The single universal truth about every website owner is this:

We all need more traffic.

And, since Google and the other search engines have essentially become the gateway to the internet for most web users, site owners are increasingly seeking to optimize their sites for search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a simple concept; structure your site to provide search engines the information they want, and in return they’ll deliver hoards of visitors straight to your virtual door step.

While WordPress is fairly SEO friendly “out of the box”, there are several settings and options that need to be tweaked in order to achieve higher rankings and receive more search engine traffic to your site.

Permalinks

A default installation of WordPress doesn’t create the most search engine friendly URLs. Instead of having nice targeted keywords in the URL it puts a post number along the lines of “/?p=5″.

Thankfully, WordPress also makes it easy to change that with their Permalink structure. There are countless combinations and custom settings you could come up for your link structure but I stick with the simple route.

My preferred Permalink structure is:

/%postname%.php

Using this structure will swap out those ugly looking ?p= for some keyword rich urls such as /good-keyword-here.php

Note: Using post names will result in long URLs. Keep your URLs as short as possible (preferably 2-5 words) by removing extraneous words such as “a, an, and, the, in, to” etc. Also use your targeted keywords or phrases in your URLs when possible.

You may be tempted to use a category name in the url, but in my experience it’s more trouble than it’s worth. If you ever decide to tweak a category name, you’ll have to implement a 301 redirect to avoid losing any links pointing to articles within that category.

Titles

First and foremost, go install and activate the All in One SEO plugin (unless you’re using the Thesis theme which has most of the same functionality built in).

In the All in One SEO settings, there’s a whole host of options you’ll need to customize. First on the list are the title, description, and keyword tags for your home page.

Your home page title tag should include the main keyword or phrase that you’d like your site to rank for in the search engines. Keep your title tag under 65 characters (including spaces & punctuation) or Google and the other search engines will truncate it for you.

For example, the title I use for the home page of this site is:

WordPress Themes, Plugins & Tutorials | WPblogger

The description of your home page should also include one or two of your targeted keywords and should summarize your site in a way that makes it enticing for searchers to click on your listing.

The description I used is:

WPblogger covers a wide range of WordPress related topics. From theme and plugin reviews, to tutorials, or WordPress news, we've got it all!

The keywords tag has been rendered obsolete for all practical purposes. Some people like to use the keywords tag to insert common misspellings or typos, but I prefer to spend my time and effort elsewhere.

After the home page meta data options, you’re presented with several options controlling title tags for every other page type.  I’ve included a screen shot of my preferred settings below, but All in One SEO’s default settings are actually quite good.

Categories, Tags & Archives

Categories, tags and archives all present the same danger in terms of search engine optimization: duplicate content.

As the phrase suggests, duplicate content is when multiple pages have largely the same content.

Duplicate content within your own site is not something you will usually be penalized for, it can cause some confusion for search engines and as such should be avoided if at all possible.

NoIndex

There are actually several ways to combat duplicate content within your categories, tags, and archive pages. One option that many SEOs recommend is to simply keep those pages from being indexed using the noindex tag.

I use that method to keep all of the date based archive pages from being indexed by search engines.

However, when it comes to category and tag pages, I prefer to prevent them from being duplicate content in the first place.

Excerpts

Instead of allowing your category or tag pages to display full posts and risk being seen as duplicate content, you can force them to display only the titles or excerpts of each post.

This allows you to still target new terms to rank while reducing the amount of content that is carried over from each post, thus reducing the risk of it being seen as duplicate content. For example, if I decide to use theme names as tags, my tag pages could then rank for searches related to those names. Had I decided to noindex tag pages, this wouldn’t have been a possibility.

As is often the case, the Thesis theme makes this as simple as selecting a few options (as seen in the image to the right). If you’re not using Thesis, you’ll probably need to edit a few files as described in the WordPress Codex. Trust me, a little bit of preventative efforts spent here could pay off big time in search traffic to your site in the future.

Note: You can also reduce duplicate content problems by reducing the number of categories you place each post in. Instead of dropping a post into 6 categories it only loosely relates to, place in the single category it fits in best.

Pagination

As Jim Westergren points out, WordPress introduce comment pagination in version 2.7. The setting, which is on be default, breaks comments into pages of 50 comments each. Unfortunately, as with tags or archive pages, the bulk of the content on those pages will not be unique.

Turning this option off, especially if you don’t often get more hundreds of comments per post, will prevent WordPress from creating multiple versions of each post.

Another unfortunate result of WordPress pagination is that as your posts age, they are pushed further and further away from your home page. While this makes perfect sense for readers, it isn’t great for SEO.

The easiest way to combat this issue is to install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin which creates a map of all the pages on your site so search engines can easily find them.

Also, regularly linking to previous posts and category or tag pages will help emphasize to search engine spiders that those pages are still important. The SEO Smart Link plugin is great for automating this process. And last but not least placing links to your categories or using a tag cloud on your home page will be a big boost to your SEO efforts.

