WordPress SEO – Helping Your Blog Rank Higher

There are an estimated 400 million active blogs out there in internet land and WordPress is by far the most popular blogging platform. While many of these blogs will become “inactive” within a matter a weeks many more will pop up to take their place. Blogs are used by the public and businesses alike and while WordPress is pretty good out of the box in terms of SEO, there are a number of ways you can improve it. So let’s take a look at just a few of the ways you can help your blog’s optimisation.

Permalinks

When you set up your blog the first thing you should change is the permalink structure. If you start to post content before doing this you will have some URLs that are not very well optimised and it will be more hassle to change them down the line. You will find the permalink section under the Settings tab on the left of your screen.

I prefer to user the custom structure of /category/postname/ for which you would enter /%category%/%postname%/ in the custom structure area:

If you would prefer to just show the /postname/ then just type in /%postname%/.

Category Base

For some reason WordPress adds in a directory named “category” at the start of this permalink structure.

There is no reason for it to be there it just adds unnecessary length to your URLs. Fortunately there is a quick and easy way to get rid of this. There is a plugin called WP No Category Base that requires no setting up, you just install it and it removes it for you.

Creating an XML Sitemap

XML Sitemaps are a great idea for all sites from an SEO perspective. They help search engine spiders easily find a list of all of you content and make it easier for them to get it indexed. This being WordPress there are of course a wealth of plugins that can assist you in this task. The one I use is called Google XML Sitemaps. After you install this plugin you will notice there are quite a few options in the plugin settings area. Most of these are fine left as they are but there is one part you may wish to customise:

If your site has multiple authors you may want to include the author pages into your sitemap. You would generally not want to include archives and tag pages as this may result in duplicate content issues.

Pagination

There can be some issues with certain WordPress themes when it comes to category pages and even the home page. If they have “previous page” links at the bottom of the page to see older content this can create an issue for the search engine spiders. If you have a lot of content then the spiders will have to crawl through all of these pages to get to your earlier content. In some cases they may actually stop after a certain number.

To solve this issue there is a plugin you can install called Pagerfix which makes your pagination look like this:

This provides far more links to the deeper content for the search engines to follow and so makes it easier for them to find it.

Related Posts

Linking to related posts is a great way to of increasing your WordPress SEO capabilities, as with the pagination plugin above it also helps to get your other content indexed by the search engines. Linking to articles of a similar nature will help to build the relevancy of your post too. There is once again a bunch of plugins that will perform this task admirably, my personal favourite is YARPP. It searches through your posts database to find posts around the same subject and adds links to them at the end of your post.

These are just some of the ways you can make your WordPress blog more SEO compliant (I feel another series coming!). They are quick, easy and relatively painless to implement and can provide you with real benefits. Maybe next time I will look a little deeper into how WordPress functions at a core level and see what SEO improvements could be made there.