SEO – An area of WordPress that’s truly fun. It’s definitive, widespread, and the rules have been established. There’s probably no larger community of folks on the planet that can guide you and tell you, “Yep, been there and done that.” All the mistakes have already been made, so all we have to do now is listen to what the experts are telling us. And that’s what I intend to do in this post – listen. Well, listen and write.
Zac Gordon, over at Treehouse, recently released a new course called, “SEO For WordPress” and after going through the video titles, I’m excited to get a jump on things. Seeing I’ve been working in SEO since 2004, I’m interested in getting Zac’s take on what’s happening out there. What’s changed? What hasn’t? Is there anything wildly different today than what I’ve already learned yesterday? All good stuff.
The beauty of Zac’s course is that it covers SEO as it specifically relates to WordPress. Themes, menus, plugins, widgets – it all seems to be there. So let’s get going and start learning about SEO and how it can be used best with WordPress.
Writing Awesome Content For Our Blogs & Websites
I think we should start with a discussion about content that’s put forth on the internet. Now, I’m not talking about product content or content that’s introduced for specific reasons, such as banking information or something scientific – What I’d like to discuss is content related to the blogosphere, because that’s easy to understand and I’m sure we can all relate to it.
Those who are in charge out there like to tell us that the content we write is the most important aspect of successful SEO. If we write something that’s not worthy, then we’ll get no love. If we write something that’s worthy, we’ll get all the love that’s due. That’s pretty much where they leave it. And for years, we’ve been attempting to interpret the meaning of what they tell us. Well, let me let you in on a little secret – I’ve been around a long time and I’ve read pretty much every resource on the planet when it comes to SEO and what I’ve found is a common theme. The theme is, “What if I take someone else’s words and mix them up to look like mine?” and “What if I just take pieces of paragraphs from a bunch of different sources and paste them all together on my page?”
It seems as though folks are creating content on the internet for all the wrong reasons. I venture to suggest that if one is creating content in an effort to make money, they aren’t going to have much success. Their heart isn’t into it. But if they’re creating content because of the love of their thoughts in their minds, they’ll eventually create a following. Not many people out there genuinely follow something that isn’t sincere.
I’m sure you get my point. Even if you do, please read just a bit further because I’ve been thinking of this analogy since last night. It’s pretty good.
Let’s say you have a goal to publish a book and sell it on Amazon. Along with your initial goal of getting published and selling a few copies, you want your book to enjoy successful sales for many years to come. In order to achieve both of these goals, you are aware of the fact that you’ll need to develop content that’s going to live between the two covers of your book. You just haven’t decided the best way to create that content. You do have a few ideas though and they are:
1. You know of many authors who have written wildly successful books. You can simply copy the text, verbatim, from one of those books and paste it into yours. Since they were successful, you feel you will be as well.
2. Again, you know many successful authors and have access to their books. You can copy portions of each of their books and copy them into yours, until yours is full. This will make you even more successful since you are compounding their successes into once source.
3. You can write your own book with original thought. Since you are so thrilled with what’s floating around in your head, you’ll have an audience who is thrilled as well. You work and work and work and finally nurture a following who truly admires you for who you are.
Now, let’s go through each one of these scenarios.
In the first case, you can give this a shot, but I’m not sure you’ll get your book published. I can imagine that publishers don’t like thieves and plagiarizers. And even of you did manage to print the book yourself, you wouldn’t get past Amazon’s “standards” gate. Your book would get pulled off the site. Lastly, if you did somehow get past it, you’d be called out as a fraud and would either receive a very low rating on your book or you would enjoy no sales at all. You stole and it’s not you who deserves praise for a good book, it’s the author who you stole from who does.
In the second case, the same thing will happen. People will learn about what you did and will reject any amount of labor you put into it. People admire authenticity and what you put forth was not that.
In the third case, you may or may not enjoy success. That doesn’t matter though, because the work you presented to the world was done in an honest way. Whether your book reviews are good or bad doesn’t matter because you can take any feedback and transform it into a learning experience. Many times, authors aren’t successful after their first try. It takes many efforts to earn recognition as one of the greats.
