In Building a list of SEO tips for WordPress the first step is to install a couple of super helpful plugins for WordPress to extend it’s SEO capabilities.

Google XML Sitemap Generator

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Automatically creates and updates a sitemap file and submits to go Google Yahoo and others…

Install and activate and your ready to go.

All in One SEO Pack

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Extends WP’s SEO capabilities with SEO dashboard panels

Install and activate.

WordPress Home Page SEO

In your WordPress dashboard go to “Settings” then “All In One SEO”

Fill in the “Home Title:” field with a short (-70 characters) description of your home page. Tip: Include a few keyword keywords found in the home page it’s self.

“Home Description:” field add a short (-140 characters) easily to understand sentence describing your site. Tip: this is not a place to add keywords for the spiders but for people to read after you get added to Google.

“Home Keywords” What you want to do here is add a short list (6-10) keywords for Google to know what your site is focused on. Make sure you have these in your content text on the home page or they will not be as effective. Tip: Be careful with how many keywords you use here as too many can degrade your keyword results. Here the focus should be on quality, not quantity.

For more help deciding what keywords are right for you to focus on check out

Google Keyword Generator

SEOing Post Pages in WordPress

Go to “Write” to add a new post or chick “Manage” to SEO an existing Post Page.

Scroll down till you see the new panel called “All in One SEO Pack”

“Title” Copy Post name and paste in here

“Description” Copy first (-140 characters) Headlining text in post and paste in this field

“Keywords” Find the most important key words (6-10) in your post and paste in this field

Inbound Links

Inbound Links are one of the most important key factors in search engine placement.
Sure you want to have a lot of incoming links however you also want good high ranking sites linking to your site. So don’t get in a hurry to have tons of links, again the focus should be on quality, not quantity. Also watch out for link exchanges when two sites link to each other it can kind of cancel out the links effectiveness. Also if your going to post to directory’s make sure it’s at least a little bit of a challenge to get submitted or your probably signing up for a low ranking site that can hurt more than help.

Getting Links From Social Networking Sites

Social media is a wonderful thing and networking sites like Stumbleupon Digg and others are a great source of feed back for your site and help build your search ranking. Add social networking icons to your WordPress theme so others can link back to you can help push your site to new levels of exposure.

Content is King

The last point is a no brainier Google can’t search what hasn’t been made so get creative and post good original content and you’ll be climbing those Google pages fast.

View all posts by John MacMenamin → This entry was posted in Tutorials and tagged Guide, SEO, WordPress. Bookmark the permalink.