SEO Untangled with WordPress

WordPress, out of the league, comes organized to grip search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.

WordPress has an array of built in search optimization tools, including the ability to use .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling, and pinging. There are also a number of third party plugins and hacks which makes search engine optimization (SEO) very easy and user friendly.

While developing a website through WordPress, you can use various WordPress Themes and customize WordPress to meet up your own requirements. To develop your WordPress site’s optimal friendliness towards search engine spiders and crawlers, here are a few tips:

Code Validation: Make sure your site’s code validates. Errors in your code may prevent a search engine from moving through the site successfully.
Read Only: Search engines can only “read” a site. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine and compare with all the parts and pieces to give you a good “score”. Learn how search engines scan your content, evaluate it, and categorize it so you can help yourself get in good favor with search engines.
Content is the King: A search engine enters your site and, for the most part, ignores the styles and CSS. It just plows through the site gathering content and information. Most WordPress Themes are designed with the content as close to the top of the unstyled page as possible, keeping sidebars and footers towards the bottom. Few search engines scan more than the first third of the page before moving on. Make sure your Theme puts the content near the top.
Keyword & Titles weigh heavy: Search engines do not evaluate your site on how pretty it is, but they do evaluate the words and put them through a sieve, giving credit to certain words and combinations of words. Words found within your document are compared to words found within your links and titles. The more that match, the better your “score.”
Image Description: Your site may not have much text, mostly photographs and links, but you have places in which to add textual content. Search engines look for alt and title in link and image tags. Having good descriptions and words in these attributes helps provide more content for search engines to digest.
Link Exchange: How good the sites are that link to you is what matters for SEO favoritism. It’s about who links to you. Blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks are all built into WordPress. These help you link to other people, which gives them credit, but it also helps them link to you, connecting the “links.” The number of incoming links your site has that have been recognized by Google can be checked by typing link: www.yoursite.com into Google (other search engines have similar functions). Other ways to generate incoming links to your site include:
- Include your site’s url to your signature while posting on posts on other sites.
- Directory submission: Strict no to commenting on everything, as mostly all blogging tools use rel=”nofollow” attribute
- Internal Linking: A search engine crawls through your site, moving from page to page. Good navigational links to the categories, archives, and various pages on your site will invite a search engine to move gracefully from one page to another, following the connecting links and visiting most of your site.