Do you see where I’m coming from here? Just because we’re on the internet, don’t think the same standards don’t apply. People who read things know what they’re looking for and they can spot a fake a mile away. Don’t be one of those fakes and don’t try to pull a fast one. If you’re not a good writer, practice how to write better. If you’re not great at creating a website to write on, ask for help, pay for a site or learn to build one yourself. Success in life is stemmed from hard work and taking shortcuts is very short lived.
Now, I know I just focused on text throughout my entire spiel regarding internet content. I don’t want to forget about other areas of content that are important to an enjoyable web page visit as well. Zac Gordon describes these areas of content like this (I’ll embellish to add a bit of flavor):
– Create unique and interesting content that makes the visitor either want to come back for more at a later date and/or compels them to bookmark your site and share it with friends.
– Be sure your content is well written and utilizes correct spelling and the proper use of grammar. This goes a long way in being considered a “source” of information on the internet.
– Make use of interesting photos, graphics and well presented video. Rarely does something that’s poorly presented get shared among friends. The web page itself is a reflection on the person who thought it was good enough to share. Make it easy for them and offer them something stunning.
– Be sure your website is functioning correctly and there are no errors in your markup. Be sure you emphasize what’s meant to be emphasized and structure your text accordingly. Be sure your titles, headings and meta data all make sense and are placed appropriately.
– The proper use of keywords and terms are just as important as the content you present. If you know who your reader is supposed to be, offer them a smooth path to travel on when searching for your site. Use the words in your text that you think they’ll type in the search box.
Adjusting Our WordPress SEO Settings
Let’s get back to WordPress. I recognize that what I just wrote above applies to SEO in general, so in this section, I’ll talk about something much more targeted.
Regarding your specific WordPress install, there are two very important fields you need to fill in before any other effort towards SEO is made. These two fields can be found by clicking the “Settings > General” link in the admin area.
If you take a look around the landing page for those links, you’ll see two areas that are called, “Site Title” and “Tagline.” You’ll need to give some thought as to what you’d like to fill those fields in with.
For the site title field, I suggest you name your website accurately. For instance, my website is named “MySiteName,” after the area I live as well as the industry I’m in. That’s what I used in the site title field. If I was blogging under my own name, I would have filled the field with “My Name.”
Regarding the tagline – you have some more flexibility here. This is where you describe what you do and what the purpose of your website is. When I filled in my tagline, I thought about what I wanted my site to be known for, and that’s “Web Design & Development Tutorials.” Short and to the point. If I were blogging under my own name about random events that happen during my day, I probably would have filled the tagline field with something like, “Blogging About My Everyday Adventures” or something like that.
Since this one area of WordPress SEO is so important, I encourage you to take a look at some of your favorite websites to see how they titled their websites. If you can’t see their title and taglines on their regular pages, you can right click your mouse and choose “View Page Source” to see behind the scenes. What you’re looking for is something like this:
<title>MySite - WordPress Design & Development Tutorials</title>
Making Sure Search Engines Can See Us
This next setting is quick and easy and needs little explanation. The information that surrounds the setting does though.
If you click the “Settings > Reading” link in your WordPress admin, you’ll see a line down towards the bottom that says, “Search Engine Visibility.” Next to that line, you’ll see a checkbox and next to that, you’ll see a line that says, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” If you check that box, WordPress will add a noindex meta tag to your code, which will prevent your site from appearing in the search results. The code will look something like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Here’s the thing about the noindex tag. If you read the text that Google displays on their website, and read it closely, you’ll notice that Google uses the words, “can prevent a page from appearing in.” They also mention that if you place a noindex tag on an already indexed page, they will remove that page from their search results.
Unfortunately, over the past few years, there’s been a huge amount of misinformation regarding the noindex tag. Apparently, folks out there have come to believe, and have spread the idea, that Google completely and totally ignores pages that utilize the noindex tag. What’s more likely the case is that Google, as well as the other search engines, still crawls and indexes all pages they can, including pages that use noindex. If noindex is used, they simply don’t display the page in the search results.
