With millions of blogs in existence, how do we find the content we are looking for on Internet? The solution begins in the planning of the website and in general the Information Architecture, menu structure, page identification and so on. What is related to all these ingredients is of course the “SEO” (Search Engine Optimisation) has been the general coined word for website search engine success for but the success starts already in the domain name selection to be frank. There is a deep knowledge of technology, usability and accessibility, an art and a science if you want, that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.
Generally every body is talking about how to make a website top ranked using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) but what about the people we are targeting? Optimising your content for the wrong target group does not give you the relevant traffic, but high search engine hits that you don’t want, targeting he wrong customers.
You can write about your beloved subject for years and never grow your website traffic, which must be one of the goals. If you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers. Luckily, the WordPress plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. We have tested some of the better ones and will hereby give you a feedback on the favourite general SEO plug-in for wordpress.
Yoast, is the favorite for some months, we started to use this in the summer 2011 and because we have tested it on several sites we think we can make a general overview of why it is the leading wp plug-in right now.
There are several option in this pretty easy-to-use advanced SEO tool but we wiill go trough the easiest must-do settings for a good start of SEO on your website.
Optimize your Titles for SEO
By default, the title for your blog posts is “Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title”. For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:
- Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
- People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.
Optimize your Descriptions
Each page need a unique description in order to make a different to each person search for your content. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what’s in the page they’re clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.
Image Optimization
An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you’re helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what’s otherwise hidden to them.
Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You’ll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand. If you’re using the meta widget, you might want to enable the option in robots meta to replace that with one that has nofollowed links.