5 SEO Steps for Your WordPress Blog

Legend- Best SEO plugin for WordPress | Insert meta keywords,description and page title | Tag your content | Create a Category | Page Naming | <h1> Page title

Steps that will change your traffic streams immediately

With great content management systems such as WordPress administering to your own web site is as easy as using Microsoft word. In a previous blog article on making your first post using a Microsoft word in WordPress I did not really elaborate on search engine optimization. A couple of my subscribers have emailed me and asked if I can write more on the specifics of search engine optimization for your WordPress blog.

Below I am going to list the steps I take to optimize each and every blog article I publish. The first three steps rely on the all in one search engine optimization PACK. The last four steps are ones that I follow in addition to the plug in optimization.

My Plugin of Choice- All in one SEO PACK

This amazing plug in allows you to optimize your website on the fly. In just a few steps every article you publish will be optimized for the search engines. A few key features for this plugin include:

• Canonical URL redirection
• Automatic page title naming
• Meta tag keywords automatically or manually
• Meta tag description automatically or manually
• Works with many other SEO the related plug ins
• Integrates easily into the e-commerce WordPress websites
• CMS style support for easy administration
• Automatic tag insertation of meta tag key words

Where do I find this Plugin?

This plugin is a free download that you can obtain in a few minutes right here.

What Does it Do?

It takes less than five minutes to install on your system but after you install it you will need to configure the settings to your preferences. Your setting choices include the following:

• Plugin Status: Enabled Disabled All in One SEO Pack must be enabled for use.
• Home Title: As the name implies, this will be the title of your homepage. This is independent of any other option. If not set, the default blog title will get used.
• Home Description: The META description for your homepage. Independent of any other options, the default is no META description at all if this is not set.
• Home Keywords (comma separated): A comma separated list of your most important keywords for your site that will be written as META keywords on your homepage. Don’t stuff everything in here.
• Canonical URLs: This option will automatically generate Canonical URLS for your entire WordPress installation. This will help to prevent duplicate content penalties by Google.
• Rewrite Titles: Note that this is all about the title tag. This is what you see in your browser’s window title bar. This is NOT visible on a page, only in the window title bar and of course in the source. If set, all pages, posts, categories, searches, and archive page titles get rewritten. You can specify the format for most of them. For example: The default templates puts the title tag of posts like this: Blog Archive >> Blog Name >> Post Title‚ (maybe I’ve overdone slightly). This is far from optimal. With the default post title format, Rewrite Title rewrites this to ‚Post Title | Blog Name. If you have manually defined a title (in one of the text fields for All in One SEO Plugin input) this will become the title of your post in the format string.
• Post Title Format: The following macros are supported:

- * %blog_title% – Your blog title

* %blog_description% – Your blog description

* %post_title% – The original title of the post

* %category_title% – The (main) category of the post

* %category% – Alias for %category_title%

* %post_author_login% – This post’s author’ login

* %post_author_nicename% – This post’s author’ nicename

* %post_author_firstname% – This post’s author’ first name (capitalized)

* %post_author_lastname% – This post’s author’ last name (capitalized)

• Page Title Format: The following macros are supported:

* %blog_title% – Your blog title

* %blog_description% – Your blog description

* %page_title% – The original title of the page

* %page_author_login% – This page’s author’ login

* %page_author_nicename% – This page’s author’ nicename

* %page_author_firstname% – This page’s author’ first name (capitalized)

* %page_author_lastname% – This page’s author’ last name (capitalized)

• Category Title Format: The following macros are supported:

* %blog_title% – Your blog title

* %blog_description% – Your blog description

* %category_title% – The original title of the category

* %category_description% – The description of the category

• Archive Title Format: The following macros are supported:

* %blog_title% – Your blog title

* %blog_description% – Your blog description

* %date% – The original archive title given by wordpress, e.g. “2007″ or “2007 August”

• Tag Title Format: The following macros are supported:

* %blog_title% – Your blog title

* %blog_description% – Your blog description

* %tag% – The name of the tag

• Search Title Format: The following macros are supported:

* %blog_title% – Your blog title

* %blog_description% – Your blog description

* %search% – What was searched for

• Description Format: The following macros are supported:

* %blog_title% – Your blog title

* %blog_description% – Your blog description

* %description% – The original description as determined by the plugin, e.g. the excerpt if one is set or an auto-generated one if that option is set

* %wp_title% – The original WordPress title, e.g. post_title for posts

• 404 Title Format: The following macros are supported:

* %blog_title% – Your blog title

* %blog_description% – Your blog description

* %request_url% – The original URL path, like “/url-that-does-not-exist/”

* %request_words% – The URL path in human readable form, like “Url That Does Not Exist”

* %404_title% – Additional 404 title input”

• Paged Format:

This string gets appended/prepended to titles when they are for paged index pages (like home or archive pages).The following macros are supported:

* %page% – The page number

• Use Categories for META keywords:

Check this if you want your categories for a given post used as the META keywords for this post (in addition to any keywords and tags you specify on the post edit page).

• Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page:

Check this if you want your keywords on a custom posts page (set it in options->reading) to be dynamically generated from the keywords of the posts showing on that page. If unchecked, it will use the keywords set in the edit page screen for the posts page.

• Use noindex for Categories:

Check this for excluding category pages from being crawled. Useful for avoiding duplicate content.

• Use noindex for Archives:

Check this for excluding archive pages from being crawled. Useful for avoiding duplicate content.

