On-Page Optimization For WordPress
On Page Optimization is one of the most (if not the most) important factors on ranking high on any search engines. Most of the times webmasters jump directly to building backlinks when their blog is not yet ready. In this article we are going to analyze some tactics which I’ve been using in almost all my WordPress sites and the results have always been the same, good ranking positions which means more traffic (and more money)
1. No Index Attribute
It has happened a lot of time to many experienced webmasters that’s why it is important to be mentioned. If your website is not being indexed then you should check over at Settings – Privacy and click on “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers”. In many cases with new installations or new themes that might be by default “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” which will not index any of your posts or pages to the major search engines
You can check easily your page source for the following code and if its as following you should change it immediately:
2. No Follow Attribute
In different websites I have seen pages like About Us or Contact Us which have a pagerank of 3 or even 4. That’s a total waste of link juice thats why you should add the nofollow attribute to the pages which don’t have a big value for you
You must go at your editor (under Appearance) and add the nofollow tag as shown in the picture below:
The above code will not pass any link power to the above specified URL. You should know that a homepage always gives some of its link power to its sub-pages so instead of giving link juice to Abous Us, Contact Us, Privacy etc you can modify your blog to follow only categories and posts
3. Ping List
WordPress is powerful platform and one of its best features is the pinging. By other words, every time you post a new article a ping will be sent to various websites to notify them that your blog has been updated with new content
By default there is only one website listed under Settings – Writing (at the bottom) but we want to notify as many websites as possible so you can download my full ping list websites below:
4. SEO Plugins
There are millions of plugins out there for WordPress however I would only like to mention a couple of them. Below I’m posting some of the plugins I use myself on this blog, most of them will automatically do the things posted above so its good for you to have them installed.Make sure you configure them properly for maximum performance:
- All In One SEO
- Google XML Sitemap
- Ultimate No Index Tool
- HeadSpace 2
5. Permalink Structure
The structure of your WordPress url’s is really important, not only for the eye of a visitor but also for the search engines. By default WordPress has its permalink structure to ?p=### but for better search engine results it is recommended to either use /%category%/%postname%/ or use the one I’m currently using on this blog:
6. Heading Tags
H1, H2, H3 and so on headings are another factor affecting your on-page optimization in WordPress. By default, depending on the template you are using the above mentioned tags might not be optimized as needed so make sure your website contains h1 tags (usually for titles) and other headings for sub-titles.
Conclusion
There are million of websites out there in the same niche as you, what makes you feel different is the number one position for your objective keyword. You should optimize your website specifically based on what your site is providing. After you have implemented the above instructions it is the proper time to start building backlinks
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