that you block any access to tag, category and archive pages to ensure that they do not polute the importance of your post and home pages. Even if you do not include them in the sitemap, Google and other spiders will hit your site and pick them up, which is where the robots.txt file is invaluable. - Meta Plugin
Make sure that you install a meta-data editor plugin such as HeadSpace2. This way you can optimise the meta content of your site in terms of the page title, page description and page keywords. Leaving this process to WordPress is pretty much a waste of time and won’t help you as much. Avoid keyword stuffing and make for readable and enticing page titles and descriptions. To this end you might want to read SEOmoz’s article SEO Best Practices: New Policies based on Updated Correlation Data. - Links and Images
Make sure that you always provide ALT options to the images you upload into your WordPress image library and that you provide keywords in the titles for the pages you are hyperlinking to in your posts and pages. Think as much about quality of output as much as quantity, don’t get sloppy, simply get into a routine and habit when posting content to your CMS. I always make sure that external links have a title and link to a new window, and I do that out of habit, I also always update the image meta data once I have uploaded to the library form my desktop. - Other Content
If, like me, you host content elsewhere on your site that is outside of the WordPress engine then make sure you include it in another sitemap and post that to Webmaster Tools also. Nothing stops you submitting multiple sitemaps to Google and if you do not then these other pages will likely fall foul of the process and be lost in the SEO equation, getting pushed way-way-way down on the significance scale in the resultset for your web site. - Anything else?
Yes you need to continue to do all the other self-marketing best practices required for raising the importance of your site, be it back links or anything else With these 6 SEO-friendly tips alone you are not going to make a hit, but if them and added effort your site should be a resounding success. If nothing else follow Google’s own rules about good SEO which is to provide useful and original content for the web.
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
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