WordPress SEO & Traffic Tips for Newbies, Part 2

WordPress search engine optimization (SEO) techniques go beyond installing plugins. I know a lot of blog newbies may not be interested in jumping into advanced things like editing PHP and doing serious keyword targeting research, there are a lot of simple “tweaks” you can do with WordPress that will help your site succeed in the search engines, and attract more visitors, without sticking your hands under WordPress’ hood, so to speak.

So, without further ado, here’s the second part of my WordPress SEO for Newbies advice:

Part 2: Tips & Tweaks

1. Post Permalinks: The first setting you need to change from the WordPress default is the permalink structure. The default WP links, with all the ?p=123 nonsense after your domain name, are absolutely no good. Not only are they impossible to remember when you look at them, but you miss out on the opportunity to put SERP*-boosting keywords in your post URLs. Skip using any of their “Common Settings” too … they just clutter your links with gobledegook numbers. What I do is click the “Custom Structure” option, and enter /%category%/%postname%. That way, if I use keywords in my category names, and keywords in my custom permalinks, the search engines can use that to decide what my page is about, and people can look at the link (if anyone emails your post to a friend, for instance) and get an idea what they’re about to read too. (*SERP=Search Engine Results Page)

   Customize your permalink for every post. WordPress 2.5 has a very convenient permalink editor interface right underneath the Title field when you’re writing your post or page. Take out any unnecessary words like: to, a, of, and, or, & the. Switch around your keywords from your post and page titles. For instance, my last post was titled “WordPress SEO & Traffic Tips for Newbies, Part 1″ but the permalink was “10-wordpress-seo-traffic-plugins”. Why? I added 10 to indicate it’s a list (see #8, below), and “plugins” is a more specific keyword I left out of the post title. I removed “Newbies” and “Part 1″ because they’re not important keywords for the search engines, and “&” and “for” are just taking up space, and you want to keep your links relatively short.

2. Post Titles: Your post titles should read nicely—no big long lists of keywords, or sticking keyword phrases in awkward places—but should still have some of your major keywords in them if you want them to get long-term search engine traffic, or be written in an attention-getting style for social bookmarking sites like Digg (see #7, below). All my posts about WordPress on this site include the word “WordPress,” because I would like people searching for information about WordPress to be able to easily find them on search engines … while my most popular post on another site was titled “10 Things Every Adult Should Know,” because I wanted to pique people’s curiosity when they saw the link.
3. Page Titles: Page titles don’t have to sound as good as the post title, because it’s not a major feature on the page (you have to look all the way to the top of your browser window to see it), and it isn’t used in links as often as your post titles will be. Page titles are a great place to put those extra keywords you didn’t cram into your permalink, that didn’t quite sound right in your post title. The page title of this post is “10 WordPress Blog Promotion SEO Traffic Tips for Newbies”. Again, you see the 10, indicating it’s a list post, the words “WordPress,” “SEO” and “traffic,” from the permalink and post title, and the extra keywords “blog” and “promotion,” because the new users I’m targeting might not know specialized keywords like SEO … I also kept “newbie” in there, since we’re not so worried about length with the page title.
4. Post Formatting: If you’re willing to click the “HTML” tab at the top of your post editing field, you can take advantage of properly structured headers or “H tags”. You’ll notice in this post and the last one, right above the tip list, is a sub-head in slightly larger and bolder text than the rest of the page. I’m not using my headers to their full advantage in these posts, because I don’t have any keywords in them, but if I’d written the sub-header on this page as “Part 2: WordPress SEO and Promotion Tips” or something like that, the header would have given those words extra importance to the search engines.

   To use headers properly in your post, click the HTML tab and find the header phrase. If you made the header bold type using the visual editor, you’ll see it’s formatted like this: <strong>Sub Head Phrase</strong>. You’ll want to change that to either <h2>Sub Head Phrase</h2> (if you want it too look the same as the post title), or <h3>Sub Head Phrase</h3> (if you want it slightly smaller than the post title, like my sub-header on this page). Search engines also put more importance on bold and italic type, and you can do that right in the visual editor if that’s what you’re most comfortable using (but don’t go crazy making words bold and italic all over the place … it looks silly.)