It’s a very misleading topic and one that requires clarification. My view may be pure conjecture, but I’m telling you, I’ve got eleven years experience and I have never, not once, seen one good thing result from using the noindex tag. Here’s what I suspect happens.
– You launch page and include noindex on it.
– Search engine crawls page, if not totally blocked, and includes it in their index.
– Since page includes noindex tag, page will not display in search results.
– Since page is still in index, it’s used for all other ranking purposes.
The bottom line is this: you don’t want to have a website with only a few good pages that are allowed to display in search results, alongside a large number of pages that include the noindex tag on them. The noindexed pages will hurt your site badly. Each and every one holds a value of pagerank and when all your page’s are added up and considered for ranking, your site’s value will be extremely low.
In the SEO course Zac Gordon is teaching on Treehouse currently, he mentions that if you are developing a website and don’t want that site to show in the search results, you should check the box on the settings page I told you about earlier. It’s my opinion that you shouldn’t do this. Instead, you should block the site completely by using the “robots.txt” file (only while in development). This file, when set up correctly, will tell the search engines to not crawl the site at all. To block search engines from your site, include this code in your robots file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
WordPress doesn’t include this file by default, so you’ll have to create one yourself. It’s very simple and can be done using any text editor. Once completed, upload it to your site’s root directory.
BEWARE: Leave the box unchecked on your “Settings > Reading” page and steer clear of using noindex – ever. Use robots.txt for blocking search engines instead. I may be the only person on earth saying this right now, but trust me, I’ve learned from many, many years of experience.
Setting Permalinks in WordPress
If you visit the “Settings > Permalinks” page in your admin area, you’ll see some choices for how to set up the URL structure for your pages. By default, WordPress will be installed and use some fairly ugly URLs that include question marks. While these aren’t the worst thing in the world, it’s become common practice to avoid these types of URLs when possible. And in WordPress, not only is it possible, it’s very easy to do.
Personally, I prefer to choose the “Post Name” selection. This is the shortest URL and it’s very easy to remember. I’m not convinced that it makes a difference if you choose something else because I’ve had success with all of them. I think it’s personal preference.
Once you make your selection though, you are most likely going to be asked to add some code to your “.htaccess” file. This file may not exist by default either, so you’ll likely have to create one the same way you created the robots.txt file and upload it to the root directory. The code that you’ll need to add to this file will be given to you at the bottom of the page after you click the “Save Changes” button. Common code looks like this:
Code:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>Writing Effective WordPress Post & Page Titles
Post and page titles are super important when it comes to SEO. And the best part about them is that they are easy to write in such a way as to establish a high click through rate from search engines.
Have you ever searched for a tutorial on web design? After clicking the “Search” button, I bet you were faced with a multitude of results that looked something like this:
5 Ways To Do…
Top 10 Best Plugins For…
How To Do…
Do you see the theme here? Some of the most popular blogs and websites around the world have figured out that people need help and are looking for a solution to their problems. That’s why these writers and bloggers give clear, concise titles that tell searchers exactly what they can expect in the post they’re about to click through to. And “Top 10” and “Top 5” posts are like candy to searchers. “How To” posts are extremely popular and effective as well – that’s why we’re facing an onslaught of “Answers.com” and “Yahoo Answers” types of sites out there today.
There are a few best practices when it comes to writing a title. If you take a look at Moz’s page on article on title tags, you can check out a few:
– Be Mindful of Length
– Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title Tag
– Leverage Branding
– Consider Readability and Emotional Impact
I highly suggest you visit the Moz page and give it a once over. There’s also a handy tool where you can write your title in to see how it would look on a search results page.
Do Heading Tags Matter For SEO? You Bet They Do
The idea of using headers, or heading tags, on web pages to enhance search engine visibility has been debated for decades. It’s actually one of the oldest arguments out there. And honestly, I’m not sure the debate has ever ended because to this very day, it rages on.
Let me give you my opinion on using heading tags in our WordPress posts and pages. Use them, but use them wisely and sparingly. If you are writing a long post, such as the one you’re reading, the best thing to do would be to break the post up into different sections. Not only does this make reading it a whole heck of a lot easier, but the search engines appreciate it as well. After all, search engines are only computers and when compared to the human brain, they are quite stupid. We need to tell them what we’re writing and how it’s meant to be read.
