How to SEO Any WordPress Blog

Sunday March 7, 2010 • 1 Comment 

Since this is a WordPress blog about software and web development, I thought it was only appropriate that the first post be about search engine optimization (SEO) specifically for WordPress blogs. With the popularity of WordPress, there are a number of blog topics out there relating to blog SEO. Some of these have great tips, some are outdated, and some are flat out overkill. Of the tips that I have followed - I've found the following to be most successful.

  1. Permalinks - The majority of your search engine traffic will point directly to specific posts or subpages within your blog. Having posts and subpages with search engine friendly URLs is extremely important. Google, Yahoo, Bing, et cetera do not think highly of a post with a URL like www.yourblog.com/post.php?p=548. Go to your permalink settings and change them to a custom structure that includes the post name (/%postname%/ is a pretty safe bet).
  2. Title Tag - You should have a keyword driven title tag, HOWEVER it should be proper English. A good structure is "Blog Title | Keyword driven description of your blog". Make sure whatever niche that your driving towards is referenced in the title in a format that makes sense. Do you make cheesecakes? "Rachel's Oven | New York style gourmet cheesecakes" would be an appropriate SEO title.
  3. Sitemap - Google really does care about this. Download and activate the "Google XML Sitemaps" plugin and it will do all of the dirty work for you.
  4. Robots.txt - You don't really want pointless comment feeds and other non-SEO nonsense to be indexed. Create a robots.txt file in your root directory that looks something like this:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /cgi-bin
    Disallow: /wp-admin
    Disallow: /wp-includes
    Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
    Disallow: /wp-content/cache
    Disallow: /wp-content/themes
    Disallow: /trackback
    Disallow: /feed
    Disallow: /comments
    Disallow: /category/*/*
    Disallow: */trackback
    Disallow: */feed
    Disallow: */comments
    Disallow: /*?*
    Disallow: /*?
    Allow: /wp-content/uploads

    # Google Image
    User-agent: Googlebot-Image
    Disallow:
    Allow: /*

    # Google AdSense
    User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
    Disallow:
    Allow: /*

    # digg mirror
    User-agent: duggmirror
    Disallow: /

    Sitemap: http://www.yourblog.com/sitemap.xml

  5. Cache - Website performance can really kill your search engine ranking. If it takes the googlebot a long time to retrieve any of your pages, it will penalize you. Install and activate the "W3 Total Cache" plugin. It's much simpler than the "WP Super Cache" and it accomplishes the same level of site performance improvement.
  6. Webhost - Choose your webhost wisely. Their performance issues can also damage your search engine ranking. This is why I would advise anyone to stay away from Dreamhost. There are several faster alternatives out there (maybe this will be it's own topic later).
  7. Simplicity - Keep your blogs simple. This may be the most important aspect of WordPress SEO. If you download and use a custom theme - analyze its files thoroughly. I've seen themes that have footer.php files that are encoded so that people don't delete the blog creator's name. Some of these footer.php files are over 500kb in size. That's absolutely ridiculous. If you don't know how to trim a theme's footer.php file, choose another theme. It's not worth the performance downgrade.

Those are what I've found to be the most important aspects to consider when optimizing your WP blog for search engines. If anybody has any additional advice, feel free to comment on this article. I'll update the list above as time goes on to prevent it from becoming outdated.