Filed Under: Articles, SEO, Linking Strategy
In this presentation of how to make your blog search engine friendly, we will show you a number of extremely useful tips – and WordPress plugins that will really make a difference for your blog – and your bank account.
SEO is the process of improving web pages so that it ranks higher in search engine for targeted keywords. There are many SEO techniques, and in general, these can be categorized as On-Page, On-Site, and Off-Site Optimization.
There are also two schools of SEO: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO, where White Hat SEOs are those that play by the rules and guidelines provided by the different search engines.
Black hat SEO basically means pushing the limit of SEO and employ techniques that are according to the search engines questionable or prohibited, such as cloaking, mirror or doorway pages and so on.
SEO Terminology
- On Page SEO: Factors on individual pages within your site
- On Site SEO: Factors site wide or within sections of your site
- Off Site SEO: Links to your site from other sites and what these links say about your site – Site reputation and link popularity.
- Document: A page or any other electronic document on your site
- Robot / Spider: An automated piece of software which travels around the internet looking for web pages and storing them in the search index.
- Search Algorithm: The algorithm used by a search engine to decide which web pages are the best match for a search term.
- Index: The database of web pages used by a search engine. When you perform a search, the search engine looks in this database to find the best matches.
- SERP Search Engine Result Page, the list of web pages shown when you perform a search.
Making Your WordPress Blog Search Engine Friendly
The search engines rank your site based on several factors — some more important than others. Even though search engines are able to spider, index and rank poorly written, poorly organized and poorly designed sites, making your site accessible to search engines greatly improves your chance of getting those sweet top 10 positions that will drive huge amounts of visitors to your site.
What you basically want to do is to make your site search engine friendly — make it easy for the search engines to make sense of your site. There are several ways of doing this and several aspects one must take into consideration: Technical, On site, On page and Off site, however that latter is not covered in this document.
How the Search Engine Works in a Nutshell
When you submit your site to a search engine, or the search engine follows a link from another site, the search engine will send a “robot” to your site. The search engine robots will then spider your blog. What this basically means is that it will try and follow all links on your site, i.e. links in your site navigation menu, your site content and all other links on your site.
When the robot is done spidering your website, it will add it to the “search engine index”. When a person performs a query in the search engine, it will then return its result page and rank the different websites based on how important the search engine thinks your site is.
Robots and Robots.txt
To make the job easier for the robot to spider your blog, you should add the following HTML code inside the HEAD tag of your website:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />
With this, you’re telling the robot to index your site and to follow all links contained within your site. It is also recommended that you have something called robots.txt.
The robots.txt is simply a .txt file that you put in the root directory of your website, and unless you have any folders you don’t want to be indexed, I suggest you allow the robot to index your whole site. Your robots.txt will then look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap and Google Sitemap
To make it even easier for the search engine to find all your pages, you should add a site map. A site map is basically a page with links to all the pages on your site, and you should make one in HTML and you should also make a Google Sitemap. If the normal HTML Sitemap is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
What would be natural here is to have one Main Sitemap pointing to the different Section Sitemaps, where the Section Sitemap points to the individual pages. Again, pay great attention to how you theme the sections. The more tightly focused on terms and phrases the Sitemaps are, the easier it is for your visitors and the Search Engine Spider to make sense of your site.
A Google sitemap is a XML file located on the root of your site. It is free, and an easy way of generating a Google Sitemap is to use a Sitemap Generator, such as SOFT plus GSiteCrawler
404 Not Found Page Returning 200 Status
After generating and uploading your Google Sitemap to Google, you may discover that Google rejects it. One of the reasons may be that your 404 Page Not Found actually returns a 200 Page Found. This is a serious, yet common issue, and is thankfully easy to rectify.
If you have this problem, get in touch with your web host and ask them to make your custom 404 page return a 404. In addition, listing your HTML Site Map will help your visitor find the content he or she was actually looking for.