Other Resources

If you’d like to know more about optimizing your WordPress site to grab as much traffic from search engines as possible, there’s plenty of information out there.

For example, Google Engineer Matt Cutts recently gave a presentation at WordCamp San Francisco which he’s made available for download. The slides cover a lot more ground than just SEO for your WordPress site but it’s valuable none-the-less.

Over the last year, I’ve also been privileged enough to give several presentations on the topic of SEO for WordPress. While there’s some overlap in the presentations (hint: that’s the really important stuff!), I think they all provide valuable content.

Market STL:

BlogWorld:

PubCon:

Recommended SEO Plugins

There are several plugins that will help in your SEO efforts. Here’s a list of the ones mentioned in the post as well as a few others we highly recommend

• SEO Smart Links
• Google XML Sitemap
• Redirection (makes 301 redirects easy)
• Broken Links Checker
• and last but certainly not least, the Swiss army knife of plugins… Joost’s WordPress SEO

Once you’ve digested this vast assortment of material, if you still have any questions or are ready to share tips and tricks of your own, please do so in the comments below.

WordPress users have been subjected to an incredible amount of hype surrounding the topic of search engine optimization (SEO). They’ve been told WordPress is an SEO friendly platform, there are countless SEO plugins in the repositiory, and almost every premium theme on the market claims to be able to improve your site’s SEO.

Given that environment, it’s only natural that some bloggers would question those claims. Alex Denning of WPshout.com recently published “Some Thoughts on SEO” and Jeffro over at WPtavern.com followed it up by imploring us to “Write for People, not Spiders.”

SEO = On-Site & Off

Search engine optimization (SEO) as a process actually encapsulates two distinct areas. On-site optimization, as the name suggests, focuses on making sure your site is organized to the search engines liking in hopes that they’ll rank your content higher.

Off-site optimization focuses on attracting the proper kind of links to your site to help improve your rankings. As Google has worked to make their rankings less vulnerable to manipulation, the importance of inbound links and other off-site indicators have skyrocketed.

When Alex states “As long as your design is coded well, that’s all the ‘SEO optimisation’ you need to do.” he’s completely ignoring the off-site element of SEO.

While most of the plugins, themes, and WordPress related SEO advice center around on-site optimization, you need both sides to capture rankings for the more competitive terms.

Content or SEO?

The main theme of Alex’s post is that you need good content to have a successful blog. Now I’m not foolish enough to argue against that point. You absolutely DO need to have quality content.

In fact, there’s an old saying in the SEO industry (it may have originated somewhere else but that’s where I heard it first) that “Content is King“.

But, the need for quality content doesn’t in any way support Alex’s next claim:

“If you’re having to try to improve your search engine ranking that means your content isn’t very good.”

Almost every successful site on the web works on improving their search engine rankings, even the blogs like Smashing Magazine that Alex mentions.

Why? Because great content is useless until readers find it and SEO is a fantastic way to get more traffic to your site. The two work hand-in-hand. Good content makes it easier to attract links (off-site SEO) which in turn improves your search engine rankings, which results in more people seeing your quality content.

However, if you have great content, but your on-site SEO factors don’t support it (through proper linking, loading quickly, explaining what the content is, etc), search engines will never know how great it is and neither will their users.

So which do you need, good content or good SEO?

Both.

SEO Will Follow

Jeffro ended his post by saying:

“My general advice for SEO is to do a few little things to get started but write for people first, SEO will follow.”

This is what I like to call the “Field of Dreams Delusion.” Believe it or not, you can’t just throw something out on your blog and expect it to receive the attention it deserves. There are so many blogs and sites on the web that if you build it, there’s a good chance no one knows.

Quality content will rarely if ever rank just because it contains great information or is fun to read.

For most bloggers, especially those with newer less authoritative sites in the eyes of Google, content needs to be promoted, passed around & ideally linked to before it will start to rank.

Of course you should “write for humans”, but content that will perform well in search engines isn’t exactly in binary code. In fact, most of the time writing for the search engines simply means figuring out what terms the bulk of your human audience uses to look for the content you’re creating.

Often getting the most SEO bang for your buck is simply a matter of organizing your content well. For example, I noticed that a lot of people were searching in Google for Thesis skins. Unfortunately, I had a few posts that were all competing for rankings. By creating a new category and using the term in my internal links to the category page, I was able to achieve a page 1 ranking.

It wasn’t a complicated process but it was also probably not something I would have done if I hadn’t been paying attention to my site’s SEO. As a result, more people are finding and using my skins.

Note: This premise, that SEO is easy or SEO will follow, has been addressed several times in the past. Todd Friesen has written two very good rebuttals of this. While a couple of years old, the principles still apply.

