What should be common sense for an established website owner is still often mysterious for new WordPress users. The subject, of course, is Search Engine Optimization.
Let’s take a look at how WordPress now helps small website owners make the most of Search Engines, as well as additional steps you will need to pursue.
Permalinks
A permalink is the website URL of your page. When you first install WordPress, your website page will have a permalink of http://yourblog/?p=XX where the XX is an article number. You can change your permalink quickly under Settings > Permalinks to include more information. You’ll notice that here on thisismyurl.com I use both the article number and a compressed permalink title.
By using the WordPress ID number, as opposed to a date or alternate structure, I reduce dramatically database access time for WordPress. This allows my website to perform faster with fewer database calls while still protecting the most valuable element of my permalink structure, the search engine optimized (SEO) links from Google and other linking websites.
The permalink title, however, is the name of the article “Common sense WordPress SEO strategy for Beginners” but switched to lowercase and with special characters removed. The resulting phrase “common-sense-wordpress-seo-strategy-beginners” has been further cleaned to remove small words such as “for” which add nothing to my SEO value. I use a wonderful plugin by Andrei Mikrukov called SEO slugs to optimize this for me.
Website Structure
Often the structure of a website is ignored by beginners, yet it’s a vital piece to the SEO puzzle and helps direct users to the most important areas of a website. Think of your structure as a pyramid where users enter your website at the top of the structure and continue on a path throughout the site until reaching the base. The most important parts of your website should be at the top while the least important sink to the bottom of the pyramid.
Using this path system, map the movements of a user from your homepage to the areas of your site. Vital pages such as contact information and products (in my case it’s WordPress plugins and WordPress consulting) should be one click away from the homepage with a strong keyword presence on the opening page. Less important pages (Privacy Policy, etc) could be on the bottom of pages, or multiple clicks away from the homepage.
I love thinking of it as a Plinko board because the thing about a website is that not very many people come in from the top. In fact, most traffic to a successfully SEO’d site will enter to pages deep within the website and so there are many entry points, just like the top of a Plinko game.
For those who don’t know how to play the game, it’s simple. You drop a ball at the top and it bounces against pegs throughout the board until landing in a container along the bottom. Your website is the same and your structure acts as pegs in this game, each link throughout your site helps guide visitors along the path until they land at a final destination.
Integration & Feeds
RSS Feeds
WordPress comes pre packaged with a powerful social media tool called RSS feeds. These feeds allow users to subscribe to your website using a dedicated RSS client or email client and when WordPress publishes a new article or post, the RSS feed will help readers become aware through a pull system of updates. What’s that mean? Simply that there is a secret file on your WordPress website (mine is at http://thisismyurl.com/feed/) which stores nothing but a list of story links, summaries and titles. When a reader wants to know if your website is updated, it simply queries the RSS feed automatically.
The Sitemap
Similar to an RSS feed, the sitemap is also a dedicated file on your website, updated whenever your site posts a new article. Mine is located at http://thisismyurl.com/sitemap.xml and it’s readable by most external applications. Like an RSS feed, it produces a list of links on a site but, unlike an RSS feed, it also rates those links and includes pages. The purpose of a sitemap.xml is to help search engine spiders such as the Googlebot (which crawls a website regularly) to understand the makeup of a site.
A sitemap isn’t included with WordPress by default, but there are plenty of great plugins on WordPress.org to help you install one on your site. Once you have a sitemap on your website, you also need to help search engines by telling them that the sitemap is present. To do this, create an account at Google’s Webmaster Tools and add your sitemap. I also tend to add my RSS feed to Webmaster Tools for good measure.
There are many other things that a great website needs to be truly SEO ready, but here in a beginner’s guide to SEO, I think we’ve covered a lot. If I’ve missed something (or if you have a great article on SEO for WordPress) please leave a comment and link below.
Chris” So using the pageid with a numeric and SE slug plugin makes it load faster than just using %postname%/ in the orginal setup for permalink?
Hi Rob, my understanding (albeit I’m not a core developer, so I could be wrong) comes from a couple sources, the WP-Hackers thread at http://lists.automattic.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2010-September/034615.html and Otto’s post at http://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/ In both cases, it’s about lowering the queries WP does to the database. What I took away from the Codex article on the subject (quoted in the WP-Hackers) is that the ID will give WordPress a match quicker than having to query multiple parameters.
Basically, in my tests it runs faster because I’ve given WordPress a query that results in a post faster than having to move onto another query. As a side note, the numeric query is also a requirement of Google News, while I’m not planning to submit the site to Google in the near future, it saves me altering my permalinks in the future if I choose to.