Be careful, though, do not redirect the visitors from your 404 to the Sitemap via a 302 or 301.
How effective is Google Sitemap?
I was working on a site, and before I added the Google Sitemap, the site had about 2500 pages in the Google index. The day after submitting the sitemap, 12 500 pages were indexed! One week after I did this, and the indexed pages had increased to 12 800. Now that’s what I call impressive.
Dynamic vs. Static URL’s
Dynamic websites have the advantage of using only a handful of files to generate thousands of pages. They do this through the variables passed onto the server in the URL string. For example, a server’s software receives a request for the following URL: “http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123” The software then uses the template file and the variable “?p=123” to search the database for the information. Once the system has it, the page is sent to the user.
Larger search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo can index URL’s that include a limited number of variables (from 1 to 3). However, smaller search engines do not index them at all. So keep it simple and rewrite your URL to make it easier for all spiders. No engine, large or small, has any issue indexing static-looking, directory-based URL’s.
In addition, it is virtually impossible to layer content to maximize visibility in the search engines with dynamic URLs as the seach engine simply will not be able to identify the site structure. A content layer is a logical level of organization within your directory structure.
The tool to rewrite a URL string depends on the platform you host your site on. The two most common servers are Apache and IIS. For an Apache server, the Module ‘MOD_rewrite’ comes standard (although it may not have been installed). For IIS, the ISAPI filter functions identically to the MOD_Rewrite module.
The Mod Rewrite module is implemented in Word Press, and if you go to Options and then Permalinks in your blog, you come to a page called Customize Permalink Structure. It is highly recommended that you use something else than the Default option.
The new custom structure will depend a lot on the way you have organized your blog in the first place, but in any case, %postname% must absolutely be in there. Whether you choose to add date or post ID or other parameters must be based on the current blog structure.
You can read more about the different parameters for permalinks on WordPress’ own site.
Canonical redirects – 301, 302 and Page Hijacking
The problem in a nutshell is that the search engines see http://yourblog.com and http://www.yourblog.com as two different sites. Both “sites” will normally be crawled, indexed and ranked in the search engine, and this results in the following — the search engine identifies the site as two different sites as duplicate sites — which is never a good thing.
Another problem that also occurs is that some sites will link to your http://yourblog.com while others will link to http://www.yourblog.com. As these are treated as separate sites, they will each receive different link popularity as well as different Google Page Rank. Unless you do something about this problem, you basically get your link popularity diluted because of this technicality.
You are also exposing your site for a phenomenon that’s referred to as 302 hijacking. A page hijack is basically a technique exploiting the way the search engines certain commands that a web server can send to a visitor. In essence, it allows a hijacking website to replace pages belonging to target websites in the Search Engine Results Pages.
The solution thankfully is fairly simple: Adding a 301 redirect from http:// yourblog.com to http://www.yourblog.com. The 301 redirect means permanently moved, and the result is that the non www version of the domain will pass on all ranking power to the www version of your site, thus increasing Google Page Rank and chances of ranking well in the search engines.
The same problems occur if you can access either of these in the root of your site:
- http://www.yourblog.com/index.html
- http://www.yourblog.com/index.php
- http://www.yourblog.com/index.asp
- http://www.yourblog.com/index.jsp
- http://www.yourblog.com/index.cfm
…et cetera
If your site use a folder based navigation structure, be advised that you may run into the same problems as with the above. http://www.yourblog.com/products/ (with and without trailing slash) and http://www.yourblog.com/products/index.php are regarded as two different pages with duplicate content in the eyes of a search engine.
There is very little information as to which format the search engines prefer, however, there are certain indications that they follow the Keep It Simple principle, and that you should in other words strive to present the shortest possible URL.
So my recommendation is to 301 redirect the http://www.yourblog.com/products/index.php as well as http://www.yourblog.com/products (no trailing slash) to http://www.yourblog.com/products/
As a final note, choosing the correct type of redirects can make or break your search engine ranking, and when dealing with canonical redirects, always use 301 permanent moved redirect and not a 302 temporarily moved.
