Web Designer’s Quick Guide to

Wordpress SEO

By Mark Thompson
www.W3Mag.com
Initial Setup
www vs non-www

One of the great things about Wordpress is you don’t have to be a technical person to redirect your blog
to either the www or non-www. The reason you do this is to fix the duplicate content issue that happens
when your site is not redirect to one or the other. Whichever you go with (www or non-www) stick with it.
It also helps with inbound links and passing the full value of all of your links to one variation of the page,
instead of having some of the links pointing to the www and the others pointing to the non-www.

For example:

This post below technically has 4 different URLs which means there are multiple urls with the same
content. Now imagine you have this issue across your entire blog? This can turn into hundreds or
thousands of duplicate pages. By redirecting to the www or non-www will help reduce duplicate content.

 http://w3mag.com/2010/09/13/free-html-templates
 http://w3mag.com/2010/09/13/free-html-templates/
 http://www.w3mag.com/2010/09/13/free-html-templates/
 http://www.w3mag.com/2010/09/13/free-html-templates

Permalink Structure

Wordpress out of the box uses parameters in the URLs, which can affect the ability of your website to be
crawled. Especially for blogs that have lots and lots of content, you want to make sure your URLs are
keyword-rich and as close to the root directory as possible.

Personally I like keeping every post directly off of the root domain, which makes it short, clean and easy
to crawl for the search engines. Adding a category before the post name is fine, but I always felt the
shorter the URL, the better.
In Wordpress: Setting >> Permalinks

Add the below into the custom structure. If you want to add category before the post name, just do
/%category%/%postname%/. After you save the settings make sure you add the code they provide to
your .htaccess file or the internal pages will not display properly.
Uploading and Optimizing Images

This may seem like a simple task, however if you don’t have the proper permissions, you will get errors
when you try to upload images. Make sure your /uploads folder has permissions 777 so that you can
upload images to your folder. To change your permission you can do this in your hosting backend or by
using a FTP program like Filezilla.

Also, you will need to make sure your images are going into the proper directory. Depending on how you
setup your blog, you may need to adjust the path to your uploads folder.

In Wordpress: Settings >> Media

By default you will see the folder is wp-content/uploads, but if you have another directory like /httpdocs/
you may need to adjust it.

When you upload images, you will want to make sure you use a file naming convention that is keyword-
rich and related to what your post is talking about. For example, in this post it discusses the new
Feedburner interface that is currently in beta. As you can see, I used a file name, title, and alt text that is
relevant to what the post talks about. This will help better optimize the overall post and tell help the
search engines better understand that the image is showing.
Ping Services

Wordpress will automatically ping various websites and blogs to notify them that you have new content
posted on your blog. By pinging these services if can help generate more exposure and get your content
crawled faster by the search engines.

Go to Settings >> Writing

Add these Ping services: (download at http://w3mag.com/ping-services.txt)

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://pi ng.myblog.j p
blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
blogpeople.net/ping
blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.it/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.in/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.tw/ping/RPC2
blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2

Speed Up Your Blog

Even though it is extremely easy to add WP plugins to your blog, you want to be careful you don’t overdo
it. Each plugin you add will increase the load time of your blog and make it take longer for a user to load
each page. Search engines are also using load time as a factor in their algorithms, so you want to make
sure your website loads as fast as possible. Use these quick tips to help speed up your blog.

 Only use plugins that you absolutely use and need

 Host all your images locally on your own server
 Combined CSS/javascript files
 Use include CSS/javascript files (not on-page)
 Minimize JQuery, Flash, and programming code in general

Robots.txt File

A robots.txt file is simply a text file that tells the search engines which files and directories they should
index or not index. What you should do is create a plain “robots.txt” file and add the following to the file.
Then upload it to the root folder on your server.

*If your blog is in a subdirectory, prefix the above with the blog directory name, e.g. /rss => /blog/rss

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /rss
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$

Blog Post Structure

Meta Tag Optimization

The All in One SEO Pack will dynamically add optimize title and meta tags for each of your posts, but it is
important to understand what and why they are “optimized” tags.

Your Title tags should, for the most part, be structured “Post Title | Blog Name”, which allows you to
optimize for the long tail for each post. For example, if your blog post title was “Top 20 Twitter Stats
Resources”, if you have that title in the title tag and the H1 tag is could have a good chance to rank for the
phrase “Twitter Stats”. Also, since blogs usually have hundreds of pages, it can semi-automate your SEO
efforts, instead of having to manually add tags for each post.
Usually with the All in One SEO Pack, it pulls in the beginning post text as the meta description tag. This
isn’t exactly the best practice, but it can be tedious to hand craft each meta description tag. You do have
the option if you choose to.

Heading Tags

When designing your Single Post page you want to make sure you have your heading tags properly
structured on the page. You should always have your post title as an H1 tag, as it is the most important
content on the page and what you want to try and optimize for search engines.

