The title, the contents of your page�s
<title> tag, is one of the single most important factors for ranking in the search results. Not only is it the literal title of the tab or browser window, it�s also the first line people see in the search results, followed by the URL and the snippet, usually the meta description combined with a date:On many blogs, the title for blog posts is still �Blog title � Blog Archive � Keyword rich post title� or �Blog title � 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.
This means the ideal title for that plugin page on WordPress.org would actually be �WordPress SEO by Yoast > WordPress Plugins > WordPress� instead of what it is now. For more info on how to craft good titles for your posts, see this excellent article and video by Aaron Wall: Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles.
1.2.1Controlling titles with the WordPress SEO plugin
You can control your SEO titles with my WordPress SEO plugin. There are two parts of the plugin that control these. First of all, as soon as you install & activate the plugin, you get an SEO section in your admin. Navigate to SEO ? Titles & Metas and you�ll see a bunch of tabs for different types of pages on your site. For each post type and taxonomy you can set a so called Title Template (as well as meta description templates but we�ll get to those later). For posts on my site this looks like this:
Click for full version � WordPress SEO title templates
There�s a bunch of variables you can use in the titles and meta description, they�re all listed and explained on the bottom of the settings page. Be sure to check whether the template actually works and you�re not getting a duplicate site title for instance. If this is the case, you might need to check the �Force rewrite� checkbox on the same page or follow the instruction on that page to modify your template.
For the other pages, I have the following settings:
- Categories, Tags and other taxonomies:
%%term_title%% Archives %%page%% • %%sitename%% - Search pages:
You searched for %%searchphrase%% • %%sitename%% - 404 pages:
Page not found - Error 404 • %%sitename%% - Author archives:
%%name%% • %%cf_role%% at %%sitename%%
The last one shows you a very cool feature: you can use
%%cf_<custom field name>%% to use a custom field, this can be either a post custom field, sometimes known as post meta value, or a user meta value. In this particular case it�s the custom field �role� I use to store the role of a user within my company.1.2.2Optimizing individual posts
So now that we�ve set decent templates, we can start to optimize individual posts and pages. For that we use the snippet preview added by the WordPress SEO plugin:
ajmalseotips.blogspot.com
This preview will automatically take the values you�ve already filled in in your blog post and apply them to your template, but you can also override the title completely using the title field just below it:
If you hit the Generate SEO title button on the right it will pre-fill that field with a title based on your template which you can then adjust, or you can write one completely by yourself. The counter will show you how many characters you�ve got left.
For titles the following things are important:
- They should always contain your brand, preferably at the end, so people may recognize you in consecutive searches.
- They should always contain the keyword you think is most important for the current post or page, which we�ll call the focus keyword from now on. The focus keyword should preferably be at the beginning of the title.
- The rest of the title should entice people to click.
1.3Optimize your descriptions
Now that we�ve got proper titles, we should start to focus on meta descriptions. The meta description can be used by search engines to show in the snippet, it�s the black piece of text shown beneath the URL. The meta description is usually only used when it contains the keyword the searcher was searching for.
Some plugins, most specifically the All in One SEO plugin, use so called �automated descriptions�. They use the first sentence of a post to fill the meta description by default. That�s not very smart. That first sentence might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject.
Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you�re thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet� If you don�t use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.
Auto generating a snippet is a �shortcut�, and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).
So, use the meta description field you find in the WordPress SEO plugin to write a meta description. Make sure it entices the reader to click through and make sure that it contains the focus keyword of your post or page at least once.
You�ll notice I do not mention meta keywords. I don�t use them and neither should you, for an explanation, read this: meta keywords and why I don�t use them.
1.4Image 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.
You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don�t have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image�s alt and title tag:
Using the proper alt attributes for images is also something that is checked in the Page Analysis functionality of my WordPress SEO plugin.
1.5XML sitemaps
To tell Google and the other search engines that your site has been updated, you can use XML Sitemaps. My WordPress SEO plugin contains an XML Sitemap module by default that you just have to enable. Go to Settings ? XML Sitemaps and click the checkbox:
As soon as you�ve checked the checkbox and hit Save, it�ll give you some options but in most cases you won�t need those. It generates an XML sitemap for all your posts, pages, custom post types and all your taxonomies like categories and tags and (if applicable) other custom taxonomies.
When you publish a new post or page, the XML sitemap is automatically submitted to Google & Bing allowing them to easily (and quickly) find your new content.
Other than most other XML sitemap plugins, this plugin doesn�t generate a static file, which is a very intensive process, especially for large sites. This means there is no �action� on publish, which slows down the publishing of the post. Instead it generates XML sitemaps as a sort of template using WordPress rewrites, which is much faster while also allowing caching plugins to cache the output.
It�s also being smart about splitting those sitemaps up into smaller bits, so Google only has to fetch one new XML �sub�-sitemap when a post is published, because the other sitemaps haven�t been changed, using the date modified options.
From an SEO perspective, it�s better than most others because it also includes the images in each post, which makes your images rank (better) in Google Image Search. It also integrates tightly with the rest of my SEO plugin, meaning that a no indexed post automatically is left out of the XML sitemap, with the option to �force� it in.
Lastly, it has a pretty complete API, allowing me and other developers to plugin extra sitemaps, which means I can do things like create my News SEO and Video SEOextension. These extensions respectively generate a news xml sitemap and video xml sitemap.
2Template optimization
2.1Breadcrumbs
You�ll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like �Home > Articles > WordPress SEO�. They are good for two things:
- They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
- They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.
These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt
single.phpand page.php in your theme, and use the breadcrumbs from my WordPress SEO plugin. You find the settings for the breadcrumbs in the SEO ? Internal Links settings page.2.2Headings
Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an
<h1>, and nothing else. Your blog�s name should only be an <h1> on your front page, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an <h3>. Your sidebar shouldn�t be crammed with <h2> and <h3>�s either etc.These are easy to edit in the
post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO and my article about the Heading Structure for your Blog (from which a lot applies to non-blog WordPress sites too).2.3Clean up your code
All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they�re not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don�t have to download them most of the time.
2.4Aim for speed
A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do three things to increase the speed of your WordPress.
- Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I�ve highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
- Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend W3 Total Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.
- W3 Total Cache works even more magic when combined with a CDN like MaxCDN. Read more about WordPress CDN stuff here.
Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I use VPS.net myself, and they�ve proven to be better than most everything I�ve seen in hosting, but I�ve got great experience with Synthesis too. If you want to know more be sure to read my article about WordPress hosting.
2.5Rethink that sidebar
Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you�re not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you�re allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.
The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren�t necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren�t helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you�d only want on sub pages.
Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.
2.6HTML sitemaps
For some sites an HTML sitemap might be nonsense, especially when your site is really a blog, for more corporate type sites with several levels of pages an HTML Sitemap might actually be very beneficial for both users and search engines. I�ve written an article on how to create an HTML Sitemap Page Template which would be a good start to get one going for your WordPress site.
2.7Author highlighting
If you�ve found my site through a search you might have seen that results from my site get an author image in front of them:
This is called an �author highlight�. Most of the work needed for that has to be done in your theme, I wrote an extensive post on what is needed and how you can do that:
rel="author" and rel="me" in WordPress. ajmalseotips.blogspot.com