SEO For Blogs-SEO Tips To Improve Your Google Rankings for Blogs

Wordpress Bloggers SEO Guide

Although there are a lot of different blogging platforms out there, Wordpress has become the most popular among them. The two main reasons for this is are its ability to be customized and the number of plugins available to add additional functionality. However, right out of the box, a clean installation of wordpress leaves a lot to be desired, at least from a SEO standpoint.

By making some adjustments, you can increase the effectiveness of your SEO to help improve your rankings in the search engines (a.k.a. Google).

Theme

The first decision to make is which theme to use. There are so many to choose from, sometimes it can be a little overwhelming. The theme should not only look good and convey the appropriate feel for your blog, but you want to make sure that it is structured in a way to take full advantage of SEO. For instance, you ideally want your navigation (sidebars) on the right-hand side. The reason for this is that it increases your opportunity for relevance by making your text the first thing the search engines see.

Depending on your site’s navigation, you may need to have your navigation along the top. If this is the case, just try to make sure to use good keywords as your categories or pages in your navigation. This way, again, it will help to show relevance to the search engines by being the first thing they see.

Permalinks

In the default installation of Word press, the URL of your post will be shown as a number:

http://yourblog.com/?p=321

what you actually want is your title (keywords) in the URL

http://yourblog.com/your-article-title

Both are valid and the major search engines do not have an issue indexing dynamic content anymore. However, when considering a SEO, you should remember that it is better to have your keywords in your URL to help increase your relevancy. So by making sure that you are using permalinks, you increase
your chance of getting seen.

To make this change, using version 2.7.1, under SETTINGS click on PERMALINKS.

Select CUSTOM STRUCTURE under Common Settings and type this:

%postname%

And that’s it. Your URL will now use your post title and help to increase your relevance for your main keyword.

If you would like more information on how to customize your permalinks, you can visit the wordpress codex here.

Page Title

Another one of the most important factors in your rankings is your page title. You always want to make sure you have your top keywords in your title. You have 65 characters to pack as much keyword power as you can into a readable and compelling title.

To help in managing your titles, I highly recommend the ALL-IN-ONE SEO pack plugin. It allows you to override title, meta-descriptions, and meta-keywords, as well as other important aspects of your page.

For information on the proper settings, see my article on how to configure ALL IN ONE SEO plugin correctly.

It is possible to do this manually in the code, but with every template being a little different, it makes it hard to do a good lesson on it. Besides, it is so much easier to just use the plugin. Why make life harder than it needs to be?

Headings Structure

With blogs there are two separate aspects to dealing with headings, the title of your blog and the headings in your posts and pages.

Header Headings

By default, your blog title is usually set as a H1 tag and the tagline is set as an H2. These are what show up at the very top of your blog page. You can change your blog title and tagline by going to SETTINGS GENERAL.

Depending on your blog name and domain name, this may or may not be an issue. If your domain and blog name include your main keywords for your site (what you are trying to rank for) then this is a big deal. If you blog name and domain name have nothing to do with what you are blogging about, then it really doesn’t matter.

If your domain and blog name DO include your keywords then there are a few things you will need to do. Depending on your graphic ability, or sense of style, you may want to customize your blog and make your entire header into a graphic. Which means not using any text. Here is one of my favorite examples:

The upside is that you get to have it look anyway that you want. The downside is that you are losing some SEO power. Fortunately there is an option to help balance out this dilemma.

Manually adding hidden H1 and H2 tags

By adding these lines to your header.php file you can use a purely graphic header and not handicap yourself in regards to SEO.

<h1 style=”display: none;”>Blog Title Goes Here</h1 >
<h2 style=”display: none;”>Blog Tagline goes here</h2 >

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