Topic Summary- What 6 things could you do to your WP Blog today to improve Rankings?
(from techtage.com): Long post titles shouldn’t be avoided, long URLs for your posts should. You can use a shortened version of your post title (if it s too long) for the post permalink. I don t consider inclusion of up to 10-15 words in post permalinks a problem but if you include more words, it s bad for a few reasons. First of all, very long URLs are harder for people to memorize, so that can affect the No. of direct visitors. Long URLs look bad and create a poor first-impression among your potential readers. There have been talks on the topic that Google and other search engines don t like too long URLs. They prefer short to medium-sized descriptive URLs instead. Plus, very long URLs don t completely appear in SERPs. Lastly, as search engines are focusing on user-experience on websites more than anything else these days and are using more user-based data than ever while ranking webpages, it s probably better to limit the URL lengths of your blog, as preferred by your readers.
Use WordPress
- at the risk of resurrecting an old thread I’ve just finished, about an SEO course that claimed links were still king, if content was above a reasonable level. There is so much conjecture about this across the web. Nice article! Keep up to date and read some authoritative advice on SEO . Thanks to the advice of the same SEO, I’ve migrated my website from html to WordPress, and I must say I’m loving the change, and ease of maintenance. It can be found here, hoping it doesn’t look too WordPressy. http://www.ppc.com.au (from graphpaperpress.com)
Fix Titles
- The title tag has long been thought of as the most important on-site factor in telling search engines what your site (or a page) is about. By default on older versions of WordPress, post titles would display as Blog Name/Post Title . As your homepage is probably already ranking for your site name, you’re not helping yourself by putting your site name at the start of your title. You don t need to rank for it more than once. Use relevant synonym or LSI keywords in your titles. (from www.viperchill.com)
Optimize Plugins
- Here is another really wonderful article of SEO information that’s been shared with us. Every Blogger s dream is to see his blog top in the searchengine results page, but they may fail due to lack of knowledge about SEO or due to improper SEO. Here are the10 best SEO techniques that teach you to become a professional Blogger. http://www.googleonlinehelp.com/10-best-seo-techniques/ (from blog.bufferapp.com)
Check Default Settings
- By tweaking some default settings, setting permalinks, adding update services, and customizing media settings – plus installing Google Analytics – This will greatly improve your WordPress Site for SEO and improve the user experience as well. (from searchenginewatch.com)
Keywords/Phrases
- Using your key words/phrases in your Title and Description tags is more important than in your Post tags. Also don’t confuse a Post tag with an HTML Title or meta description tag. They’re unrelated. It can’t hurt to use the keywords in the Post tags if you’d like. I don’t really have a specific strategy for that. I typically just add tags to a Post that are related to the Post and don’t think too much about these in terms of SEO. (from diythemes.com)
Remove Duplicate Content
- If your content will only live on one URL, you likely won t need to worry about duplicate content issues (even if other pages on your site contain an excerpt). Be sure to check with your seo consultant to see how your particular WordPress theme handles categories. (from searchengineland.com)