Building the Perfectly Optimized Site Using WordPress
In the past few years WordPress (www.WordPress.org) has become the standard
blog publishing platform because of its ease of use, rich feature set,
available plugins, and standards compliance. Of course, the fact that it's
free and open source hasn't hurt either.
While developers have flocked to using WordPress as their blogging platform
of choice, it's often overlooked as a content management platform for
non-blog sites. WordPress allows you to create pages that are automatically
are added to the sites' navigation bar and can be customized by a PHP
programmer to handle just about any task you'd want to accomplish with a
site. Free themes and plugins can help reduce programming and design costs
immensely, and with a little work WordPress can be customized to automate
many of the most arduous SEO tasks. The result is a powerful and easy to
use search engine friendly publishing platform that eliminates the majority
of both upfront and ongoing SEO work.
Since WordPress is already very standards compliant, you and your programmer
don't need to worry about proper HTML formatting - that's all taken care of
for you. There are, however, a few simple steps that should be taken to
turn your WordPress site into the ultimate search-optimized site:
Create Unique Title Tags
Search Engine Optimization firm SEOmoz recently polled 37 of the best SEO's
about what factors influence Google's algorithm. The NUMBER ONE factor
influencing a high ranking was "Keyword Use in Title Tag". For that reason
alone you want your Title Tag to include the most relevant keywords related
to your post. Unfortunately WordPress defaults to having your site title as
the first thing in your Title Tag. Ideally you'd have a customizable page
title show up first.
For example, if your company named Cool Designs is located in New York and
has a Web Design page, the Title Tag "New York City Web Design - Cool
Designs" is more likely to rank high for NYC-related web design queries than
a page that has "Cool Designs - Web Design" as the Title Tag. Fortunately
WordPress has a SEO Title Tag plugin that allows you to customize each Title
Tag.
Turn on Permalinks
The default WordPress post or page has a permanent link that looks like
http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123. This is what's called a dynamic URL - a URL
that uses variables in the URL to determine the page content. In this case
the "p" variable determines what is shown when the page is loaded. And
while dynamic URLs are efficient for programming, they aren't exactly search
engine or user friendly.
Years ago search engines had trouble indexing dynamic URLs. That's not
necessarily the case anymore (although you might as well remove all doubt),
but static URLs like http://www.yoursite.com/keyword-filled-post-title/
still offer several advantages. The primary advantage is the cleanliness of
the URL, which really has nothing at all to do with search rankings. A URL
with real words in it (as opposed to numbers and question marks) is much
more enticing for people to click on when search results are returned, and
consequently is much easier for them to remember when re-visiting your site.
Having relevant keywords from your post in your URL can also have a slight
impact in boosting your rankings for those key words.
This change can be done with URL rewriting. Normally doing this requires
quite a bit of programming effort. Not with WordPress. Just go to Options
à Permalinks and change your default structure to the date and name based
structure.
Create Sitemaps
Both HTML sitemaps (a page that lists links to every other page on your
site) and XML sitemaps (a file that lists all of the pages on your site for
search engine spiders) can aid immensely in getting every page on your site
indexed by all of the search engines. Automating each type of sitemap
usually requires a few hours of programming for most sites. Of course,
WordPress has a HTML sitemap plugin and a XML sitemap plugin that does all
of the work for you. After creating the XML sitemap, be sure to submit it
to Google and Yahoo to access extensive crawling information about your
site.
Install Analytics
All of the traffic in the world isn't worth very much if you aren't
converting any of it to sales, leads, newsletter signups, or whatever the
goal of your site may be. Google Analytics has become the premiere
analytics software because of its simple and customizable interface, breadth
of features, and price (free). In addition to the normal important
analytics metrics - visitors, unique visitors, page views, new/returning
visitors, traffic sources, most viewed content, etc - Google Analytics has
goal tracking and e-commerce revenue tracking so you can see exactly where
each conversion is coming from. After signing up for an account, the Google
Analytics plugin for WordPress will have you up and running in minutes.
If you also use WordPress for its blogging capabilities, you'll want to
install the Sociable plugin and sign up for a Feedburner account to make
sure you get the most out of your blog. Sociable allows people to submit
your posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Furl,
Technorati, reddit, and StumbleUpon, which can be VERY effective for
promoting extremely viral sites and articles. Feedburner offers a plethora
of advancements to your RSS feed for your posts, but from a SEO standpoint
the most important thing is to configure it to automatically ping search
engines and blog directories. This ensures that your posts always get
indexed, and usually gets them indexed fast.
There you have it - a perfectly optimized site using WordPress and other
free tools in about a hundredth of the time it would take you if you built
it from scratch!
