Why SEO?

One of the issues which is greatly overlooked is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Think of when it comes to releasing a product, you have your research, your production and your marketing. Think of SEO as the marketing side of your service /  product.

So how do you optimise your already built product in this case your website? WordPress / 3rd parties offering tools / plug-ins which allows you to configure your website to allow optimisation on your website. This blog uses plug ins that allow pages to become SEO friendly to help boost SEO ranking performance.

It is important you also have a google webmasters account and any sort of analytics program, for this website I use google analytics to monitor my traffic. I also use it for a lot of sites I build. It is slightly more advanced than the typical stats type package but once you used it a few weeks you can get the hang of it.

Tools

These tools can be found in the plug-ins section of wordpress…

  • All in one SEO Pack
    Quite a good SEO pack, allows to add meta information, a title, description to each page.
  • Google Analytics for WordPress
    You can use this to apply your google analytics code to the site to read stats within each article / page.
  • Google XML Sitemap
    This is important to get your site indexed quickly and efficiently with conjunction with google webmaster tools.
  • Redirection
    No one likes going to a link on google finding out that the page is not found. Redirection prevents that offering a more efficient way of directing you to the right content on the site.

Optimising wordpress

So we know the tools, we know, Google webmaster helps sort out indexing problems and get your site indexed faster in Google. But what can we do to optimise wordpress. One handy tip which I have learnt from another site (applogies about this as I do not remember what the site name is) is to make article url’s user and SEO friendly.

Permalinks allows you to customise how to display your article urls. By default it shows a query string ?p=13432 which to any search engine is never good. Other customisation can be done but having a custom structure where displaying the title of the article helps wonders. What would you rather have wordpress.htm?p=13432 or wordpress/my-article?

To allow this you have to add /%postname%/ within the custom strcture in permalink settings.

Hopefully now your website over time should improve, make sure you use targeted keywords in your content as well without spamming your own content.