Here’s another really nifty plugin. If you by any chance decide to move the content of one of your posts or pages to another location, there’s a 301 Re direct plugin for that too, and it’s called Angsuman’s Permanent Redirect and it permanently redirects posts and pages that contains “redirect” custom field, to the value of the “redirect” custom field.
Category Naming Convention
Be descriptive with naming Categories. Don’t get carried away, but make sure at least one keyword or keyword phrase appears in the Category name in the format /descriptive-keywords/ This is not an area to stuff keywords.
Categories should be named appropriately as part of the overall theme and should be relevant to the directory content.
Image Naming Conventions
Instead of naming your file image01134.jpg, you would ideally name it keyword-phrase.jpg or image-name.jpg. Many sites have poor, even non-existent Alt tags, so a focus should be to make those Alt tags as efficient as possible, using at least one keyword relevant for the page and page category. Also, remember to use dash, not underscore in your image names. This is quite important from a SEO perspective.
Many computer programming languages have variables or constants such as _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have an image like word1_word2.jpg, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 — which of course almost never happens. If you have an image like word1-word2.jpg, that image can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2?.
Title Tag
The title tag is the single most important on-page element for ranking well in a search engine. Rule of thumb is to put the Title tag immediately after the Head tag, and it is said that certain search engines does not count it if it’s after other Meta Tags. Many web sites and blogs have a Title tag naming convention like this: [Company Name] – [Page Title].
While this is certainly much better than not having any title tag (did you know that there are over 25 Million pages in Google with the Title “untitled document”?), switching things around to [Page Title] - [Company Name] is a much better approach as you get the keyword rich Page Title first.
Unless your company is a very well known brand, page title should always come first. The reason is that the searcher is looking for a product, service or information, not your company. And when you give prominence to the Page Title rather than your company name, you will rank better.
The way to do this in Word Press is to use a plug-in called Optimal Title. This simply switches the Blog title and the Post title around so that you get it right.
Heading Tags
The heading tag is the second most important on-page element for ranking well in a search engine, however all too often do I see pages with not one single Hx tag. Or it’s used incorrectly. The H tag is primarily to be used to structure a document, not to style text. It’s clearly defined by W3C how to use it — both in the HTML/XHTML specs, but also in WACAG and other guidelines.
The search engines don’t care about the pretty colours or the cool fonts, only the document structure and will rank the page based on that. Follow the W3C specifications, use the H tags to construct proper page hierarchy and the search engines will love you for it.
Normally your Post title will be a H1, but if you write long posts, I highly suggest using H2 and possibly H3 as well for sub headings instead of just bold text.
And while on the subject of styling fonts — use external style sheets and put all your styling in there. Do not use inline text styling. It makes your page faster, and it gives the search engine much less code to go through, thus making it easier for the spider.
H1 is the main heading, and thus you should only have one occurrence of the tag per page. A page should always be focused on a over all theme, and you can use these headings to cluster them around this overall theme.
Ideally you use the H tag alone without a class, but some times you need a different look or colour of the same H, and that’s when you use classes. Thankfully, most Word Press themes are coded very well, so this won’t be a problem for most. In most cases, I would also highly recommend that your Title tag and your H1 tag is identical, or that they contain the same key phrase or semantically matching theme. This also seem to be the standard for most Word Press Themes
Lists
Lists are a great way to display key features of a product or service. On the web, the visitors tend to scan content instead of reading, Putting key features inside a list makes it easier for a visitor to do so — and the search engines put emphasis on text inside a list. Lists can also be used for creating great looking menus with dropdown or hover effects as a replacement on JavaScript menus, but more about that later.
Page Text
Without moving into the copywriter’s domain, there are a few aspects to page text from a designer’s perspective. Yet again, follow W3C Guidelines. Proper use of P tags instead of BR for paragraphs, strong instead of b, em instead of i and so on.
