Working WordPress to SEO Advantage

One of the final steps to making your blog SEO friendly is to use WordPress tools to push that blog over the edge. In this article, Linda shows you how to get that WordPress SEO advantage.

Using the Default WP Template

I'm going to start with the basics, using a default WP template. The dashboard is shown below, along with a post developed from a press release. The company, Funeralwise.com, is offering a rebate for anyone who registers to begin to work out his or her plans for burial and estate planning (I am not receiving any funds for mentioning this site or its promotion).

While I could just copy and paste the press release and push the "publish" button, I would rather take advantage of a few tools that WP offers that might help my standing in search engines. One of those tools is the "Excerpt" box shown by that arrow that points to your left.

An excerpt allows you to choose to display an arbitrary amount of text from the beginning of each post as a teaser for the whole post. Then, users who want to read the rest of the post can click a link to see the full text. This is handy if you have lots of long articles all on one page, and it's especially handy if you use a keyword or key phrase within that excerpt.

You do not have to copy and paste any one sentence for the excerpt. In fact, it would help if you used the "who, what, when, where, why and how" of the article to keep it brief. In this instance, I might use:

"This month, Funeralwise.com offers a rebate for anyone who registers to  pre-plan funeral arrangements."

This excerpt is what people will read on your site if you use shortened entries on your front page (summaries, found in Settings >> Reading), and it also will be the sentence that many people might read as a summary on search engine pages.

Look at that excerpt again, and determine what you might use for key phrases or keywords. Here is where the excerpt goes (and, you can learn more about excerpts at WordPress):

In this case, I would choose "funeral, pre-planning, pre-planned funeral" for three key words and phrases. If I think of those words and phrases as "tags," then I can post those three choices in the "Post Tags" area shown above to the right top. Those tags will help your blog entry in a number of places, including – but not limited to – social media sites such as Technorati.

Finally, be sure to pick a category that can help readers find the article again should they come back to the site. Appropriate categories can help you, as well, as the posts can become confusing after posting one or two per day for a year (that's 365-730 posts!).

One other item to notice before you push that "publish" button includes the title. In the image below, you can see that you can change the title to alter how people read it in their address bar AND in search engines:

You can adjust your Permalink settings to show whatever you want when you set up your site in the beginning (Settings >> Permalink). You can read more about Permalinks at WordPress Codex to get a grip on how you might want to handle your link structure to your posts. Just know that, no matter what you choose, you can alter that Permalink – at least the title portion – through the tool shown above.

In this case, my Permalinks are set up to reflect the title of the post. But, I may want to change that title, depending upon my key words and key phrases. If you, too, want to change your title, then you need to mimic the format shown above. Use dashes between words, and don't make the title too long if you can avoid it. In this case, I may want to change the title to "pre-plan-your-funeral" to gain more traction from my keywords.

Once you decide on your title, you can get a shortlink to that blog entry. This tool is wonderful, especially if you're limited to content in sites such as Twitter.

When you press on that "Get Shortlink" button, a box will pop up that shows the shortlink. You can copy and paste that shortlink on a notepad for use once you've published that entry and use it in place of other shortlink services such as bit.ly or TinyURL. You can read more about this shortlink service at the WordPress blog.