SEO Tips & Information

By default a the title for a Wordpress blog post includes the blog title as well. For example, a post on thie blog with the title:

How to use the All-In-One SEO Package

would have a title something like:

How to use the All-In-One SEO Package | SEO Tips & Information

You can easily improve this title - so that it only contains information relevant to the post - using the All-In-One SEO Pack to change the title format. To change the format, do the following:-

1. Go to the admin section of the blog.
2. Click the Settings link (on the top right of the page).
3. Click the All In One SEO link in the menu bar that appears.
4. In the Post Title Format field, remove the text “| %blog_title%”.
5. At the bottom of the page, click the Save Updates button.

 Your browser should now only show the blog post title without the overall blog title when viewing a post.

See also : Improving the Page Title for Blogspot blogs

All In One SEO, Wordpress SEO Tips

Previously I made a post describing how to optimise the title, description and keywords for each post on a Wordpress blog using the All-In-One SEO Pack. The All-In-One SEO Pack can also be used to optimise the description and keyword for the blog home page.

By default, a Wordpress blog doesn’t have description and keywords meta tags but these can be enabled using the All-In-One SEO Pack.

To enter a description and keywords, do the following:-

1. Go to the admin section of the blog.
2. Click the Settings link (on the top right of the page).
3. Click the All In One SEO link in the menu bar that appears.
4. Enter the Home Title, Home Description and Home Keywords values you want for your blog.
5. At the bottom of the page, click the Save Updates button.

Your blog should now have meta description and keywords tags. To check this out, browse to the blog home page, right-click and select View Source from the browser’s context menu. Do a search for the description and keywords.

All In One SEO, Wordpress SEO Tips

It looks like a Google PageRank export has just happened and as always there are winners and losers.

Of the sites I’m associated with, my main site gained PR on some inner pages and my three blogs remained at the same PR. An arcade site and a shareware downloads site though gain a PR of 2 and 1 respectively from PR 0. My Software development site though went to PR 1 from 2. This last drop wasn’t unexpected as I haven’t done any link-building except for forum posting.

Google PageRank

If you’ve installed the All-In-One SEO Pack as a plug-in to Wordpress, you’ll find there are 3 extra fields to be completed when making a new blog post.

Title

This field should be set to the page title you want for the blog post. Mostly this can be set to the same text as the Title for the blog post.

Description

This field should contain a couple of sentences that neatly summarise the purpose and content of the blogpost. Remember that this description will act as the leader in the search engine results and should give people a good idea of the info they’ll be able to access if they click on your link in the SERPs.

Keyword

The Keyword field is less important than the Title and Description field but you can include a comma-delimited list of keywords appropriate to your blog post. These will be used as the meta keyword tag for the post page. Any keywords you list should be contained within the text of your post.

Here’s a picture showing how I completed the All-In-One SEO Pack fields for this post:

All In One SEO, Wordpress SEO Tips

When a Wordpress blog is first installed and you start making posts, the URLs are not ideal for SEO. The URL for a new blog post will be something like www dot myblog dot com/p?id=3. For SEO purposes, it’s far better to have meaningful, human-readable URLs such as www dot myblog dot com/my-interesting-post.html.

To make Wordpress use SEO-friendly URLs you need to switch on permalinks with a custom structure. Wordpress will then use better URLs even for existing posts on the blog.

To set up a custom permalink structure, follow these steps:-

1. Log in as the adminstrator on your WordPress blog.
2. Go to the Dashboard, click on the Setting link on the right near the top of the screen.
3. Click on the Permalinks hyperlink.
4. Check the Custom Structure radio button.
5. Enter this value (without quotes) as the custom structure: “/%category%/%postname%/”.
6. Click the Save Changes button.

Your URLs should now be SEO-friendly and based on the post titles and category names.

Wordpress SEO Tips

Google assigns each web page a PageRank between 0 and 10, The PageRank is a measure of the weight or importance Google gives the web page: 0 is the lowest importance and 10 the highest.

Here is Google’s definition of PageRank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Put simply, the more hyperlinks there are to a page the more important Google considers a page. Links from important pages count for more than links from less important pages.

In theory, if two web pages contain the words “mysterious algorithm” and a user searches for this on Google, the page with the higher pagerank will appear higher in the search results.

Historically, Google’s algorithm for assigning a rank to a web page was what distinguished the Google search engine from others such as Yahoo or Alta Vista. Google’s algorithm allowed the rapidly growing number of web pages on the internet to be catalogued and ranked making searches more meaningful to users. In more recent years though, Google has increasingly modified its ranking algorithm to be biased toward to content of webpages rather than the incoming links.

For more information, see PageRank on Wikipedia.

Google PageRank