Optimizing Your WordPress Blog

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of preparing your site to make it as easy as possible for the major search engines to crawl and cache your data in their systems so that your site appears as high as possible in the search returns. Book V contains more information on search engine optimization, as well as marketing your blog and tracking its presence in search engines and social media by using analytics. This section gives you a brief introduction to SEO practices with WordPress, and from here, you can move on to Book V to take a real hard look at some of the things you can do to improve and increase traffic to your Web site.

If you visit Google's search engine page at www.google.com and do a search for the keywords WordPress blog design, Lisa's site at E.Webscapes is in the top-ten search results for those keywords (at least, it is while we're writing this chapter). Those results can change from day to day, so by the time you read this book, someone else may very well have taken over that coveted position. The reality of chasing those high-ranking search engine positions is that they're here today, gone tomorrow. The goal of search engine optimization is to make sure that your site ranks as high as possible for the keywords that you think people will use to find your site. After you attain those high-ranking positions, the next goal is to keep them. Check out Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, by Peter Kent (Wiley), for some valuable information on keeping those high rankings through ongoing optimization of your site.

WordPress is equipped to create an environment that's friendly to search engines, giving them easy navigation through your archives, categories, and pages. WordPress provides this environment with a clean code base, content that's easily updated through the WordPress interface, and a solid navigation structure.

To extend search engine optimization even further, you can tweak five elements of your WordPress posts, pages, and templates:

• Custom permalinks: Use custom permalinks, rather than the default WordPress permalinks, to fill your post and page URLs with valuable keywords. Check out Book III, Chapter 3 for information on WordPress permalinks.
• Posts and page titles: Create descriptive titles for your blog posts and pages to provide rich keywords in your site.
• Text: Fill your blog posts and pages with keywords for search engines to find and index. Keeping your site updated with descriptive text and phrases helps the search engines find keywords to associate with your site.
• Category names: Use descriptive names for the categories you create in WordPress to place great keywords right in the URL for those category pages, if you use custom permalinks.
• Images and ALT tags: Place <ALT> tags in your images to further define and describe the images on your site. You can accomplish this task easily by using the description field in the WordPress image uploader.

Planting keywords in your Web site

If you're interested in a higher ranking for your site, we strongly recommend using custom permalinks. By using custom permalinks, you're automatically inserting keywords into the URLs of your posts and pages, letting search engines include those posts and pages in their databases of information on those topics. If a provider that has the Apache mod_rewrite module enabled hosts your site, you can use the custom permalink structure for your WordPress-powered site.

Keywords are the first step on your journey toward great search engine results. Search engines depend on keywords, and people use keywords to look for content.

The default permalink structure in WordPress is pretty ugly. When you're looking at the default permalink for any post, you see a URL something like this:

http://yourdomain.com/p?=105

This URL contains no keywords of worth. If you change to a custom permalink structure, your post URLs automatically include the titles of your posts to provide keywords, which search engines absolutely love. A custom permalink may appear in this format:

http://yourdomain.com/2007/02/01/your-post-title

We explain setting up and using custom permalinks in full detail in Book III, Chapter 3.

Optimizing your post titles for search engine success

Search engine optimization doesn't completely depend on how you set up your site. It also depends on you, the site owner, and how you present your content.

You can present your content in a way that lets search engines catalog your site easily by giving your blog posts and pages titles that make sense and coordinate with the actual content being presented. If you're doing a post on a certain topic, make sure that the title of the post contains at least one or two keywords about that particular topic. This practice gives the search engines even more ammunition to list your site in searches relevant to the topic of your post.

A blog post with the title A Book I'm Reading doesn't tell anyone what book you're reading, making it difficult for people searching for information on that particular book to find the post.

If you give the post the title WordPress All-in-One For Dummies: My Review, you provide keywords in the title, and (if you're using custom permalinks) WordPress automatically inserts those keywords into the URL, giving the search engines a triple keyword play:

• Keywords exist in your blog post title.
• Keywords exist in your blog post URL.
• Keywords exist in the content of your post.