Anchor Text
“Click here”. How often is that key phrase relevant for the content of your page? Not very often. However, a search in Google on that phrase gives you a absolutely mind-blowing 2.5 billion results. Now that’s what I call a waste of search engine marketing power. Link text should be concise and descriptive, using topic relevant keywords and phrases. A hot tips here is to use anchor text that makes sense when read out of context.
There are ways to get the best from both usability, accessibility and SEO via CSS, and is something that’s being used here at SEO Bomb.
Meta Tags
Unfortunately, none of the common Meta tags comes as default in Word Press and you need extra plug-ins for this. Below are the plug-ins for Meta Keywords and Meta Description respectively:
- Jerome’s Keywords: Adds a keyword field below the post text field
- Head Meta: Let you use Custom field as Meta Description
Some search engines will index the META Description Tag found in the section of your web pages. Google is one of them, and if the META Description is written correctly, with a maximum of 156 characters including space, it will display your description instead of snippets from the page content provided that the description contain the term or phrase being searched for.
Normally, you would only write a description based on primary target key word- or phrase, but I have successfully managed to write up to three different descriptions and have the search engine display the appropriate description depending on which key word is being used in the search engine query.
Yahoo & MSN does also use the META Description, but I find them both, and MSN in particular, a bit tricky from time to time. Another thing I’d like to mention when it comes to MSN is that they some times seem to prefer the description from DMOZ, so if you do have a DMOZ listing, you may find yourself in some trouble if you haven’t paid much attention when authoring your description.
META Keywords
The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you’ve targeted for that specific page. There have been numerous discussions surrounding the use of the keywords tag and its effectiveness. The overall consensus is that the tag has little relevance with the major search engines, but it may help the search engine to determine the overall theme of your website.
Google Blog Search
While on the subject of Titles and Meta descriptions, Google Blog Search seems to have a slightly different take on the Description they display. While Google normally display up to 156 charachters from potentially the Meta Description fields, Google Blog seach is fetching info from your RSS or XML feeds, and display up to 240 charachters in the description.
That means that your Optional Excerps should not be more than 240 charachters to be displayed as a whole:
Listing includes
Title: 66 charachters – Does not include Blog Name
Description: 240 characters including space (Optional Excerpt in Word Press)
Date
Author
Normal search
On normal keyword and phrase search, Description is displayed
Advanced search
On advanced search, it does not display the Description, but rather the first 240 following characters.
RSS and Syndication Your Content
I could nix this section directly from SEO Blackhat but I’m not gonna. Their article about RSS and syndicating news is excellent, so check it out. I also highly recommend looking at their Ping list - which happens to be the same list as I use on this blog.
I must point out that my custom made syndication buttons are way sexier than theirs — and you can use them all you want if you promise to link to this site. But anyway, here we go:
Step 1: Download my custom syndication buttons: black or white and put them in your images folder
Step 2: Add the HTML for your chosen buttons according to SEO Blackhat’s directions
Preventing Blog Spam - Akismet
Not that this has anything directly to do with making your website search engine friendly, but one of the drawbacks of lots of traffic to your site is the increase of blog spam. That is what you have the Akismet anti blog spam plugin for.
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. Just do yourself a favour and install it. It’ll make your life so much easier.
And there you have it — the ultimate guide for making your blog rank in search engines. Of course I have a few more tricks up my sleeve if you’re really serious about blogging, but that’s for clients only. If you like it, link to it, if you have comments or questions, leave a comment!
Sverre Sjøthun
15 Comments so far
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Good tips. Thank you.
Adam
By Adam on 03.05.06 2:58 am | Permalink
Thanks! This is the clearest explanation of how to make a Wordpress blog search engine aware that I have read. The tips on robots.txt and subtly structuring blog content so that search engines will like it are invaluable.
