WordPress is a great search engine optimized system even right out of the box but there is a lot more to do if you want to improve it.
If you have a blog or a website, you probably want people to come and read what you have there and this is where the SEO comes into place.
About eighty percent of a website’s traffic (traffic = visitors) comes from search engines like Google. If you want to increase the traffic coming from search engines you need to rank higher in the results, in order to do so you need to search engine optimize your website.
The most important things you need to do with your WordPress website are:
- Use Pretty Permalinks.
What does this mean? If you take a look at the address bar when viewing this post (not through the homepage or archive pages) you will see that the address is not something likehttp://orenyomtov.com/?p=123(the default in WordPress), instead it’shttp://orenyomtov.com/wordpress-seo-tips.html. This way you have the keywords of your title also in the URL and that helps a lot. - Use All In One SEO Pack plugin and change the post title tag from
%post_title% - %blog_title%to%post_title% - %blog_title%.
Why? This swaps the blog’s name and the post’s name in the<title></title>tag. The first words in the title tag are more important from the last words so putting the post’s name first makes the page title more relevant to it’s content. e.g. beforeOren Yomtov’s Website - WordPress SEO Tips, afterWordPress SEO Tips - Oren Yomtov’s Website. - Use tags and categories wisely. They can contribute a lot to your search engine ranking as well as do nothing/hurt your ranking.
Don’t use too many tags (I say use about 4-8 tags per post), and when you do use them, try to use the same tags over and over again. WordPress Simple Tags plugin may help you with that. Try not to create more then 2 new tags for each post (of course when writing the first posts of the blog, almost all of the tags will be new). The same goes for categories, there is no need for lots empty/one post categories. When creating categories think what will help the user to navigate through your site and that will be the best for SEO most of the time. - Use Google Sitemap Generator plugin in order to auto generate the sitemap of your website each time you add a post/page. This helps Google to reach pages that they might not reach otherwise. After you install this plugin and make sure it works (check your sitemap.xml file), add & verify your website at Google Webmaster Tools and then submit the sitemap.
Remember, at the end of the day, your website is not for Google’s crawlers. It’s for humans, average users like you and me. So you need to keep the balance between what’s good for search engine optimizing, and what’s good for your readers.
My No Meta WordPress Plugin finally got his own WordPress dot Org page.
Now I’m waiting for my Mass Custom Fields Manager to get approved.
I always wanted to have my own plugin page :). It just makes me proud to be an owner of an open-source plugin.
Howto get a WordPress plugin page
In order to get a plugin page at WordPress.org (like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plugin-name-here) you need to do a couple of things as described below:
- Think about a good idea for a WordPress Plugin.
- Develop the plugin yourself / hire a developer to code the plugin for you / contact me and ask me to code the plugin for you.
- Register as a member at WordPress.org
- Ask WordPress to host your plugin.
- Grab yourself some cookies & milk and wait until they send you an email saying they approved your plugin (Usually within one week). If you receive an email saying that they didn’t approve your plugin then… Well I have no idea because I never got one.
- The email will say that you will receive access to your SVN within the next hour so this step is just more waiting :(.
- Once you got your access, read this tutorial on How to Use Subversion to upload your plugin (=get a plugin page), and upload your plugin files to the
/trunkfolder. If you encounter any problems with this step like I did (this is the toughest step), contact me through the contact page or by leaving a comment and I’ll get back to you + Update this post with the solution so it helps other people as well. - Wait up to fifteen minutes (WordPress checks for updates every 15 minutes) for WordPress to create your plugin page and then use the WordPress plugin search to find it.
- Be pround of yourself and comment here to let me & other people know that this tutorial works.
Frequently Asked Questions
- No questions yet :).
I hope this guide will help some people to get started with WordPress plugin developing, because it’s just amazing what you can do with it. The way that WordPress was built lets you change virtually anything and tweak the system in any way you want.
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