WordPress SEO Blueprint
July 25th, 2010Strong On-Page SEO Theme Development for WordPress
In past few years I have tested and researched what could be the very best layout for my themes and what can deliver superior results with Google and other search engines as well and this is what I have come up with. No, nothing really new but never used on any other WordPress sites out there, at least not too my knowledge.
Proper WordPress SEO Structure
If your theme is anywhere near the above image your site or a blog is Search Engine Friendly and that is how WordPress themes should look like after properly optimized. Changing H2 to H1 isn’t really an SEO. This image is just an example, sidebar can be placed anywhere you want, as long as it doesn’t take the presence over your content or your header. Structure like this one has been proven to rank your posts higher than just standard theme design, followed by unique well-written content and proper keyword density.
Theme Structure and Content Placement
- Content comes first and there is nothing that should block search engines from getting to your posts first and as fast as possible. Not only that you will “wrap” your titles in H1, but also you are pushing the content above everything else listed on your site.
- Header comes second and it could be connected to your main menu (top navigation where you list your pages and categories).
- Sidebar comes third, the place where you list your recent post, categories maybe, blogroll etc, it is completely up to you what you want there.
- Footer is as always the very last thing you want search engines to crawl.
If you have any questions about this structure, please don’t hesitate to ask me, I will be more than happy to give you more details. OnlinePress runs on one of the versions I developed, in case that you would like to see the actual example. Maybe in near future you will have an option to download this as well.
SEO Back to Basics
February 22nd, 2010Is your site performing badly on Search Engines and you have no idea why?
Almost every day for many years now I would go and search Google Blogs just to see what is going on around, as well as Twitter and Facebook. From what I hear many site owners are complaining about terrible rankings, they say “my site was #3 on Google top 10, now we can’t even find any of keywords that were leading to our site”.
This is very simple folks, every time something goes wrong you must go back to basics, all the way where you started and backtrack. Just like when you lost your car key, what did you do? you tried to remember where you had the key last and backtrack. Same goes with search engines, start with your main page, open your Google Analytics, go back few months and compare. Sometimes when time permits I would also analyze some of this sites, just for myself to see what could be preventing them to gain their ranking back.
In most situations site owners are doing the SEO by themselves and that is great, some of them can’t afford SEO Consultant so they have no choice, but if and when you decide to take this in your own hands, please don’t push the optimization way to hard, don’t place the keywords where they shouldn’t be and for Pete sake do not stuff your pages with H1 titles from top to bottom of your page, that doesn’t help, it will only hurt you.
WordPress (Self Hosted) site owners!
If you are running a site that is powered by WordPress.org, please make sure that your index.php or home.php is properly SEO coded. If the title of the theme you purchased or downloaded for free says “SEO Optimized WordPress Theme” that doesn’t mean it’s true.
Here is what the properly optimized WordPress Theme should look like:
index.php or home.php if you downloaded a customized there, page.php and single.php should start with H1 title, not H2. sidebar.php headings should not be H2, sidebar importance level must be lower than your main page or a post. H3 is acceptable, however the perfect solution is no headings at all.
Also, don’t download anything from those site where WordPress Premium Themes are available for free and the main reason why is because the theme your downloaded will NOT be the same theme you purchased from sites such as woothemes.com, studiopress.com or wpnow.com. Why they are not the same? When you purchase one of the premium themes, you will also get their support as well, so in case something goes wrong, they will assist you. When you download the premium theme free of charge, there is no support and you will have some extra codes in your theme, as well as some missing codes too, which will make your site look good from the outside, but performing so bad from the inside.
WordPress.com Server is Down
February 18th, 2010WordPress.com Hosting Server Outage
In case that you didn’t hear, WordPress.com is experiencing some technical difficulties, the entire server went down recently.
About 40 minutes ago WordPress posted this on Twitter
WordPress.com is down, we’re working on restoring service now.
http://twitter.com/wordpressdotcom/status/9302612517
I am sure that many site are affected by this and as is right now your best option is to wait patiently and check WordPress Twitter updates.
WordPress SEO Tips
November 28th, 2009
Basic tips for ranking better with your WordPress blog or site
Nowadays you can download many free WordPress themes. Some of them are already properly coded and few do need your attention. How can anyone do these changes and quickly rank higher?
This time I won’t write whole lot about it, however I’ll give you the examples so that you can do this fast and without any pain.
WordPress Post Titles
Post titles in WordPress are extremely important; just by changing them you’ll have more glory while going towards the top with your site.
In your wp-content/themes/{theme-name} locate and open single.php. Somewhere close to beginning of this file look for:
< h2 ><?php the_title(); ?>< /h2 >
Many WordPress designers have tendency to place H2 where H1 is needed.
If your theme is H1 already, leave it as it is, if not change it to:
< h1 ><?php the_title(); ?> < /h1 >
Now, on the same location open your page.php, check the <?php the_title(); ?> and if necessary to the same.
In case that you want to target your content first and I believe that everyone should, make sure that when you write a post, your H1 (The Title) is automatically followed by H2 (The Subtitle) and that should look like this:
< h1 >WordPress SEO< /h1>
< h2 >Search Engine Optimization for WordPress, free tips on how to rank better< /h2 >
Here I started with (WordPress SEO), which will be my title, as well as my (permalink) seoagent.org/wordpress-seo, immediately after that my post will have a brief information in H2, to give my visitors more info about this things they will be reading on that specific page. At the same time we are providing our friends at Google, Yahoo, Bing etc., with the keywords that are the most important to us, so when they visit your blog/site H1 and H2 are the very first thing they will see, since we are sending them the “message” what are the priorities to look for.
Since we just covered he headings on your posts and pages, let’s fast forward to the very first paragraph.
WordPress SEO is our title, Search Engine Optimization for WordPress, free tips on how to rank better will be the subtitle and your beginning of the post, article, tip or whatever is that you will be writing on should look similar to this:
< p >SEO ranking with your WordPress blog should be better if your site is properly optimized. Search Engine Optimization is only good if you pay attention to your website headings and as well as the content< /p >
See, there is nothing to it, just make sure that all three of the above have equal keyword density, never overdo and don’t spam your titles, subtitles or content.
The very last tip I would like to recommend is your sidebar (sidebar.php) titles are usually in H2, since we already used this for subtitles, you can change it to H3, or even H4 in case that you are using H3s’ in your content.
Let search engines target your posts, not what is behind the sidebar.
If you want to see the perfect example of what we were covering in this post, when you have time, please check out http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html and take a look at Google’s source code, their headings are top-notch optimized. Yes, you will say that this is Google, they will rank great anyways, no that’s not my point at all.
If you have any questions, please ask away.
PS Don’t forget to match your H1 title with the title tag as well, also it’s important that your site description is relevant to your content as well, if you cannot think of anything, simply copy the first paragraph of your post and paste into meta description, however only if they make sense.
