Optimizing Wordpress blogs from Seo/User prospective

Wordpress is an amazing blogging platform that we can use to create our personal and professional blogs and websites. In this small guide, I will help you optimize a Wordpress blog from search engine as well as from user prospective:

1.Chose a web host: Wordpress is the best content management system available for blogs and websites. Instead of creating a sub-domain on Wordpress, I would suggest you to start with a brand new domain name and professional web hosting. When you chose a web host, you should go for one that supports Wordpress blogs.
2.W3C Compliant blog: From seo prospective, I would suggest you to choose a W3C Compliant theme. This is not mandatory but I would suggest keeping your Wordpress blog W3C Compliant. To make your blog W3C Compliant, you should validate your HTML code at least. And if you are not good in coding part, select “Wordpress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” from Setting –> Writing option which will automatically lower the number of errors in your code.
3.Permalink Structure: Optimizing your permalink is the next step that you have to follow. By default, Wordpress gives URL’s like:
http://www.scopeformoney.com/?p=123

No doubt, search engines will index this URL but they are not good from user and seo point of view. You can decide by yourself which is the better URL by looking at the following examples:

http://www.scopeformoney.com/?p=123
OR
http://www.scopeformoney.com/2009/07/20/how-to-make-money-online-doing-surveys-with-cashcrate/

By looking at the following URL, you cannot really judge the kind of content that will be processed to you. Btu the second URL tells the whole story by itself. Also second URL is easy to remember. So to chose user and seo friendly URL, go to
Options –> Permalinks

4.Basic seo activities: your page title is the most important when it comes to on-page optimization. Give your page a meaningful title and try to limit your title length to 67 characters only including spaces because Google will only count first 67 characters in your title tag. Avoid putting too many keywords in your title. It’s your page title that people will see first in search engine listing and depending upon your title text they decide whether to click on it or not.Apart from title, it’s description which is shown as part of your listing in search engines. And you should limit the length of description to 156 characters only. Here is an example of our listing in Google search engine:
Make Money Online Make money fast Make money Online at home
Make money online at home using legitimate ways with a money Guru. Learn how to make money online with pay per click, survey filling, affiliate selling, …
www.scopeformoney.com/

So we should write search engine and user friendly titles and descriptions so that people actually clicks on our listings in the search engines.

5.Don’t copy content: I would suggest you not to copy content from other websites to avoid any kind of penalty from Google that applies to duplicate content websites. No doubt, Google will still index your content even if copied, but will place it in its supplemental results.
Apart from copying content from other websites, there are some more issues we need to fix when we work with Wordpress blogs. Each Wordpress blog offers RSS for posts, comments, monthly achieve, category achieves and tag pages achieve etc. where same content is used over and over. We are facing the problem of multiple URL’s having the same content. One of solution to this problem can be using no index for feeds, category pages, monthly achieve and tag pages. For this process, we can even exclude the directories using robots.txt from our website we don’t want search engines to index.

6.Google Sitemaps: there are many plugins available on internet that will create an XML sitemap for your Wordpress blog. I use Google XML Sitemap generator plugin from Arnebrachhold to create XML sitemap for my Wordpress blogs for free. Once you have generated your XML sitemap, you can submit it to Google using Google webmaster tool.
7.Image optimization: to optimize your image, you should include related keywords or tags in the image name and use dashes for spacing between words in your image name. Suppose we have to include an image for Google Adsense logo in our content, here are some ways people might name that image as:
1.jpg
Abc.jpg
GoogleAdsense.jpg
Google_Adsense.jpg
Google-Adsense.jpg

So this is the best naming convention from user and search engine prospective? According to me, it will be the last one i.e. Google-Adsense.jpg

Search engines don’t understand what we write in an image. But they make decision about our image by looking at the content around our image. So it’s a good practice to write a description about the image around it. We use ALT/Title tags with images to describe what our image is all about.

We can think of using related keywords in description to an image, but we should write correct description about an image and reasons for using this image if required. One more reason for using ALT tags with images is, there are some people who will be accessing your website by disabling their images. So when we use Title/ALT attributes with our images, they are able to able to know what our image is all about. Please see the following example of image attributes:



8.Pinging Service: Wordpress provides a pinging service where it notifies pinging servers every time you update your blog if they are already defined. If you haven’t defined your pinging service list do it by going to Dashboard –> Options –> Writing
You can get a big list of pinging servers here that you can define in your ‘Update Services’ box.

9.More traffic tips: Check my 26 ways to bring traffic to a website for additional ways to promote your Wordpress or any blog/website that you may have.