I have been doing lot of Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress sites recently and although there are lots of good material out there for the same but I did not find any concise and step by step guide to do WP SEO effectively and quickly. So I decided to write one my own, which I would try and use in future. I would be updating this posts in future with new learnings. So here we go:
SEO Tools:
There are list of SEO tools that are helpful. I would start listing them here.
SEO plugin:
In case of Wordpress please install a SEO plugin. One can use either of Yoast SEO plugin or All in one SEO plugin. Just don't do the mistake of using both. One of my clients installed multiple plugins and tried to use all of them. This is a recipe for disaster. As this lead to multiple Meta tags for keywords, descriptions and social tags. Thats a disaster. Matt Cutt (Google's Search Spam head) explains that Every page needs to have unique meta description tag. And this breaks that. Then again, Facebook does not like multiple og:image tags too.
To check, just right click on any of your website page and view source. In the source, just look out for META tags and make sure all of them are unique.
Page Title:
Make sure the page title is within 70 characters as most of the search engine does not parse beyond 70 characters. Another important thing is the construct of page title. Important keyword should fall at the beginning of the page title, as users tend to read that first. For example, a title like "A website for cat products" does not make sense while "Cat products website" is a much better page title although both of them means the same. Moreover one must try and utilise as much of 70 characters as possible. Use this space for intelligently spreading various important keywords.
Meta Description:
This is the important field which search engines uses to display the description of each url/page on the search result. Each page should have an unique meta description tag and its not even viable to have unique meta description for each page. Most of the time I put one meta description for Homepage and use it for all the pages and sometimes I use different meta description for page of high ROI. For example, it can be a particular category in my blog which has most number of visitors.
Keywords:
FB OG Metadata debug tool:
Submit to Search Engines:
Use various online tools to submit the website to various search engines. Few of the submission sites are:
--To be completed--
SEO Tools:
There are list of SEO tools that are helpful. I would start listing them here.
- http://www.seositecheckup.com/
- http://www.woorank.com/
- https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
- http://www.bing.com/webmaster/diagnostics/seo/Analyze
These give a good guidelines for where to begin with.
SEO plugin:
In case of Wordpress please install a SEO plugin. One can use either of Yoast SEO plugin or All in one SEO plugin. Just don't do the mistake of using both. One of my clients installed multiple plugins and tried to use all of them. This is a recipe for disaster. As this lead to multiple Meta tags for keywords, descriptions and social tags. Thats a disaster. Matt Cutt (Google's Search Spam head) explains that Every page needs to have unique meta description tag. And this breaks that. Then again, Facebook does not like multiple og:image tags too.
To check, just right click on any of your website page and view source. In the source, just look out for META tags and make sure all of them are unique.
Page Title:
Make sure the page title is within 70 characters as most of the search engine does not parse beyond 70 characters. Another important thing is the construct of page title. Important keyword should fall at the beginning of the page title, as users tend to read that first. For example, a title like "A website for cat products" does not make sense while "Cat products website" is a much better page title although both of them means the same. Moreover one must try and utilise as much of 70 characters as possible. Use this space for intelligently spreading various important keywords.
Meta Description:
This is the important field which search engines uses to display the description of each url/page on the search result. Each page should have an unique meta description tag and its not even viable to have unique meta description for each page. Most of the time I put one meta description for Homepage and use it for all the pages and sometimes I use different meta description for page of high ROI. For example, it can be a particular category in my blog which has most number of visitors.
Keywords:
FB OG Metadata debug tool:
Submit to Search Engines:
Use various online tools to submit the website to various search engines. Few of the submission sites are:
- http://www.freewebsubmission.com/
- http://www.dmoz.org/
--To be completed--