SEO Tips & Information

A simple SEO tip for building links to your blog posts is to enable pinging in the Wordpress Admin pages.

Pinging the major search engines and blog directories notifies them that you’ve made a new post so they should come and index it double-quick. On this blog, a new post normally appears in the Google search results within 5 minutes of being published.

The bigger benefit of pinging though is that there are a loads of automatic blogs that pick up new posts and link to them. It’s usual that within a few hours each new post on this blog picks up 3 or 4 links from other blogs as a result of pinging. These links aren’t of the highest quality but never turn down the opportunity for an easy link.

To enable pinging, you need to tell Wordpress which pinging services to use when a new blog post is published. To do this:-

1. Log into your blog as the admin.
2. Click on the Settings link over on the right, near the top of the page.
3. Click on the Writing link on the left.
4. Paste the links to pinging sites in the Update Services field at the bottom of the page.
5. Press the Save Changes button.

There are hundreds of pinging services you can use, but there are only a few major ones worth bothering with. Here’s the list I use.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping

If you want to easily find out when someone links to your posts, enable trackbacks when you write a post. When another Wordpress blog links to you, you’ll then get a comment on the post being linked to in the form of a trackback. Askimet will pick these trackbacks up as spam so you can easily delete them before they get displayed as comments, but it’s a quick and easy way of knowing who’s linking to you.

For more Wordpress SEO Tips read Improving Wordpress blogpost titles and How to use the All-In-One SEO Pack.

Link-building, Wordpress SEO Tips

By default, a Wordpress installation is nofollow, i.e. any comments on the blog will have the rel=”external nofollow” attribute applied. There are a number of reasons for going dofollow and rewarding people who make a good comment with a decent backlink. One easy way to make a Wordpress blog dofollow is to install the Do Follow Plugin by Semiologic. Follow these instructions:-

1. Go to http://www.semiologic.com/software/dofollow/ and download the sem-dofollow.zip plugin.
2. Unzip the plugin to a folder on your hard drive.
3. Upload the unzipped plugin folder to the wp-content/plugins folder for your Wordpress blog.
4. Log in to the admin section of your blog and activate the Do Follow plugin

Your blog is now dofollow!

Take advantage of your new dofollow status and add your blog to one of the many dofollow directories. Hopefully you’ll soon start getting decent comments. Your life will be made a lot easier though if you also activte the Akismet anti-spam plugin for Wordpress too.

Wordpress SEO Tips

In my link building tips post about dofollow blog commenting, I forgot to mention one other thing to look for when commenting on a blog post - the Top Commentators Widget. If a Wordpress blog has this widget installed then the blog will show a sitewide list of the top commenters with links back to their sites. This means if you are in the top 3 to 5 commentators you get a free sitewide link to your website. Obviously, if you want to be in the top commenters list you need to get your comments approved so spamming is definitely a no-no.

If a Wordpress blog has the Top Commentators Widget installed, it’ll have a “Top Commentators” title on each page. If you make good comments on the blog then you are more likely to able to go back and make more since the blog owner obviously likes getting comments the widget is installed. Revisiting the blog regularly and making comments should allow to get a nice site-wide link from a blog with good PageRank if you’re lucky.

Link-building, Wordpress SEO Tips

One important factor to bear in mind when blogging is to interlink your posts. The posts on your blog’s homepage probably have the best chance of doing well in SERPs since it’s likely your homepage has the highest rank of any pages on your site. By linking from newer posts back to older posts, you can help spread a little link juice back to the posts that have slipped off the homepage.

There’s at least 3 ways or styles of linking between blog posts:-

1. Turn keywords in the body of the post into hyperlinks to older posts on the right topic.
2. Add a footer to the post. Something like “To read more, go to …”.
3. Use a plug-in such as the Similar Posts plug-in.

Each of the 3 ways has advantages and disadvantages.

Number 1 probably gives the best or most weighty link since the (hopefully) nicely worded anchor text will be surrounded by other text on the same topic.

Number 2 allows you to always make sure that the posts are truly appropriate for linking.

Number 3 lets you sit back and let the plugin do all the work for you. This can be great if you install the plugin on an old blog with many existing posts. A disadvantage of this plugin is that the posts that are linked aren’t always those you would have linked up manually - sometimes the links are a bit random.

For further SEO Tips on blogging, see:

• Improving Page Titles on BlogSpot blogs
• Improving Page Title on Wordpress blogs

Blogspot SEO, Wordpress SEO Tips

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

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