I‘ve been using WordPress for SEO for several years now. I fully agree that it’s the cheapest (free) and easiest way to start a content based website that’s search engine optimized to a great degree out of the box. However, there’s still a lot of awesome ways to enhance it for SEO. This video by Joost de Valk is fantastic for anyone who is going to use WordPress and wants to show up in Google. In fact, it’s one of the most comprehensive guides to what plugins you should use and how you should be creating your WordPress blog. I watched the video, then had my assistant watch it so he could learn all about these plugins and tips. I had my assistant take notes, get links to all the plugins mentioned and decided to share my notes with you, so here you go…

• Joost de Valk
• Website: www.Yoast.com
• Company: www.Orangevalley.nl

• WordPress Overview
• It’s the cheapest, best option for CMS
• It’s also the ultimate tool for affiliates

• Optimizing WordPress – Plugins
• HeadSpace2 plugin
• Function: Optimizes blog header/title and “more” link.
• Blogs need well optimized titles, descriptions
• HeadSpace allows alteration of the More tag on posts
• Tip: Seach engines don’t like “More” link because they want link to have keywords what post is about.
• To use, will have to edit Header.php file in theme
• Want post title to be first thing in title because by default, WP makes Blog name first few words of header.
• POST TITLE is more important than BLOG TITLE
• Redirection plugin
• Function: Tracks 404 errors and redirects to proper pages.
• Yarpp
• Function: Shows related posts to blog
• Lets readers navigate site more
• Also better for search engines because they can crawl site through related posts
• SEO Friendly Images
• Function: Places post title into image alt and title tags if they are empty
• Clean Slugs (Sign up for his newsletter to get this plugin.)
• Function: Removes stop words from URL slugs
• A slug is the part of the URL that identifies the post
• Clean Slugs plugin automatically removes stop words like “to” and “the” from the slug before it saves the post.
• Result: You get cleaner, shorter slugs
• RSS Footer
• Function: Adds text to bottom of post linking back to original post.
• When blog get scraped and reposted, RSS Footer will automatically insert backlink and source of original blog.
• Result: You get more backlinks and traffic back to your site.
• Best for ranking on blog search engines because of amount of links.

• Optimizing WordPress – Site Structure
• Switch Blog Title and Post Title
• WordPress puts the blog title into the header on your theme and makes the blog title the H1 always. However the blog title HAS NO USE of being an H1 anywhere else except on YOUR HOMEPAGE. Reason is you don’t want your other pages to rank for your blog name/brand, you want them to rank for your post title.
• Categories in WordPress
• Add description to categories that tell people what is in each category.
• Breadcrumbs (Plug-In)
• This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.
• Breadcrumb paths add to site structure by letting users navigate back.
• Users like it, search engines like it even more because it tells them how your site is structured internally.

• Optimizing WordPress – SEO
• Internal Linking
• It is important to get internal linking right be back-referencing posts, etc…
• Robots Meta (Plug-In)
• Can be used to exclude pages from the search engine index.
• Reason is user could land on archive page from 2006, when it would be better for them to land on category page.
• Can also add “no-follow” values to pages you don’t want search engines to crawl, such as login page, disclaimer, etc.
• WP Page Numbers (Plug-In)
• Give numbers to all pages on blog instead of letting WP order newest and oldest. Otherwise, posts get buried.

• Promoting Your Blog
• Social Networks
• Find the people you are looking for to read your blog and go to their community and join the conversation there. (e.g. Twitter)
• Use those social networks to promote your blog.
• Don’t beg with bad content. Make sure content is quality.
• Guest Posts
• Do a guest post on a bigger blog on a topic you are able to post on to promote your blog.

• Audience: Visitors/Subscribers
• Turn Visitors into Subscribers.
• If visitors only go to site once, it really only helps your CPM rate.
• Give them multiple options to subscribe (e.g. RSS, email) Note: Method should depends on audience’s technical level and what they use!
• Offer subscription options with posts
• Remind people that they should be subscribing to your blog.
• Ensures your readership grows.
• Life cycle of a site user:
• Visitor – first time to site
• Subscriber – becomes a regular user
• Fan – starts telling others about your site.
  THIS IS WHERE YOU WANT THEM TO BE!
• Comments/User Interaction
• Ask users for comments: e.g. “What’s your opinion?” and get conversation going.
• Respond to users if time allows.
• If comment is good, add to blog and attribute.
• Make yourself easy to contact.
• Enable or install subscriptions to comments.
• Stop spam and remove it immediately.
• Keep it simple to comment.

• Maintaining Your Blog
• Housekeeping
• Make sure you have quality hosting once audience grows.
• All blog additions should benefit your READERS, not YOU. Users go to your site for content, not your sidebar.
• Bonus Tips
• Change WordPress Search Option
• WP Search is a problem because results appear in chronological order rather than relevance.
• Will have to install plugins and edit theme to make this change.
• Can also use a Google Custom Search Engine.
• Shrink Queries to Database
• For references to items such as style sheets, make them static to speed up page loads.
• Install Safe Updates
• Be sure to install safe plug-ins.
• If not careful, you could be kicked out of Google for SPAM.

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