I wrote a post a while ago with some great information regarding how to structure an HTML web page where I talked specifically about document structure. If you visit the page and scroll down to that section, you’ll see how you can break a lengthy page down into bite size pieces. Even if your page isn’t as long as the one I’m writing right now, you can still offer a bit of semantic understanding to it with the use of heading tags.
So, what are these heading tags? Take a look:
Code:
<h1>Heading 1</h1>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
<h3>Heading 3</h3>
<h4>Heading 4</h4>
<h5>Heading 5</h5>
<h6>Heading 6</h6>There’s actually a great tutorial on the use of heading tags over at the WooRank Blog. In that post, they offer a few rules to live by when writing headers:
– Keep them relevant.
– Keep them consistent.
– Some are more important than others.
– Make them matter.
They also offer some advice for areas of abuse to steer clear of. Check out the post. It’s pretty good.
Regarding keywords in heading tags, I would suggest that you use them. It’s a great opportunity for search engines to see and gauge what your content is about and headers tell them that the words inside are a bit more important than other words on the page. Just don’t overdo it. If you notice my headers in this post, I don’t duplicate keywords and I don’t obviously abuse the words that I choose to include in each element.
The Power of Links in WordPress
Linking pages to one another truly is the power behind the internet. Actually, I think the interconnectivity is referred to as the “World Wide Web,” but you get my meaning. Since the beginning of it all, links have been what makes surfing around so much fun and so helpful. If you can imagine a web with no links, you can imagine something that’s very boring.
When writing WordPress posts and pages, it’s important to link to a few areas. The first area you want to link to is your own material. A good example of this is a few paragraphs up, where I linked to a post I had previously written about Gutenberg. Do you see what I just did there? I linked to the page.
The reason it’s important to link to your own material is because you’re giving your visitors an opportunity to read further about a particular topic. And as your site grows and as you write more, the more material you can link to will become available.
Also, if you notice the anchor text (the text that is the link itself) I used as the link, you can see that it’s rich with keywords. I didn’t use, “Read More” or “Click Here.” Those types of words don’t give any indication to search engines what the linked to page is about and why you linked to it. If you’d like to learn more about the importance of anchor text and how best to use it, please check out Moz’s page on the topic.
Another important area to link to when writing posts and pages is external websites. Now, you don’t want to go out and start linking willy nilly – you only want to link to sources that you feel will benefit your readers. Every website you choose to link to will be a reflection on you, so choose wisely. If you send a site visitor off to a site you wouldn’t want your mother visiting, you are going to lose a lot of visitors. And I’m sure your reputation will suffer over time as well.
I’m sure you see the benefits of linking off site. If you don’t, rest assured that by doing so, you’ll be building trust with your audience and telling them that you’re not only concerned about your website traffic and retention rate, you’re also concerned about their well being. Meaning, you want them to find what they’re looking for. If you can assist visitors in this way, they’ll appreciate it and perhaps visit you again in the future. Even better, they may bookmark your site or link to it from theirs, which is good for everyone.
Make Your Blog & Website Images Work
Image search is huge. Every day, millions of searches are done for images, where people are looking for something specific. Not everyone always looks for text and paragraphs, so it’s important to boost your SEO efforts by including images in your posts.
There are two things I want to discuss when it comes to adding images to your WordPress posts and pages. The first is the use of the alt attribute.
Basically, by adding text to your image alt attribute, otherwise know as “alternative text,” you’re telling search engines what your image is. Since computers can’t actually “see” images the same way we can, it’s important to give them as much information about your images as possible, including the proper keywords that would describe the image as accurately as possible.
The next area I’m going to talk about is actually adding the image to your page. I’m going to assume that you know how to do this. When writing your post and after you click, “Add Media,” you’ll be brought to a page where you can choose from all your stored images. Either that, or you’ll drag and drop an image into the body of your WordPress editor. Either way, on the page where you can select your image, you’ll see an area to the right that’s titled, “ATTACHMENT DISPLAY SETTINGS.” It’s here where you’ll want to take great care.