Are Themes Really SEO-Friendly?

In following the Twitter discussion surrounding these two posts it seems much of the inspiration was derived from all of the SEO hype surrounding WordPress themes.

The bottom line is this: themes control the most important aspects of your WordPress site structure. As Thesis theme creator, Chris Pearson, said “ALL content is served to [search engines] via themes, so themes have 100% of the control.”

If your theme is coded poorly, loads slowly, doesn’t allow customization of titles, descriptions, meta-data, or creates any number of possible SEO problems, it’s going to make life pretty difficult.

Many of the top themes on the market qualify as SEO friendly. None currently offer the level of customization that Thesis provides out of the box.

Is this a selling point?

Absolutely. I’ve used themes that harmed my rankings in the past and trust me, that’s a mistake you’ll only make once. There’s nothing worse than realizing you sacrificed a significant portion of your potential audience because of the theme you’re using.

Is it over-hyped?

Probably. The separation in terms of “SEO friendliness” between many of the premium WordPress themes on the market is fairly small. Even if your theme doesn’t provide all of the SEO related flexibility that Thesis or Headway provides, you can probably achieve similar results using a plugin or two, assuming your theme is coded cleanly. If you’re trying to decide between two themes, I’d certainly factor in the SEO functionality it provides, but don’t purchase a theme simply because it touts itself as SEO friendly.

Note: Leland over at ThemeLab.com responded with his thoughts on the issue as well. He seems to be doing a series of posts and judging from the first one, What Makes a “SEO-Friendly” WordPress Theme?,  it will be well worth reading

Comment Spam

source: @kevin033

Alex also mentioned the obnoxious practice of comment spam that I’m sure every blogger has encountered.

“One often gets the impression that these people [like] Best Plumber in Oregon are leaving comments in an attempt to increase their search engine ranking.”

That’s absolutely what they’re trying to do. As  mentioned above, attracting inbound links to your site, especially links with targeted anchor text, can drastically improve your search engine rankings.

In fact, comment spam like the example Alex provided can work quite well assuming the comments a) get published and b) don’t have the nofollow tag applied to them.

Most blogs automatically slap a nofollow tag on links in the comment section which tells Google not to include those links when calculating their rankings. However, some blogs (such as those that jumped on the DoFollow bandwagon a while back) have removed that tag, thus giving them SEO impact.

DoFollow blogs are so few and far between these days that I have to agree with Alex on this issue, bloggers would be better off spending their time creating new content than trying to squeeze “link juice” from blog comments.

But dismissing the entire practice of SEO because one tactic is no longer a worthwhile activity is throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

SEO Resources for WordPress

Assuming my post has convinced you not to give up on SEO completely, here’s a list of resources that can help:

• SEO Guide for WordPress
• Advanced SEO for WordPress
• Wolf-Howl
• How to Build Links

While those links will provide you with a lot of information, don’t get overwhelmed and certainly don’t neglect the other aspects of blogging. Keep writing, keep creating good quality content, but don’t turn a blind eye to SEO and assume it will all happen naturally either.

Family time, year end reports, budgeting for next year, planning for next year, returning gifts… while this may be the “most wonderful time of the year” it’s often the busiest as well.

Naturally tasks on the lower end of the priority spectrum, such as updating the copyright date on your website, tend to drop off our radar.

Thankfully, with a small snippet of code, you won’t ever have to worry about updating the copyright date again!

If you’re using the Thesis theme, you can drop the following block of code into your custom_functions.php file:

function copyright(){
	echo '<p>Copyright ';
	echo get_bloginfo();
	echo ' &copy ';
	echo date("Y");
	echo '</p>';
}
add_action('thesis_hook_footer', 'copyright', '99');

If you’re using a different theme, you’ll need to find your footer.php file and drop this code where you want the copyright info displayed:

<p>Copyright <?php echo get_bloginfo(); ?> © <?php echo date(“Y”); ?></p>

Once the code is in place, the copyright notice will automatically update to the current year and will be one less thing on your year end to-do list.

image source: counting chest bullets

I rarely if ever publish an article that just directs readers to another blog post.

However, Lisa Barone’s coverage of the “Pumping Up WordPress for SEO” session at SMX is THAT good.

Jordan Kasteler (of Search and Social), Jon Henshaw (of Raven SEO Tools), and Rae Hoffman (affiliate genius & one of Lisa’s fellow founders at Outspoken Media) were the presenters and they covered a TON of ground.

All three panelists are experts in the SEO industry and obviously know their way around WordPress so if like me, you weren’t lucky enough to be able to attend in person, make sure you read & bookmark the post for future reference.

I’ll see if I can’t talk one or more of them into an interview in the future, but if Lisa’s post and the 60 or so links in it (not an exaggeration) don’t satisfy your craving for information on the topic, there’s always our SEO Guide for WordPress to fall back on.