I'm protected by SpamBrave
http://www.spambrave.com/
In the past few years WordPress (www.WordPress.org) has become the standard
blog publishing platform because of its ease of use, rich feature set,
available plugins, and standards compliance. Of course, the fact that it's
free and open source hasn't hurt either.
While developers have flocked to using WordPress as their blogging platform
of choice, it's often overlooked as a content management platform for
non-blog sites. WordPress allows you to create pages that are automatically
are added to the sites' navigation bar and can be customized by a PHP
programmer to handle just about any task you'd want to accomplish with a
site. Free themes and plugins can help reduce programming and design costs
immensely, and with a little work WordPress can be customized to automate
many of the most arduous SEO tasks. The result is a powerful and easy to
use search engine friendly publishing platform that eliminates the majority
of both upfront and ongoing SEO work.
Since WordPress is already very standards compliant, you and your programmer
don't need to worry about proper HTML formatting - that's all taken care of
for you. There are, however, a few simple steps that should be taken to
turn your WordPress site into the ultimate search-optimized site:
Create Unique Title Tags
Search Engine Optimization firm SEOmoz recently polled 37 of the best SEO's
about what factors influence Google's algorithm. The NUMBER ONE factor
influencing a high ranking was "Keyword Use in Title Tag". For that reason
alone you want your Title Tag to include the most relevant keywords related
to your post. Unfortunately WordPress defaults to having your site title as
the first thing in your Title Tag. Ideally you'd have a customizable page
title show up first.
For example, if your company named Cool Designs is located in New York and
has a Web Design page, the Title Tag "New York City Web Design - Cool
Designs" is more likely to rank high for NYC-related web design queries than
a page that has "Cool Designs - Web Design" as the Title Tag. Fortunately
WordPress has a SEO Title Tag plugin that allows you to customize each Title
Tag.
Turn on Permalinks
The default WordPress post or page has a permanent link that looks like
http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123. This is what's called a dynamic URL - a URL
that uses variables in the URL to determine the page content. In this case
the "p" variable determines what is shown when the page is loaded. And
while dynamic URLs are efficient for programming, they aren't exactly search
engine or user friendly.
Years ago search engines had trouble indexing dynamic URLs. That's not
necessarily the case anymore (although you might as well remove all doubt),
but static URLs like http://www.yoursite.com/keyword-filled-post-title/
still offer several advantages. The primary advantage is the cleanliness of
the URL, which really has nothing at all to do with search rankings. A URL
with real words in it (as opposed to numbers and question marks) is much
more enticing for people to click on when search results are returned, and
consequently is much easier for them to remember when re-visiting your site.
Having relevant keywords from your post in your URL can also have a slight
impact in boosting your rankings for those key words.
This change can be done with URL rewriting. Normally doing this requires
quite a bit of programming effort. Not with WordPress. Just go to Options
à Permalinks and change your default structure to the date and name based
structure.
Create Sitemaps
Both HTML sitemaps (a page that lists links to every other page on your
site) and XML sitemaps (a file that lists all of the pages on your site for
search engine spiders) can aid immensely in getting every page on your site
indexed by all of the search engines. Automating each type of sitemap
usually requires a few hours of programming for most sites. Of course,
WordPress has a HTML sitemap plugin and a XML sitemap plugin that does all
of the work for you. After creating the XML sitemap, be sure to submit it
to Google and Yahoo to access extensive crawling information about your
site.
Install Analytics
All of the traffic in the world isn't worth very much if you aren't
converting any of it to sales, leads, newsletter signups, or whatever the
goal of your site may be. Google Analytics has become the premiere
analytics software because of its simple and customizable interface, breadth
of features, and price (free). In addition to the normal important
analytics metrics - visitors, unique visitors, page views, new/returning
visitors, traffic sources, most viewed content, etc - Google Analytics has
goal tracking and e-commerce revenue tracking so you can see exactly where
each conversion is coming from. After signing up for an account, the Google
Analytics plugin for WordPress will have you up and running in minutes.
If you also use WordPress for its blogging capabilities, you'll want to
install the Sociable plugin and sign up for a Feedburner account to make
sure you get the most out of your blog. Sociable allows people to submit
your posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Furl,
Technorati, reddit, and StumbleUpon, which can be VERY effective for
promoting extremely viral sites and articles. Feedburner offers a plethora
of advancements to your RSS feed for your posts, but from a SEO standpoint
the most important thing is to configure it to automatically ping search
engines and blog directories. This ensures that your posts always get
indexed, and usually gets them indexed fast.
There you have it - a perfectly optimized site using WordPress and other
free tools in about a hundredth of the time it would take you if you built
it from scratch!
I'm protected by SpamBrave
http://www.spambrave.com/
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