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I wish I could go back in time and sit down and teach myself everything I know at this point. At that point I could have learned MUCH more and then repeated the process over and over! Then at that point the world would explode and none of this would matter anyways… When I am writing these posts I need to have someone in my head that I am writing to, and the best person I could think of is my past self and people out there that are beginning to mess with WordPress and SEO. I hope this helps!
I’ve built many WordPress sites, and there is usually a mental checklist that I follow in my head when first building the site. I’ve decided I’ll put these pointers down to help anyone looking to build an SEO friendly site WordPress site:
- Change Permalinks
Click on ‘Settings’ >> ‘Permalinks’. You should see a page that looks like this:
Wordpress Permalinks
The URL of a site is a strong indicator to Google or any search engine as to what is actually on the page. The default setting for WordPress is to have the URL to include simply numbers.
Click on ‘Custom Structure’ and change your permalinks to include the category and the post name in the URL.
In case you’re not aware, the ‘%’ symbols simply make the title of the URL dynamic and change according to what the post/page title is.
It’s worth mentioning that the further away from the root website name the less important Google considers the keyword. If you don’t have very strong category keywords, then you may want to consider excluding your categories in your permalinks and simply making your custom structure the ‘postname’.
- Install the plug-in “SEO All-In-One Pack“
Once you install the plugin you will be asked to ‘Enable’ it. Go into the SEO All-In-One Pack dashboard and click enable and then save. Other than that, This plugin comes pretty much working straight out of the box, I’ve never had to mess with it too much.
- Install the plug-in “Ultimate Google Analytics“
When you sign up for ‘Google Analytics‘ you are given an identification number. The name will begin with UA and look similar to this: UA-00000000-0 (but it will have numbers of course)
- Install the plug-in “Google XML Sitemaps“
Once you have installed ‘Google XML Sitemaps’, go to “Google Webmaster Tools” and sign up. Click to ‘Add Site’ and enter your site domain. Once this is done you will be asked to verify that you are in fact the owner of the site you just registered. Google will spit out a meta tag and ask that you, “Copy the meta tag below, and paste it into your site’s home page. It should go in the <head> section, before the first <body> section.”
Verify Google Webmasters
Copy this code. Go back to the wordpress admin section and click on ‘Appearance’ and then ‘Editor’. Find your file where your header div is contained. Usually this is in header.php.
Ctrl+F and type ‘</head>’, this will find the end tag for your head div. Paste the Google Webmaster meta data just above this information and then click save.
Now go back to Google Webmaster Tools and click on ‘Verify’. Your site should be verified, and you now have Google Webmaster Tool enabled on your site.
This is an important step to establish a sitemap with Google. Remember the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in that we downloaded earlier? Well go back to WordPress and click on ‘Settings’ >> ‘XML-Sitemap’. This will take you to the Google XML Sitemap dashboard, in among all the words you will read a link that says, “‘rebuild the sitemap’ manually”. Click the link. You now have a dynamic sitemap for your WordPress site. if you visit www.yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml you will see your sitemap.
Now go back to Google Webmaster tools and click on ‘Submit a Sitemap’, and then again click the button that says, ‘Submit a Sitemap’. Then type in sitemap.xml in the box after your domain name, then press ‘Submit Sitemap’. In the status bar you should see a little clock signifying that your status is pending. If you refresh the page after a few moments you should see a green checkmark indicating that Google accepted your sitemap.
However, if your sitemap was not accepted, make sure you have the correct reference to www. or NO www. I’ve spent hours stewing over why my sitemap wasn’t accepted, only to find out that I had registered my domain without a ‘www.’ in the URL and Google Webmaster Tools was looking for the ‘www.’
The fantastic thing about this sitemap is that is is dynamic. It will change with you as you change your site, making it easier for Google to index your site. And with a sitemap it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. This same process can be followed to submit your sitemap to Bing as well as Yahoo.
These are just a few of the basics, and are certainly not very advanced. Later I’ll probably get more detailed into how to improve your on site SEO. If you have any questions or if you’d like to request that I speak about a certain topic feel free to e-mail me at eli@semblem.com
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Yes, exactly how i would do it as well. This is an absolute basic SEO for all Wordpress blogs.