WordPress is ready to embrace search engines straight out of the box. Your aim is to gather the information that the search engine needs to include your site within its database as well as to help the search engine crawl your site. For this purpose, WordPress` functions and features guide a search engine through the pages, categories and posts.
WordPress provides a number of built in search tools aimed to optimization. It includes the ability to create permalinks, to use .htaccess, pinging and blogrolling. Also, there are different hacks and third party plugins useful for search engine optimization (SEO).
But once you start to customize WordPress and to use a number of WordPress Themes, it can affect those search engine features and functions. Thus, see useful tips which will help you to keep your WordPress website maximum friendly towards search engine crawlers and spiders.
All search engines can only “read” sites, since there is no search engine which can “see” a site. So no matter what it looks like. What does matter is the content of your site that educates, explains, shares, babbles and informs. That is all words. Thus, ensure that your site has high-quality word material for a search engine to compare with all the pieces and parts and examine to give you a maximum gain.
Search engine will not be able to move through your site successfully if you have errors in your code. Make sure that the code of your site is good.
Imagine you are a casual Internet user. How do you usually search information? Think about the phrases and words you would use to find information. Those keywords should be used throughout the text, but not in every sentence. Understand how search engines “see” your content use your knowledge and you will always be in good favor with search engines.
A search engine ignores the majority of CSS and styles when enters your website. It just gather information and content. Most WordPress Themes are specifically designed to keep the content maximum close to the top of the unstyled page while footers and sidebars are placed close to the bottom. Most search engines do not scan more than the first third of the page before moving on. So insure your Theme place the content as close to the top as possible.
Search engines do not see any visual effects of your website. They see the words by putting them through a sifter and give credit to certain word combinations. Search engines compare the words found within your document to words found within your titles and links. The more match brings the better result.
Say your site does not have much text, mostly links and photographs. However, you still have places where a textual content can be added. Search engines look for title and alt in image tags and link. Since it aims the purpose to make your website often visited by users, having good words and descriptions in these attributes will help you to provide more digestible content for search engines.
No matter how well your site is, the matter is how well are those sites that link to your website. This is how search engine favoritism works. Blogrolls, trackbacks and pingbacks are a parts of WordPress. It can help you link to other as well as it also helps them link to you. In addition, it gives them credit when connecting the links. You can check the number of incoming links your website has by typing link: www.yoursite.com into Google (there are similar functions in other search engines). These links can be recognized by Google. Also, you can generate incoming links to your site using following ways:
- Submit your site to directories (see below)
- Add URL of your site to your signature on different sites or forums.
- Pay attention: All modern blogging tools use the rel=”nofollow” attribute, that is why leaving comments on blogs will not help with this.
When a search engine moves through your site, it crawls from page to page. Proper navigational links to the archives, categories, and different pages on your site will make a search engine to move consistently from one page to another. By following the connecting links a search engine will visit most of your site.
If you need to submit your site to search engines, there are various resources that can help you with that. Some of them are free and some are paid. Another way is to submit your site to search engines manually. Whatever way you choose, search engines will welcome your WordPress website as soon as your site is ready.
See some tips to submit your site successfully:
- Check if you have the right content for search engines to scan. Generally, it should be more than ten posts to give the search engines the material to evaluate and examine.
- It is better to submit a website depending upon its criteria. Do not submit a website to the same search engine more than one time in several month. Thus, it is better to keep a list of those search engines that you already submit to be sure you do not make resubmission too soon. Moreover, it will help you to track of how they include your site among their pages.
- Get ready to copy and paste or type the categories your site belong to as well as the title of your website manually in a search engine directory.
- Make a list of your site’s “URLs/addresses”. You can submit specific feeds and categories as well as your root directory to search engines to expand your search engine effectiveness.
Submitting your site to directories is also useful for search optimization and traffic generation purposes. You can use both specific to the subject sites as well as comprehensive directory sites. The most important directory is DMOZ.org. Its content is used directly by almost all of the main search engines and it can be syndicated throughout the Internet.
The following information is about the resources which are as friendly as WordPress for search engines. Learn know to prepare and maintain your website for search engines’ crawlers and robots.
Meta Tags contain information about your website’s description, purpose and keywords used within your site. They are not included in WordPress by default and located within the head of the header.php template file. If needed, you can manually add them in WordPress.
The Custom Fields option in WordPress can also be used to include descriptions and keywords and for Pages or posts. See several WordPress Plugins that will help you to add keyword descriptions as well as meta tags to your website. Find them in the Official WordPress Plugin Directory.
To get information on what they should and should not be looking for, search engines get information from a yourserver.com/robots.txt file. Google and the rest search engines recommend to specify where they should look for content in high-quality files or directories. It will increase the ranking of your site.
An example WordPress robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
# Google AdSense
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*
# Google Image
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
# digg mirror
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /
# global
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: */comments/
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
WordPress has various built-in feeds, that allow your site to be seen by different feed readers since the majority of search engines accept feed submissions. There are many sites which specialize in feed services and directories of feeds. If you want to submit your website’s feeds, you need to find out the link to the various feeds provided by your site.
Technorati is a real-time search engine that tracks the world of weblogs – the blogosphere. Technorati tracks the real-time nature of blogging and the perceived relevance of blogs as well as the number of links. Once weblogs been updated, Technorati automatically receives notification about it. That is why it tracks the dozens of updates that occur in the blogosphere per hour. Also Technorati can monitor the communities (who links to whom) underlying these conversations.
Technorati tags are used to categorize the information used by blogs as well as different topics. Moreover, Technorati uses categories of WordPress as tags automatically. If you need more tags, just add rel=”tag” to any link on your website. For example:
<a href=”https://dev.bestwebsoft.com/” rel=”tag”>WordPress</a>
<a href=”http://codex.bestwebsoft.com/” rel=”tag”>Codex</a>
Also, see several WordPress plugins that will help you to maximize Technorati tags.
Pay attention: Use the following code include the Atom feed in the header of your theme. Add it somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags to optimize Technorati listing:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml”
title=”Atom 0.3″ href=”<?php bloginfo(‘atom_url’); ?>” />
Your posts in Technorati will most likely be displayed wrongly if you did not add the Atom feed to your header. As a result Technorati may list other (meta) information which is displayed between the real post content and the post title and on your weblog as well as the post content may be duplicated.
Permalinks can optimize the work of search engines by presenting your archive URLs, page and post as something like http://site.com/2003/05/23/example-example/ rather than http://site.com/index.php?p=423. Permalinks are enhancements to your existing URLs. Links to articles and posts within your site gain importance with Permalinks once search engines use the title and links as part of their information gathering.
A sitemap is a single page which lists of all the posts on your site. It is aimed to help your visitors to get a good overview about your site as well as to find a post or page quickly. However, it is also important for search engine optimization like a good link that point to all your blog pages. When you have a link to your sitemap on all your posts or pages both search engines and visitors and will easily get to it and find the needed information.
Since June 2005, Google accept sitemaps of your site as part of their website submissions and formatted only using XML.
The issue of whether listing the link relations actually can somehow affect search engine optimization. Whatever it was, it is not difficult to implement proper link relations.