Enjoy!

Oh, and for those of you wondering what I’ve been up to lately, I’ve been busy building out a few new sites (using the Thesis theme of course). But I’ve got something in the pipeline for that I’m confident will make up for the recent lack of posting.

It should drop in the next day or two so be sure to check in or subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss it!

image source: Shannon K

The Thesis theme has been hailed as the most flexible WordPress Theme ever. And, given the diversity of quality designs its users have cranked out, it’s tough to disagree.

The flexibility centers around the theme’s unique use of a custom CSS (cascading style sheet) file so you can drastically change the look of your site by editing just one or two lines of code in one single file.

If you’re an amateur (at best) web designer like myself, just reading the three letters of CSS probably sent shivers down your spine. But, while CSS can certainly be intimidating at first, Thesis actually makes it MUCH more approachable and easier to learn.

While I still wouldn’t consider myself an expert, in just a few hours I was able to learn enough to create the custom design you see on this site.

The Necessary Tools

For the purpose of this tutorial you’ll obviously need to have purchased a copy of the Thesis theme. Also, I urge you to install the Thesis OpenHook plugin, as well as the Firebug add-on for FireFox.

OpenHook makes it quick and easy to edit your custom CSS file from within the WordPress admin panel. Without it you’ll have to use an html editor and keep saving & uploading every time you tweak something and that gets old quick.

Note: Thesis OpenHook also allows you create and use custom functions within the hooks Thesis uses. But that’s a whole other post and both Chris & Rae have done a good job of explaining hooks already. Also, Thesis 1.6 has built in functionality that allows you to edit your custom files. If you’re comfortable with PHP and using hooks, you will no longer need OpenHook, however, it’s still a great tool for those new to Thesis.

Firebug allows you to inspect items on any given web page and selects the corresponding CSS rules that govern that particular object. This will keep you from having to guess what rules are being applied to an object not to mention having to sort through line after line of code trying to find the answer.

Those two plugins saved me countless hours of work and certain frustration. If you don’t install them that’s fine, just don’t get mad at me when you put your keyboard through your flat screen display.

Learning CSS

Once you’ve activated your custom CSS file (which amounts to renaming the “custom-sample” folder in the stock Thesis installation to simply “custom”) any change you make in your custom.css file will be applied to your site.

So, how do you make those changes?

After activating the Thesis OpenHook plugin, you’ll see a “Thesis Custom Styling” option in the Appearance section of your left sidebar. Clicking that link will take you to a page that should look a lot like the image below that allows you to edit your custom.css file.

As you can see, within the developer’s comments you’re given these two quick examples of CSS stylings that you may want to employ:

.custom a, .custom a:visited { color: #090; } <--- This makes links green
.custom a:hover { color: #00f; } <--- This makes links blue when you mouse over them

CSS code is divided up into 3 basic parts, the selector (the item you want to style), the property, and the value. In the first line above you’re styling links (a) and visited links (a:visited) by editing their color property to a value of #090 (green).

Trial and Error

Once you’ve grasped the concept of how to construct CSS stylings, my best advice is to jump right in. You could spend hours digging through W3Schools’ article repository on CSS but at least for me, trial and error is a much more effective approach.

Note: Do keep the W3School articles handy for quick reference should you encounter an issue that you don’t know how to deal with.

DIYthemes offers a quick but worthwhile tutorial on editing your background color or adding a background image that was a fairly natural starting point for me.

Grab their code, drop it into your custom.css file and start tweaking the settings to your liking. For this site, I wound up wittling the code for my background down to the following:

body.custom {
background: #505050 url('images/bg-image.png') repeat-y scroll center center;
}

While my code looks a little different than the first example, the structure is essentially the same. My selector in this instance is the page body, and I’m styling the background property to have a value of #505050, use a background image, repeat that image along the y axis even while scrolling, and to center that background image on the page.

Learn from Others

The big breakthrough during my learning process came when I started looking at the sites in the Thesis showcase.

When I found something I liked, I inspected it with Firebug to figure out the syntax and applied it to my site.

Want to know how Chris Brogan got that cool image to appear when you hover over links in his footer? Take a look!

And, with most installations of the Thesis them if you need to take a look at the entire custom.css file you can do that too by adding /wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/custom.css after the domain name.

Note: While CSS can not be copyrighted, the look and feel of a design CAN fall under copyright laws. So don’t try to rip off someone’s entire theme. This should only be used to learn how to modify your own theme.

For example, want to know how I made my headlines orange and centered on the page? Using Firebug or peaking at the full style sheet you’d see this snippet of CSS:

.custom h1, .custom h2, .custom h2 a {
color: #d54e21;
text-align: center;
}

Do you want orange headlines centered on your page? Probably not.

But now you know how to should you choose to do so and that, my friends, is the whole point.

Original image by Simon Pow