Seo Guru

Wordpress SEO

WordPress is indisputably one of the best blogging platforms according to many. Wordpress provides everything that a blogger needs to spread his manipulate across to the blogosphere. It allows advanced customization with the help of templates & plug-ins and making the blog both user and search engine friendly. Below are some of the tips, tricks and plug-ins that I use when I setup WordPress blogs: Remember, this is just one of the many posts that I’ll be doing on Wordpress pretty soon, so stay tuned!

(1). Custom Site Search

Site search is usually a feature that’s turned on in Wordpress by default but if it’s not make sure you take care of it. Site search allows for users to visit more pages during their stay on your site by simply ’searching’ for whatever they are interested in. WordPress also allows for custom search pages so that you can give visitors a better search experience on your blog. For custom search page options check out: http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Search_Page. Lastly don’t forget to track the Site Search with something like Google Analytics. You can read this small analytics tutorial regarding site search setup.

(2). HTML Tables

HTML codes often gets pretty messed up in WordPress (or Blogger for that matter). There have been number of occasions where I tried to copy and paste an HTML table from a different site into one my blog and ended up losing the complete table formatting. My suggestion is to find some sort of FCK Editor Plugin to replace the default editor OR to use the “copy from word” option located in the default editor.

(3). Custom Meta/Title Tags

There are many WordPress Meta Tag plug-INS out there which all can pretty much do the job. But I personally like to use the one created by G-loaded. This particular Meta Tag plug-in adds Meta Tags to your Wordpress Front Page, Single Posts, Static Pages and Archived pages. It is compatible for the following versions: v1.5.2 - v2.3.2. For title tags I use the following code so that the title for the home page uses my blog’s description and individual pages/posts gets to put their own title before the blog’s title. The title code can be updated or changed in a file called header.php.

(4). Feeds/RSS

By default, WordPress will truncate content within a feed. I personally feel that offering full content to the readers is more beneficial because many readers’ uses a desktop feed reader which doesn’t show the truncated content. So if the posts aren’t cut short, it will allow my readers to get a complete concept for each given post. Additionally I have seemed a substantial increase in the number of subscribers when I switched from a partial feed to a complete feed. You may use a plug-in such as CompleteRSS which is a great way to offer full feeds.

With Complete RSS you can say goodbye to invalid RSS and partial entries — your feeds show your entire article no matter what, bringing you the traffic you deserve, and no longer use the very-much abused ‘content: encoded’ tags that cause many feed readers such a headache.

If you’re using Feed Burner in WordPress you should probably also use Feed Burner Feed Smith; A plug-in that will detect all ways to access your feed, and redirect them to your Feed Burner feed so you can keep track every possible subscriber.