Some WordPress SEO tweaks

Nov 27, 2006

This weekend I’ve been trying to tweak my blog to make it more search engine friendly. I did lots of reading; some new and some old. Actually I started my search with “whether content should come first or the navigation”? My navigation came first initially because using the CSS DIV somehow I couldn’t keep the navigation on the right and appear below the content too. Most people recommended that content should come first. Although for most components my WordPress template (I always create my own blog templates) uses DIVs, to bring content at the top I used tables yesterday. I’ll do some more reading and revert back to DIV-based placements soon. Anyway, here are a few things I found (and partially implemented on my blog) to SEO my WordPress blog:

Make content appear first

Content should come before your navigation when the search engine spiders come visiting. Your content is the most important thing and the search engines should be able to access it as soon as soon they can. I read somewhere that they give up after reading one-third of your page; so whatever important you want to say, say it quickly, and that too at the top. Actually in the navigation of your blog there is so much stuff that if it comes before your content, your content is pushed way down, and although many a time your navigation contains your important keywords and key phrases, it’s not same as your content.

Use the header tags intelligently

This is something I learned for the first time. I know the header tags — <h1>, <h2>, etc. — are important and if your keywords appear within these tags you get extra point, but their hierarchy too has some effect. For instance, it boosts your ranking if on individual pages you use the <h2> tag for titles instead of the usual <h1> tag. The <h1> tag is most effective if you use it on the first (home) page to display the title of the top most post; yes, all the other posts appearing after the top post should have the title enclosed within the <h2> tag. You’ll need a little bit of programming to do this.

Use your keywords in lists (bullets)

Keywords appearing within the <li></li> tags too add up to your overall SEO efforts. Take for instance, 5 ways of making your blog search engine friendly can be presented in the following manner:

SEO your blog by publishing quality content
SEO your blog by highlighting important key phrases
SEO your blogs by using lots of lists
SEO your blog by making your content appear first
SEO your blog by using keywords within outbound links

OK, I know the repetition sounds silly, but you can use it more creatively.

Use keywords and key phrases in outbound links

You can put your keywords and key phrases in the outbound links in the following manner: Amrit is a great content writer and copywriter. The HTML code is <a href=”http://www.amrithallan.com/”>Amrit is a great content writer and copywriter</a>. So you should creatively use keywords with <a> and </a>.

Interlink your posts

Link your blog posts with each other. Although your navigation is a good place to interlink your posts, link to older posts from within your newer posts. For instance, recently from within this post I linked to another, older post. You can also have a Related Posts section where you can post link to all the related posts, as you can see it appears at the end of this post. For this I use a category tagging WordPress plugin.

This, about sums up my current efforts. .I’ll keep on adding new things to this post as I learn them.