Yesterday we customized wordpress with a custom theme, widgets, and plugins. Now that our site is looking the way we want, we need to modify it for search engine optimization. WordPress does a pretty good job with SEO out of the box, however improvements can be made. SEO is important, as search engines are often a majority of traffic for a blog. Without a good SEO strategy in place, it can be difficult to gain visitors to your site.
H1 Tags
The first area of focus are the header tags for your site. To explain, header tags are html tags that have a specific size component. An <h1> tag is the largest tag, and is the tag for your website’s name under the default theme. For SEO, information within the <h1> tag is the most important information on your page. When a search engine bot goes through a post in your site, it will notice the content in the <h1> tag first, and index it as the most importent content in the page.
The problem is, under most wordpress themes, the <h1> tag is the title of your website. As such, every post you send out will contain the same tag, thus the most important information a search engine will ever see about your blog is it’s name. This is counterproductive, as most of your visitors will never search for your blog’s name; they will search for your blog’s content. There is no need to make your blog’s name the most important piece of information, it is better to make your post title’s the most important, as this is what people will be searching for. When submitting an article, your post’s title is the most important component to SEO, as this is the phrase people will search for.
This means we need to change wordpress and make it so your post title is in an <h1> tag, not your blog’s name. We will be doing some coding here, so get ready with your favorite text editor. We first need to remove header tags from both your blog’s name and tagline, as your blog’s name is in a <h1> tag. Open up the directory you installed wordpress in on your computer, then go to wp-content/themes/curenttheme/header.php. Search for the following:
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
Depending in the theme the content between the <h1> tag may be different. The important thing is to remove the <h1> tag and closing tag. Using the example above, the end result would look like the following:
<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a>
Now, save the file and upload it to the server. If you reload the page, you will see that your blog’s name will be much smaller. This is because the <h1> tag is gone, which controlled the size of the blog’s name. If you want your blog’s title to be larger, you will need to add a font tag, and increase the size that way, or use a css div and set the font options for the title. Below is an example of a css div tag that controls the font size of your blog’s name.
<div style="font-size:36px;">
<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a>
</div>
To change the font size, just change 36 to whatever number you wish. Now that the header no longer uses the <h1> tag, you are ready to change your post title to an <h1> tag.
Changing your Post Title
On your computer, go to your wordpress files and open wp-content/themes/currentheme/single.php. Look for the following line:
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
You are going to want to change the <h2> tags to <h1> tags like the following:
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
Now, save and upload the file to the server. Now your post will be the most important thing displayed to search engines. Do note, your article’s title will now be huge, as it is in an <h1> tag. You can set the size of the tag by using the following code:
<h1 style="text-size:20px;"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
This will set the font size to 20 pixels. Change this to whatever value you like.
Permalinks
I direct your attention to this web page’s url. Look in the address bar, and see the address of this page. What do you notice? First there is my domain name, psychcomp.com. Next, is the link to this article, using words from my title. As you can see, there is nothing else listed. If you have visited many blogs, you will notice categories, dates, or even numbers. What is the difference between my structure and the others? My structure is the one best suited for search engine optimization. When a bot goes to my site, they see my domain name, and my title as the url. There is nothing else, so they will note my url, see the keywords in it, and log them. The bot will not get detracted with the category or the date, it will only focus on my content. There is debate to if this is true, but it makes sense. To change your permalink structure, log into your admin area, then go to settings, then permalinks. Choose custom structure, and input the following:
/%postname%/
Now, click the save changes button. All your post links will now be reset. This is the best time to do this, before your site has had a chance to be listed in search engines. If you do this, and your site has already been listed, then every link you have in the search engines will no longer work. This is a very bad thing, as this is a good method to loose all your visitors, and to be blacklisted. If you have an already established blog, then do not do this.
All in One SEO Plugin
Yesterday you installed many plugins for your site. One of them was the All in One SEO Plugin. Now it is time to customize the plugin. Look at the following screenshots below to see how to best customize it.
For the Home Title, Home Description, and Home Keywords, change these to match your site. For the home title I combined my title and my tagline. Save changes once done. These changes mainly focus on the title of your page. The title is very important, as it will contain keywords users will search for. If your page title, and your post title, are the same, you will have more exposure in search engines.
Update Services
When you publish a post, it is wise to send a notice to search engines to index your new page. This can be done automatically through wordpress’s update services. To go here, log into the admin area, go to settings, then go to writing. Scroll down until you see update services. Add each url listed below on a separate line in the text box.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://api.feedster.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/ping http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2 http://coreblog.org/ping/ http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2 http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ http://ping.feedburner.com http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2 http://rpc.twingly.com http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi http://ping.blo.gs/
Click the same changes button. Now every time you publish a post, all these services will be updated with the new post.
In Conclusion
Now you have optimized wordpress for Search Engine Optimization. It should be easier for visitors to be notified of your site. We are not done, as we next learn how to add forums to your blog. Forums are a great way to form your own community. Once forums are complete, we will learn more ways to publicize your site.
Table of Contents: How to Establish Yourself Online
Part 1: Plan
Part 2: Domain Name and Web Host
Part 3: Setting up WordPress
Part 4: Customizing WordPress
Part 5: WordPress SEO
About the author: Psychcomp is owned and maintained by Nathan Driskell, a Licensed Professional Counselor - Intern and Internet Addiction Specialist. Nathan has worked for the past five years creating and maintaining websites, and has experience managing small business networks.
Contact Nathan at the following locations:
ndri...@psychcomp.com">E-Mail
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- How to Establish Yourself Online – Part 4: Customizing WordPress
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- How to Establish Yourself Online – Part 2: Domain Name and Web Host
- How to Establish Yourself Online – Part 1: Plan
- SEO Centro: Rank Checker
- Example robots.txt for WordPress and PHPBB3
- Blocking Search Engine Bots
- WordPress Attack: Upgrade Now
- Remove Old Links from Google
Tags: establish, establish yourself online, SEO, wordpress
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