By Ira Krakow on 03.05.06 5:38 pm | Permalink
I’m glad you guys liked it! Many of the things I’ve pointed out is really not just for WordPress, but general SEO advice. I just though it’s be nice to write a useful SEO article for WordPress, cause I really haven’t seen many of them.
WordPress is a really great blogging platform, but there are a few things about it that annoys the hell outta me - like how it always adds the /category/ in the category listing.
That directory is not good for anything and there’s noting in it. Thankfully there are ways to get around that too via .htaccess.
Got other tips? Share them!
By Sverre Sjothun on 03.06.06 7:42 pm | Permalink
Those are damn sexy syndication buttons you’ve made there. I made the delicious button in the tutorial myself, and I can’t believe how many places I see it now.
Solid article - Although I don’t really care for the head meta plugin.
Be descriptive with naming Categories. Don’t get carried away, but make sure at least one keyword or keyword phrase appears in the Category name in the format /descriptive-keywords/ This is not an area to stuff keywords.
I disagree here. I say, make your Categories your keywords.
By quadszilla on 03.26.06 10:19 pm | Permalink
Thanks for the props on the buttons, and again - I really love your aticle on the syndication.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I also added an instruction page(linked right beneath the buttons) on how to actually use them - and it seems to work like a charm!
By stuffing keywords I mean don’t go overboard like /buy-purchase-viagra-100mg-online/ or /ncaa-basketball-odds-lines-betting-wagering/
Not only does this look unprofessional(as if you care about that if you’re into 302’s in Y and M), but it’s decrease the focus of the category.
The thing is, with a proper setup you can use the category litings for layering content like mentioned in the SEOMoz article linked above.
So certainly use great keywords in your categories, but I recomment not more than 3.
Sverre
By Sverre Sjothun on 03.26.06 10:34 pm | Permalink
Oh, as for the Meta Head plugin, it’s damned annoying for the front page and categorylisting as it lists all keywords for every article in the lising - thus you may end up keyword spamming.
I whish I could find one that limits keywords to say 10, or one that lets you define keywords and description for the front page and categories…
By Sverre Sjothun on 03.26.06 10:39 pm | Permalink
Hi!
Fantastic article, but I have a question. When you talk about robots & spiders indexing my site, you talk about the robots.txt.
What if there are image & video directories that I don’t want indexed?
Would
become
By Chaz on 04.25.06 2:50 am | Permalink
Glad you like it!
All you have to do is to add
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder-one/
Disallow: /folder-two/
…etc
More info on Robots exclusions can be found here
By Sverre Sjothun on 04.25.06 4:25 am | Permalink
I’ve seen books sold on this topic that aren’t as good as what you’ve put together in this post. Thanks for the guide to search engine friendly blogs that anyone can understand.
By Marketing Mentor on 08.30.06 3:03 am | Permalink
Wow, this is a fantastic article! Really useful. Well done Sverre.
By Lisa Ditlefsen on 11.09.06 11:25 am | Permalink
This is the stuff i have been looking for the past few months.I searched for e-books on this topic but never found one.
How to check whether my blog is indexed in a search engine?
By amber on 01.24.07 3:58 pm | Permalink
Hi, this is really a great article.
Just wanted to point out that there might be a problem with your url-rewriting. When I enter:
http://seobomb.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-make-your-blog-search-engine-friendly/
I get:
http://www.seobomb.comthe-ultimate-guide-to-make-your-blog-search-engine-friendly/
(missing / in the middle)
You might wanna have a look into the rules.
On my site I did a 301 the other way around and got rid of the www-part.
By Jesper on 01.27.07 5:35 am | Permalink
wow, great article. I have been looking for ways to make my site more search engine friendly. Thanks for the wealth of information.
By Simon on 08.09.09 1:00 am | Permalink
it was very interesting to read.
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
By palefaced on 07.15.10 1:42 pm | Permalink
Sign: zdbrw Hello!!! gsabn and 383mfdyyzrzxg and 200 : I will try to recommend this post to my friends and family, cuz its really helpful.
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