The first in a series that takes you through the ways to optimise your WordPress blog and/or website for the search engine side of your Internet marketing.
Now that you have your keywords prepared – you did work on this after the blog post looking at what your customers actually search for, didn’t you?
Well in this post we start using your best keywords (and if you want to chat about yours, pop an email over to me at hello@blogmistress.com):
- Your blog’s title is one place that should ideally include your keywords – if that works for your blog or website – it won’t for some and will partly depend on the theme’s design, so don’t worry if you can’t work in your keywords here. You set your Blog Title in Settings, General. And while you’re there, see if you can include your keywords in the Tagline too.
- Next go to Settings, Permalinks where you can have your page and post page names to something useful. The Permalinks are simply the permanent link address for a page. Set your Permalinks to a Custom Structure of /%postname%/ – what this does is take the title of your blog post or page and use it to name the link. For instance, this blog post’s link is http://www.blogmistress.com/wordpress-and-seo-part-1/
- Now to install one of the most powerful plugins for your Internet marketing SEO – the All-in-One SEO plugin. Install this (go to Plugins, Add New and search for this then install) and then you can set the basics to best suit your SEO at Settings, All in One SEO – enter a Home Title that includes your best keyword(s) – this is one of your most powerful places to include your keywords – and add a Home Description – this is the bit that shows up in a search under your page’s title, so here you want to include something that will encourage your potential visitors to click to your website/blog, as well as your keywords. And as for the rest of the settings, it’s likely that the defaults provided will work well for you – we’ll explore this plug-in in more detail soon.
That will do for now – your next actions will follow later in the week. If you want to know more about any of this, either comment below, or send an email to hello@blogmistress.com or you may be able to grab me on Skype – find barbarasaul and happy to chat if I’m about.
Babs
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Hi Babs,
How about “/%category%/%postname%/” for permalink (“Custom”) setting?
Also, if your wordpress install directory appears in your path (e.g. as http://www.mysite.com/wordpress/) I suggest when installing you consider naming for SEO rather than using the default (“wordpress”). Using “blog” might be good, or “articles” but take care naming this, e.g. keep it general yet meaningful, because every website page and blog post URL will contain this word.
Love your posts! I’m learning WordPress and enjoying reading your posts and tweets along with the codex and lovely grubby code files
.
Mark
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PS Think I typed “%categories” in the above .. watch out, it needs to be “%category%”.
PPS I actually like “/%category%/%year%/%postname%” so my posts include the year in the URL too.
This is something to consider, indeed, Mark – though you could, take that further, of course – we'll have a look at the potential of that, and see just how useful that could be.
And glad you're enjoying our posts – do say if there's anything in particular you'd like to know more about, too.
Babs
Even now I have to double-check myself, just to be sure I have the required /s and %s
You are right to use the permalink structure that best suits you – and that really does want a whole post to itself sometime. Including the /%category%/ is useful if your categories are likely to be relevant. All parts want to be considered individually – I think that once someone is looking at it at the level you are, Mark, they've figured out what's likely to work best. Keep at it!
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