• Use noindex for Tag Archives:

Check this for excluding tag pages from being crawled. Useful for avoiding duplicate content.

• Auto generates Descriptions:

Check this and your META descriptions will get auto generated if there’s no excerpt.

Capitalize Category Titles:

Check this and Category Titles will have the first letter of each word capitalized.

• Additional Post Headers:

What you enter here will be copied verbatim to your header on post pages. You can enter whatever additional headers you want here, even references to style sheets.

• Additional Page Headers:

What you enter here will be copied verbatim to your header on pages. You can enter whatever additional headers you want here, even references to style sheets.

• Additional Home Headers:

What you enter here will be copied verbatim to your header on the home page. You can enter whatever additional headers you want here, even references to style sheets.

Log important events:

Described well By Justin Wright Here in This Video

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Yikes, What Does That All Mean?

Note: if GaLearning.com is performing the installation for you, do not worry we will set this up the best possible way for your business.

Now, maybe that’s a little too much for some people to follow. In these cases, why not get an experienced WordPress technician to help resolve this for you. For example, our methods of search engine optimization stem from our proven belief system. We have installed and configured hundreds of WordPress blog web sites, there is definitely a preferred configuration for optimal results.

Selecting a plug in for search engine optimization should be researched carefully. You want to look for plug-ins that have a good track record, and are endorsed by other users. This is easily done by checking with the WordPress community at WordPress.com. Having performed this research already, I can tell you that the all in one search engine optimization PACK is the most effective for my purposes.

Are You Ready To Optimize?

Now that you have your plug in installed and fully configured it’s time to optimize your first publication. Here are the six main steps you will take to optimize your publication.

1. Page Title- When you write or publish an article it is important to understand the primary theme topic that should be used in your title. What are you writing about?
2. Meta tag description –One or two sentences should be used to accurately describe your content.
3. Meta tag keywords- Then you want to put consideration into other keywords that accurately describe the publication. I like to use keywords that appear  in the body of the content.

Once you have decided on those three elements you can scroll to the bottom of your post where you’ll find the all in one search engine optimization fields. ** Requires All in one SEO Pack.

Simply enter the information in the appropriate text fields and you have completed the first SEO steps.

This is another important element in modern day search engine optimization. When you tag content it helps the entire web organize your information more accurately. These tags are defined by you as the author of the content. If your content is outstanding it is often passed around and re-distributed throughout the social web, where it can be re-tagged by other readers. Tags are always relevant to the content and more than one may be used per content article. There are a couple of ways to insert your tags using the WordPress interface.

1. Add a new tag.
2. The current tags you are using.
3. You can also choose from other tags that have been used previously by you on other articles.

If you haven’t created a category yet it is highly recommended that you do. Think of categories like buckets or jars. In your garage you may use small jars to put all of the nuts and bolts in… you may use another jar to put all the washers in. The point is you keep all similar items in one container. That is the same way categories work on your website. The more organized you can keep your information in buckets the more people and search engines will enjoy your website. Choose your categories wisely and accurately!

1. Category name — The category name is used to describe all of the contents you will put in the container. It will appear under each post and may also appear in the category widget depending on the system preferences you are using.
2. Category slug – The category slug is – separated, do not use spaces, and remember that this will appear as part of the URI (uniform resource identifier) which is the information that appears after the domain extension (e.g. www.domainname.com/this-is-uri). Yes indeed this is all part of search engine optimization.
3. Category parent — By choosing a category parent you begin your architectural design of the information storage. There may be instances where you want to put buckets within buckets. When that is the case you will choose a category parent; e.g. www.yourdomainname.com/fruits/oranges. In this case “fruits” is the parent directory for “oranges”
4. Description – Although descriptions are not prominently displayed on your site there may be themes that display the description. In most cases the search spiders seem to always find their way to the description no matter what the theme. It is always a good idea to provide a short description for each category.
5. Add category — When you are sure you have everything set perfectly add your new category.

Now you have created a container to put all of your relevant information into.

When you view our web site or web page on the Internet there are two components to the web address. The first component is known as the URL or uniform resource locator. An example of a URL is your www.domainname.com. The second component to a web address is the URI or uniform resource identifier. An example of a URI is www.domainname.com/uri/uri.html. The URI is described as anything that follows the domain extension after the forward/. The URI also breaks down further to the webmaster. In WordPress you have the ability and control to name your article, which provides another opportunity to use important keywords. File names contained within the URI are part of search engine optimization and this is something you have full control over. Why not use it?

1. Click Edit
2. Rename your article

There are actually two page titles that are very important and you’ll want to pay close attention to them. The first important title is one that appears to search engines and people browsing your website. It is the HTML page title that appears in the <title> tags in the <head> of your document. They display in the browser like this….

The second page title that is very important is the one that appears in the side of the <H1> tag. If you are a web master with good manners you understand that the <H1> tag appears only one time on every document. In WordPress you can add your title by entering it into the text field.

That’s about it! After you complete your first post you may be interested to see what the source code of your document looks like. Simply navigate to the content page you are interested in and right mouse click to view the source of the document. You’ll notice that you have a sexy page title, comma separated Meta tag keywords along with a beautiful Meta tag description. Practice these steps with every article you publish on the Internet and watch how quickly your content begins to rank for keywords that truly engage your visitors.

Learn more about posting your first WordPress blog from MS Word