When you create sub-heading within your content, those should be H2-H4.

Pagination

Give your users multiple ways of going deeper into your content. Adding pagination on your blog
homepage and breadcrumb trails throughout your blog can make it easier for users to navigate and find
archived content.

Comment Design to Encourage Commenting

After someone reads your blog post, what do you want them to do??? Well one goal for any blog, should
be to get the reader to leave a comment. Comments and user-generated content is what makes blogs so
appealing. But in order to get someone to comment, you need to not only ask people to comment, you
need to have a nicely designed comments area. Having a uniquely designed comment area including
features like user gravatars, reply notification, DoFollow link (check out CommentLuv plugin), and
comment totals can really enhance your comment section of your blog.

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

I won’t go too much into website tracking and analytics, but you should always install Google Analytics on
your site, so you can track website visitors. This is essential for any blog that is looking for ways to
improve their SEO. You will also want to install Google, Yahoo, and Bing Webmaster Tools, as they
provide a bunch of site diagnostic tools that will help identify 404 error pages, page loading issues,
broken links, xml sitemap submission, and other great tools.

Both Google Analytics and webmaster tools can be installed by inserting a small piece of javascript onto
your blog.

Conversion Optimization
A key part of Search Engine Optimization is converting users into customer, loyal readers, and
subscribers. In order to maximize your conversion rates on your blog, you need to have a number of lead
generation mechanisms in place.

Opt-in Forms

Having multiple opt-in forms for free premium content is always an easy and effective way of gaining a
visitors contact information.

RSS

Having your “Subscribe via RSS” call to action in a prominent place on your blog is key to gaining new
RSS subscribers. You should place it toward to the top of your sidebar, header, and/or the bottom of
each blog post. Having it in multiple locations ensures that the reader will see it and increase the chance
of them subscribing.

Social Media Sharing

Having users share your content with their social network can help drive more traffic and introduce your
blog to a new readership. Make sure you have plenty of ways to allow users to share your content
socially. Typically social media icons from Twitter, Facebook and popular social bookmarking sites like
Digg, StumbleUpon, and Yahoo Buzz will give a user lots of options on how they want to share your
content.
Free Essential Plugins

All in One SEO Pack

This SEO plugin is probably the best and most robust plugin for optimizing your blog for search
engines. This plugin will automatically optimize your blog category and post url structure, auto generate
title tags, avoid duplicate content issue by restricting search engines from accessing pages that have
duplicate content on them, and canonical tag integration.

Google XML Sitemap Generator

This plugin will automatically generate a XML sitemap of your wordpress blog that is formatted for
Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. Your sitemap will be sent to all of the search engines every time the
plugin rebuilds your XML sitemap. Having this plugin, ensures that the search engines are aware of all of
your posts and will help with the overall crawling of your blog.

Google Analyticator

This plugin will add your Google Analytics tracking script to every page on your blog. There are also
other options and features which give you more accurate tracking.

 Disable Admin Tracking

 Enable Event Tracking
  Track Outbound Link Clicks
 Track Downloads (PDF, CSV, DOC)
 Google Adsense Integration
 Ability to Modify Tracking Script

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images will automatically optimize all of your images by adding alt and title attributes. If you
do not have an alt or title attribute for your images, it will add one for you.

WPTouch

This plugin allows you to easily create a mobile friendly version of your blog. With the increase usage of
mobile and smartphones, having your blog compatible with smartphones is a MUST.

W3 Total Cache

Load time is becoming an important factor in search engine algorithms. Not to mention a page that loads
fast makes a visitor much happier and is more likely to stay on your site longer. W3 Total Cache will help
speed up the page load times by caching pages, removing white space and comments, and compressing
css and js files. Here are a few reasons why this plugin boasts it’s at least a 10x increase in site
performance.

 Enable Page Caching

 Enable Minify
 Enable Database Caching

Premium Essential Plugins

PopUp Domination

PopUp Domination is a plugin that displays a nicely designed lightbox popup to your visitor, which allows
you to place an offer and/or lead generation form in front of the user. This can quickly help to grow your
email marketing list and opt-in rates.

OIO Publisher
OIO Publisher allows you to easily place and accept advertising on your Wordpress blog. It allows you to
accept various types of banner advertisements, inlink ads, and paid reviews. This plugin integrates easily
with various payment gateways including Paypal and Google Checkout. Let this plugin automate the
tasks of accepting and managing advertising on your blog.

Thank You
Thank you for taking the time to download the Web Designers Guide to Wordpress SEO. I hope you
found it useful and that you will start applying what you learned to your blog. Please feel free to e-mail
your comments or suggestions if you would like at mark@w3mag.com.

Mark Thompson
- W3Mag.com & StayOnSearch.com

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