Under most circumstances, you’ll want to choose the “None” value inside the “Link To” dropdown. If you choose “Attachment Page,” you’ll be essentially creating a new page for each and every image you set this to. This is the definition of “thin content” and search engines don’t like thin content at all. If you have enough of it, you’re entire site ranking will fall and you’ll have a tremendously difficult time getting it back. Heed my advice when I tell you not to add images to their own attachment pages.
Using Video For SEO
The importance of video online has exploded over the past few years. A while ago, I remember reading that Youtube was the second largest search engine on the planet, which is strange, considering not many folks consider the search feature on Youtube when thinking about search engines. Any way you look at it though, websites and brands live and die with video.
If you want to build a brand, use Youtube for your video hosting. They are the go-to when it comes to people on the web who are searching for things to watch. I know of many content creators who are making their livings on Youtube and are most likley either shooting a video or editing one right now. It’s no joke – you can make a lot of money on Youtube.
If your goal is to create video for your own site and host it somewhere else though, you may want to consider a service like Wistia. One of the benefits of using a service like this is that when users make a search in a regular search engine for a particular topic, and you happen to have a video for that topic, the search engine will show your site in the search results, not Wistia’s. This is huge for traffic.
The Effect of Categories and Tags On WordPress SEO
In some cases, category pages can be the primary landing pages for your website. I remember a few years back, I was running a blog where this was the case – by far. The category pages surpassed all other pages on the site when it came to where people visited when coming from search engines.
Now, back in the day, when I had those popular category pages on my blog, I didn’t have any of the options I’m about to talk about next. My category pages simply held a list of posts related to it. As time has passed though, WordPress and many theme and plugin developers have added some rich features to truly enhance the SEO visibility of these types of pages.
When creating a category in WordPress on the “Posts > Categories” page, you’ve got a few features to choose from. Beyond the category name and slug, depending on your theme and plugins, you can choose to list your category as a sub-category of another one and to add a description. It’s only once you create your category and click the “Edit” link that you see the true power of how you can enhance the page.
On the edit page, again, depending on your theme and plugins, you can add title and meta text, page title and description text and various SEO values. With my theme, I can even choose which layout I’d like for each category page.
The reason you want to take advantage of all these features is simple differentiation from your other category pages, as well as your home page. The more different you can make them, the better chance you have for ranking for unique keywords and phrases.
Regarding tags, the same is true. I haven’t used tags in quite a while because they fell out of fashion, but I have seen quite successful websites still using tags to their advantage. If you do decide to use tags, please be sure to use them very sparingly. Many a folk out there have gotten in trouble by creating way too many tags for their rather small WordPress blogs.
Adding Value To WordPress Menus
I have come to love the menu feature in WordPress. It’s a flexible and powerful tools that lets us title menu links throughout our sites pretty much any way we want to.
When adding or editing a menu item on our sites, we have the option to give it any navigation label and title attribute we’d like. Even if we have already set up, for example, a category with a specific name, we can change the text that links to that category. Also, we can add some nice, descriptive text for the title attribute. While this might not have much direct SEO relevance, it will add more targeted text to our pages.
In order to adjust the text I’m referring to, be sure to have some pages or categories already set up. Once you do, head over to the menu area by clicking the “Appearance > Menus” link. On that page, you can organize menu items the way you’d like. It’s after you set them up that you would edit the related text. Simply click the small arrow that’s on the right side of your menu item and fill in the two fields how you see fit. It’s as easy as that.
WordPress Widgets & SEO
Widgets can be quite helpful in building a community around your site. Whether it’s using a widget to place a Facebook “Like” box or a button that leads visitors to your Twitter page, growing your audience using social media can help SEO in many ways. For instance, the more that people follow you on social media, the more buzz there will be about your website online. The more buzz, the more links, the more search engine recognition. So, as you can see, cultivating an audience via as many channels as possible can have compounding effects overall.
Wow, this was one of my longest posts ever. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. If you would like to read some other posts regarding WordPress, you can do so by clicking the “Blog” link up at the top of this page.
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