Writing content with readers in mind

When you write your posts and pages, and want to make sure that your content appears in the first page of search results so that people will find your site, you need to keep those people in mind when you're composing the content.

When search engines visit your site to crawl through your content, they don't see how nicely you've designed your site. They're looking for words — which they're grabbing to include in their databases. You, the site owner, want to make sure that your posts and pages use the words and phrases that you want to include in search engines.

If your post is about a recipe for fried green tomatoes, for example, you need to add a keyword or phrase that you think people will use when they search for the topic. If you think people would use the phrase recipe for fried green tomatoes as a search term, you may want to include that phrase in the content and title of your post.

A title such as A Recipe I Like isn't as effective as a title such as A Recipe for Fried Green Tomatoes, right? Including it in your post or page content gives the search engines a double-keyword whammy.

Here's another example: Lisa once wrote a post about a rash that she developed on her finger, under her ring. She wrote that post well over a year ago, not really meaning to attract a bunch of people to that particular post. However, it seems that many women around the world suffer from the same rash because, a year later, that post still gets at least one comment a week. When people do a Google search by using the keywords rash under my wedding ring, out of a possible 743,000 results returned, Lisa's blog post appears in the top five slots.

This is how great blogs are! Lisa was actually able to solve her problem with the rash under her finger because one woman from Australia found Lisa's blog through Google, visited her blog post, and left a comment with a solution that worked. Who says blogs aren't useful?

Creating categories that attract search engines

One little-known SEO tip for WordPress users: The names you give the
categories you create for your blog provide rich keywords that attract search engines like bees to honey. A few services — Technorati (http://technorati.com) being one of the biggest — treat categories in WordPress like tags. These services use those categories to classify recent blog posts on any given topic. The names you give your categories in WordPress can serve as topic tags for Technorati and similar services.

Search engines also see your categories as keywords that are relevant to the content on your site. So, make sure that you're giving your categories names that are relevant to the content you're providing on your site.

If you sometimes blog about your favorite recipes, you can make it easier for search engines to find your recipes if you create categories specific to the recipes you're blogging about. Instead of having one Favorite Recipes category, you can create multiple category names that correspond to the types of recipes you blog about — Casserole Recipes, Dessert Recipes, Beef Recipes, and Chicken Recipes, for example.

You can also consider having one category called Favorite Recipes and creating subcategories (also known as child categories) that give a few more details on the types of recipes you've written about. (See Book III, Chapter 7, for information on creating Categories and child categories.)

Categories use the custom permalink structure, just like posts do. So, links to your WordPress categories also become keyword tools within your site to help the search engines — and, ultimately, search engine users — find the content. Using custom permalinks creates category page URLs that look something like this:

http://yourdomain.com/category/category_name

The category_name portion of that URL puts the keywords right into the hands of search engines.

Using the <ALT> tag for images

When you use the WordPress image uploader to include an image in your post or page, a Description text box appears, in which you can enter a description of the image. (We cover using the WordPress image uploader in detail in Book IV, Chapter 3.) This text automatically becomes what's referred to as the <ALT> tag.

The <ALT> tag's real purpose is to provide a description of the image for people who, for some reason or another, can't actually see the image. In a text-based browser that doesn't display images, for example, visitors see the description, or <ALT> text, telling them what image would be there if they could see it. Also, the tag helps people who have impaired vision and rely on screen-reading technology because the screen reader reads the <ALT> text from the image. You can read more about Web site accessibility for people with disabilities at http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/people-use-web.php.

An extra benefit of <ALT> tags is that search engines gather data from them to further classify the content of your site. The following code inserts an image, with the <ALT> tag of the code in bold to demonstrate what we're talking about:

<img src="http://yourdomain.com/image.jpg" alt="This is an ALT tag within an
    image" />

Search engines harvest those <ALT> tags as keywords. The WordPress image uploader gives you an easy way to include those <ALT> tags without having to worry about inserting them into the image code yourself. Just fill out the Description text box before you upload and add the image to your post. Book IV, Chapter 3 covers in-depth information on adding images to your site content, including how to add descriptive text for the ALT tag and keywords.