5. RSS Feeds: RSS feeds update with every post, either showing your entire post, or just your front page excerpt, and people who use RSS readers or subscribe to sites like Bloglines can get notification every time you update your site. WordPress creates RSS feeds automatically for every blog you set up, but the links aren’t very visible in a lot of templates, and it doesn’t provide very detailed information about your subscribers. If you’re comfortable editing your templates, you can find your own large RSS icons and link them to your feeds, or you could find a sidebar widget that gives you more visible RSS icons. If you want detailed information about your RSS subscribers, you can sign up with Feedburner’s free RSS service and install their FeedPress plugin to automatically redirect all your RSS links to your Feedburner feeds.
6. RSS by Email: A lot of not-so-tech-savvy visitors may not use RSS services, but you still want them to be able to receive notification of your new posts. Feedburner offers a service to email your RSS information to subscribers. There are also a number of plugins that offer post notification emails (although if your blog does get very popular, these plugins might interfere with your hosts’ bulk-mail spam policies, so be careful!). The more ways you offer visitors to keep up with your site, the more repeat readers you’ll have!
7. Social Bookmarking: Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Digg Effect” or a story about a webserver crashing when one of its hosted sites gets “Slashdotted”. That’s the power of social bookmark sites. Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit are three big ones for general interest sites … while slashdot is aimed at a more technical crowd. Becoming a member of these sites is a good way to start building up a following of people who may, in turn, help boost your site onto the main page of the bookmark site … which can send you tens or hundreds of thousands of visits in one day. Stumbleupon once sent me over 20,000 visits in one day, which I thought was pretty amazing, until another article hit the front page of both Digg and Reddit on the same day, and my database server almost imploded under the weight of 200,000+ attempted pageviews in one 24 hour period. (Make sure you have some kind of caching module installed for your site before getting really active on the social bookmark sites, just in case!)

   Most of these sites have rules against using your account for “self promotion”. In practice, what that means is that you have to be active enough at submitting other people’s sites, and rating other people’s submissions, that you can submit one of your own pieces every 10-20 submissions. Don’t submit all of your blog posts … be choosy and only submit the ones you feel are *really* top-quality. You can also find other, smaller social sites to join and participate in … (looking at the button options in Sociable is a good way to find some) because it’s easier to build up a group of friends on a smaller site, and most of them will be members of the larger bookmarking services as well. The more people you get to know online, the more likely someone else will ‘bookmark’ one of your pages for you.

8. Popular Post Types: One digg user commented, while my SQL server was busy having seizures, that I shouldn’t have written a Top 10 post if my site wasn’t ready for the traffic. This is, of course, absurd … but it makes a good point: People love “list” posts. If you’re writing informational posts, a list promises the reader they don’t have to slog through a 5000 word essay to learn what they need to know. Everything is broken down into logical, easily digested pieces, and it saves them time. Another popular style of post is the How To post. Again, rather than having to read a book, How To posts give your visitors an easily followed, step by step format. These two can be easily combined into something like “How to do X, in 10 easy steps”.
9. Social Networking: Sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter provide other opportunities to promote your blog. If you’re targeting a teens-twenties demograhic, set up a MySpace page for your site. If you’re targeting 20-30s, start a Facebook page. On both sites, you can set up your pages to automatically post blog entries from your RSS feed, and people can join as “fans” of your page. If you set your RSS feed to only show entry excerpts, these pages can drive extra traffic to your site from people who want to read the whole article. Twitter is another very useful ‘networking’ service, where people “follow” one another’s accounts can read short “micro-blog” messages, or “tweets”, from each other. You can set up an account with Twitterfeed.com to automatically broadcast new items from your RSS feed to your Twitter followers. There are also WordPress/Twitter plugins that do the same, but I found one I tried tweeted my Twitter followers every time I edited a post too. After trying Twitterfeed, I haven’t even thought about looking for another plugin.
10. Ping Services: One more WordPress default setting to change is what services to “ping” when you post a new entry (this lets other sites on the web know when you have new content for them to index). WordPress is already set up to ping rpc.pingomatic.com, which sends out its own pings to a large number of other services. Some people feel it’s best to ping all the major sites themselves, in case pingomatic is down … however a lot of these “comprehensive” lists include URLS that pingomatic will already send pings to plus pingomatic itself, putting you at risk of being penalized as a ping spammer by pingomatic’s service. Also, there are some sites that won’t accept pings from anyone but pingomatic, so I like to use their service for the bulk of the work.

    I would suggest either you use a short list including pingomatic, plus a handful of services they don’t ping for you, or find a comprehensive ping list that excludes pingomatic and pingoat (another multi-ping service). Here’s the short list I’m currently using:

    http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

    Go to Options > Writing in your dashboard, and scroll to the bottom of the page … then just paste the list into the box under “Update Services”.

*whew* That got longer than I thought it would, faster than I thought it could. Of course all of these points are really general overviews of techniques that can be fine-tuned to a large degree … I’m sure in future posts, I’ll revisit a lot of these ideas in greater detail, but if you’re really a WordPress and/or SEO newbie, this should give you plenty of ideas to start with!