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Either you know about SEO, or you ought to. Search Engine Optimization (not marketing) has two real paths: white hat and black hat. “Black hat” SEO are practices which deceive Search Engines (such as Google) into rating your site higher, to get either a higher PR (Page Rank) or more hits from its users.

White Hat SEO has the same goal (longer term), but using allowed techniques, essentially, designing your site in a way that search engines will appreciate and utilize it and its content in the best possible way.

This guide will help you to easily setup and start using some basic SEO techniques on your WordPress blog.

Step 1: Download & Activate Plugins

Firstly, we need to install some plugins we’ll require. Download and install the following plugins, and we will go into more detail later on –

Unzip them all in your plugin directories, and activate them through the Plugins page in your WordPress Admin screen.

Part 2: Utilizing your plugins

SEO Siloing
I’ll start with the SEO Siloing plugin, given that its the simplest of course. SE Siloing is essentially a “post filing” technique. It allows you to create a Page with a group of posts in a category.

For example, on my site here I have a Page called “Web“, which provides a simple listing of posts I’ve put into the category “web”.

In order to create the same effect, create Page names with the exact same name as categories (actually the category slugs) that you post in. In that page put the following code:

That will take care of the rest for you! Create as many pages as you want, but remember this is also for your users. Its essentially a quick, easy to use category system – thats search engine friendly!

All in One SEO
Actually, this is the easiest. Enable the plugin.

What this will have automatically done for you is the following:

  • SEO’d titles. Post Titles are rewritten on the fly, with the actual post title coming first, then your blog name. No more ‘Archive’ in your title.
  • The categories for a post get output as META keywords. Since you already tagged your posts with your categories this is fairly automatic.
  • Your post excerpt gets to be the META description.
  • Pages that are just fillers (category pages etc.) get a content=”noindex,follow” to avoid duplicate content.

While you may not understand any or all of this, it will help search engines to understand the content of your site.

Get Recent Comments
For this I will assume you have a theme that supports Widgets, if you don’t you can easily install the plugin from reading the documentation in the zip file.

Put “Get Recent Comments”, and “Get Recent Trackbacks” into your Side Bar, then go to the Options page to configure them. Set it to show 5 – 10 comments, a and least 100 characters. This will provide Search Engines with quick links to almost random (mostly fresh) posts on your site, with custom content written by your users. Its a great way of cross-linking.

Related Entries
Related Entries has the exact same intention and effect as the Recent Comments explanation above: its a great way of cross linking relevant information (which search engines and users love).

Install it under each post, as demonstrated here on my site by adding the code to your theme as instructed in the howto.

Part 3: Permalink structure

Permalinks are pretty (and clever) ways of showing posts in your URL bar. Instead of “http://raven.za.net/?id=4″, you can show “http://raven.za.net/search/seo-guide”. Search Engines love this, and so do users!

Go to Options, then Permalinks (/wp-admin/options-permalink.php). Choose to use a custom structure and type this in:

/%category%/%postname%

You now have sensible URL’s!

Part 4: Maintaining and building

You have now setup your WordPress blog to be sensitive to Search Engines and cross link your content. The important part now is writing good, and sensible copy.

Tip 1: Its not a newspaper! Don’t write witty headings that will mess with your URL and your search engine visibility. People won’t search for “You never would have believed…” – they’ll search for “Britney Spears has no hair”, so call you post that!

Tip 2: Categories – keep these in mind! Your SEO Siloing plugin is going to use them, and you have updated your permalink structure to have them in your URL’s – don’t make silly categories, keep them relative!

Tip 3: If you aren’t sure, don’t do it. There is nothing worse than Black Hat SEO – it does work, but only if you really know what you are doing, and not for very long. Something suspicious will get you banned!

Tip 4: Be wary the sandbox! Search engines are known to put new domains into things known as “sandboxes”. Basically, your results will show FAR FAR away for a few months after launching a new domain with a new site – don’t worry, it will come right!

Part 5: Coming soon…

Later, I’ll be talking about reporting on this – looking at search engine results to see changes, getting stats and more!


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