Wordpress SEO for Complete Idiots….like me.

Posted by Bill as Blogging Tips, SEO

If you’ve been blogging for very long at all then you have surely run across the term SEO. It’s one of those terms that most bloggers know a bit about, they know it’s important, they know they should pay attention to it, but they still don’t.

If you want a leg up on your competition then attention to your SEO is a good start. Most new bloggers don’t take the necessary steps to optimize Wordpress until it’s too late. It has been my experience that they don’t do it for two reasons, they don’t know how important it is and they think it is far more difficult than it is. This article will show you how simply you can optimize your blog for the search engines and gain more traffic.

If you have more than one SEO plugin installed, then you have too many and they may be creating conflicts with each other. If you are running Wordpress, you have access to an awesome all in one plugin that will take care of your SEO for you. It’s called All in One SEO pack, and it takes care of most of your SEO issues automatically.

Install is the typical Plugin…download, unzip, ftp and activate. You have an options panel to set up the plugin and then you’re done. Let’s take a look.
Here is a screen shot of what the options panel looks like:

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Home Title: This will be the text that appears in your Explorer bar at the very top of your browser. The very first thing that search engines see. Set it up with your keywords and a creative tag line.

Home Description and Keywords: Enter your homepage information here, a description of your blog and the keywords that you are trying to show up for in a search engine. Keep it to 9 or less keywords and make sure you don’t repeat any of you keywords more than 2 times in your description. By doing this you are setting something called the Meta information. The Meta information tells the search engine spiders what your blog is about, it will help them categorize you.

Title Rewrites: Leave these as the plug in sets them. They are optimized for search engines and basically what they are doing is changing the order that the bot will read the info from your pages. In the default setting Wordpress is not so great….so set it and forget it and make sure you check the “rewrite titles” box.

Manual Control: If you still want your meta information to be customized on each individual post, then you have that option via your “write” dashboard. In most cases I will not use the manual function but in case you truly want to optimize post by post, we will take a look at it. You find the menu placed on your “Write” panel where you write a new post. Once the plug in is installed you will find it down under the WYSIWIG window.

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Title Tags - By default, WordPress will actually add your post title as the title tag for the individual post. This is not always ideal and what this box will allow you to do is target the post title to your readership, but use a different title tag that only the search engines see. You can verify this is working by right clicking on your post and viewing the title tag info at the top of the page. THAT is what the search engines sees….not your How to Make Millions in Ten Easy Lessons post title.

Meta Keywords - By default, WordPress will actually use your category assigned to your post as the keyword, but we all know this is often not a great indicator of what the post is about. All-in-One SEO Pack also provides a keyword field that you can enter in your own keywords, but it also allows you to automate this process if you wish. I set mine to automate in case I am lazy and don’t write meta keywords for each post. I try to select categories that would make good title tags or meta keywords anyways so this works for me. If you don’t check the “Use categories for Meta Keywords” then make sure that you insert tags and meta keywords manually at the end of every post.

Meta Description - The meta description is the description that the search engines will use when displaying their search results, so this can be just as crucial as your title when it comes to getting web surfers to click over to your website. This is essentially an “advertisement” for your blog post. The “If you read my earlier post” is the part that you would be modifying if you type a description in here…..otherwise it will use the first 160 characters of your post…..this is your advertisement that would show up in a search engine search.

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Pretty cool so far and you’re pretty much done. In case you haven’t noticed…you haven’t had to do hardly anything, except enter your title, description and keywords.That’s kind of the point….after all SEO for idiots needs to be easy.You have one more step to take before you are done and that is to address the Permalink structure of your posts. In default mode, Wordpress is awful and is not setup to with an optimum permalink. A permalink is, as you may have guessed, a permanent link to your post. If you ever want to reference a post then you will want a link that is easy to find, easy to follow and will make sense to a search engine bot.Do not skip this step…..it’s that important.

Let’s take a look: Look at the URL structure….that ?p=132 is very SEO unfriendly, not to mention user unfriendly.

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You can optimize this very easily….go to your Options tab on your Admin panel and you should see a link to your Permalinks. Click on it and this what you will see.

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Now, like anything, debate abounds as to what the best method of setting your permalinks. I have read far and wide and observed most of the top blogs and they all seem to have settled on the method that I have shown above. What this will do is make your post “title” into your permalink. The only other option that I have seen considered viable from the choices above is the date option, however the post title seems to be a much more common choice, and I prefer it that way myself.

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After

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A better looking url to both humans and search bots.As you can see SEO couldn’t be easier for Wordpress, all you do is install the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin, set your permalink structure and you have 95% of the work done.
You will have SEO gurus telling you that it isn’t this easy and sure, maybe their are a other things you can do but for the vast majority of us “non-dorks” then this will suffice just fine.

Install is just like any other wordpress plugin, you upload it to your plug in folder and activate, just make sure you go to your Options tab and set the fields as discussed and voila, you be done. Your blog is now SEO friendly and it should take you all of about 15 minutes.

You can find the plug in here at All In One SEO.If you aren’t using it already, stop, drop and roll on over to the link and download it now. It’s one of my favorite plug ins….what are yours?

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