If you’re using the latest Wordpress 2.7, then 50% of the SEO has been done for you. The remaining is to :
- use the All in One SEO Pack plugin that once activated takes care of your title and which part of your site will be crawled.
- use The Escape’s Web Page Analyzer that will show which links are broken and whether you’re using the right meta keywords. Repair broken links and if the results for the meta keyword don’t suit your expectation : edit your header.php of your current wordpress theme and add the meta keywords separated by comma in this line of code :
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3" /> - use tags and keywords wisely. When you’ve decided which keyword you want to rank for, make the appropriate changes and run your site through the search engine analysis tool for that keyword. The analysis may take some minutes. Make sure to read the tips provided in the report at the end of the analysis.
- Review the number of your outbound links : best practice is less than 40 links out so think well before adding your site to a site directory that will ask for a reciprocal link.
- let images help you rank :
- avoid using sites like Flickr, ImageShack, etc. to host your images. You are giving away a chance to let someone visit your site by directing the search engine to Flickr instead.
- host the images of your articles/tutorials on your own domain. Instead of using the image upload feature of Wordpress, create a folder like
http://yourdomain.com/images/tutorials(or any keyword you want)and put your images in that folder. Create different folders inside the images directory by varying the name of the folder for each of your articles for e.ghttp://yourdomain.com/images/seofor your seo articles etc. This is because every keyword in a link matters for the crawler - name your images correctly instead of using names like screenshot01, img01, image01, etc. Prefer naming it with a keyword that you think people might use to search for that kind of image for e.g iphone.jpg and use the corresponding keyword in the alt attribute of that image when putting it in your article.
- Use a sitemap(the Google XML Sitemaps wordpress plugin might help) and let Google know and provide you with its crawling progress by adding your site to the Google Webmaster Tools.
- name your categories correctly, again using keywords people might search for(or you can decide whether to crawl your category pages or not using the all in one seo pack and the google xml sitemaps option panel).
- and like I suppose you already know : make some good articles that you might want to link back in future articles by for e.g providing more clarification on the same topic etc. and post frequently like this : good articles and link back to your previous good articles.
- use digg, stumbleupon and other social and digg-like sites to spread your articles.
That’s the remaining 45%. Like everybody else, we are still trying to figure out the 5% which might give our site the real boost in rank. Try the above tips and see whether it helps for you too. Thanks for reading.
P.S : image used in the above article from Practical Tips for Google SEO
