10 Tips To Make WordPress SEO Friendly

The beauty of WordPress is that it’s very easy to install, customize and blog with. The downside is that, out of the box, it’s not that SEO friendly. Actually, it’s sort of SEO friendly, just not SEO perfect. Here are some our recommendations in order to get the most optimal WordPress blog:

1. Use The “More” Function.

WordPress loves to make duplicate content. This is when your website has the same exact text on different URLs throughout your site. Search engines don’t like finding duplicate content because they think you are trying to trick them in order to get better rankings for having more content.

The first problem you are going to have with WordPress making duplicate content is on your home page. Not only is the exact same content going to be on the homepage, it’s also going to be on the original post page. So you will have the same two posts replicated both on the home page and on the post page. Eventually the content will be moved to the archives, where again you will have duplicate content issue.

This is where the “More” function comes in. The best practice to minimize duplicate content on the home page is to place a “More” break after your first paragraph. This way readers can quickly skim your blog post and if they like it they can click on “More” to read the rest of it. It also keeps the bulk of the content off the home page.

2. Don’t Use Tags.

Tags end up placing the same content on more pages. This is exactly what you don’t want to do. We recommend that you never use tags. If you insist on using them, make sure you add the nofollow attributes to the tag hyperlinks.

3. Nofollow The Pagination On The Home Page.

I’m sure some of you are saying “What?!?…Why?!?. Well simply because all the important content will be discovered through your categories, like they should be. The association of your blog post by links titled “1, 2 , 3” is not an optimal way to guide search engines through your content. You want them discovering your content through links like “Learn how to bake amazing cookies” or “The nuts and bolts of engine repair”. Keywords are important during the indexing process, especially in your links. Finally, those additional numbered pages are just locations of more duplicate content.

4. Install SEO All In One Pack Plugin.

This plugin takes care of two very important things: The title tag and the meta description tag. You can configure this plugin to have unique title and meta description tags without adding repetitive phrasing in them.

5. Make Sure You Write A Meta Description.

Just because you have installed the SEO All In One Pack Plugin, doesn’t mean that you are out of the woods yet. In this version of WordPress (2.7) you add meta descriptions by writing an “Excerpt” in the “Edit Post” section of your admin. Make sure you write good descriptions, that pull searchers in and be sure to use a couple choice keywords.

6. Set Up The Right Permalinks.

Thank God this got easier in later versions of WordPress. If you don’t want to mess with your .htaccess file, simple pick a Permalink set up that only uses / and – (slashes and dashes). Round it off by sticking a .html at the end of it.

7. Customize Your Title Tags.

The main point here is that WordPress always wants to add your blog title to your title tags by default. We feel that this an unnecessary waste of valuable title tag real estate. Do what ever you can to make sure that doesn’t happen.

8. Put An Alt Tag In Your Header Image.

This one requires you to tweak a WordPress file. In your header.php file you can add an alt tag in the image squeezed between your H1 tags. This is a great way to capitalize on the SEO value of your H1 tag. In the alt tag add the name of your site with a short keyword rich description in it.

9. Make Sure You Are Using Alt Tags In Your Images.

If you need to install a plugin to get alt tags in your images, then do it. For every image you add to your blog, be sure to give it a nice keyword rich alt tag description. Be sure to check your source code to make sure WordPress is actually leaving an alt tag description – sometimes it doesn’t want to behave correctly.

10. Install The Google Sitemaps Plugin.

Google Sitemaps doesn’t increase the SEO value of your site. What it does do is alert you to any problems Google has with your website. If it has a problem indexing it or if it finds to many duplicate titles or descriptions, Sitemaps will let you know. This is your best tool for Google domination!

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