Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital if you want your website to be found and displayed (indexed) by the search engines. Just building a website and setting it up is not enough.

In this article I will share with you some of the techniques I use to set-up SEO when building a website with WordPress. I hope you find them helpful.

I. Domain Name

SEO starts with the domain name. Make sure your domain name contains keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines.

For example, if you create a website about dog training, make up a domain name such as DogTrainingForPuppies.com, or DogTrainingForPoodles.com, or DogTrainingSecrets.com. The trick is to use the word “Dog Training” at the front of the name, followed by some other words.

II. Page SEO

Every time you create a new page (or a post) on your website, make sure you do individual SEO for each page. For example, if the page has to do with dog barking, make sure you “sprinkle” the keyword around the page:

• The title of the page has “dog barking” somewhere in it
• The keyword “dog barking” appears in the first paragraph of the content/article
• The pictures on the page are named using “dog barking” as part of the name

III. SEO Plug-ins

There are two great plugins available for WordPress to handle SEO on your website. Make sure to download them before you create your website:

All-In-One SEO

After you install this plugin, click on “Settings”, then on “All in One SEO” to set-up the following fields:

Click on “Enable” to enable the plugin.

Home Title (Title Tag) – This is the title of your website Homepage (what shows on the top-left hand side of the browser). Make sure you use relevant keywords when creating your website title.

Home Description (Meta Description Tag) – This is a brief description of your website’s Homepage. This description is displayed by the search engines when displaying your website information. Make sure to include all relevant keywords.

Home Keywords (Meta Keywords Tag) – This is a list of all the relevant keywords for the website, separated by commas.

Next, remove “| %blog_title%” from the next 6 “title format” fields. After all the changes are completed, click on “Update Options” at the bottom of the page.

 

When adding a new page, make sure you fill in the following fields in the All in One SEO Pack section:

Title (Title Tag) – This is the title of your new webpage (what shows on the top-left hand side of the browser). Make sure you use relevant keywords.

Description (Meta Description Tag) – This is a brief description of your new webpage. This description is displayed by the search engines when displaying your website. Make sure to include all relevant keywords.

Keywords (Meta Keywords Tag) – This is a list of all the relevant keywords for the new webpage, separated by commas. Remember, these keywords are related to the theme of this page in particular. For example, if the page is about dog barking, make sure to include dog barking related keywords.

Ultimate Noindex Nofollow

There are certain webpages and links that you do not want the search engines to index. Pages such as Contact Us, Sitemap, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, etc; you want to exclude from being indexed. To do this, you need to add a “nofollow” and “noindex” tags to those links.

Install the Ultimate Noindex Nofollow plugin. Click on “Settings”, then on “Ultimate Noindex”.

On the “noindex” box, type the Page ID of the pages you want to add the “noindex” tag. To find the Page ID, click on “Pages”, then move the cursor over the page you want add. Look at the bottom left of your screen, and you will see the Page ID

 

The last number is the Page ID (in this example, it would be 3).

Next, click on all the “Add noindex” boxes in this section.

I recommend also adding the “nofollow” tag to the same pages as before. To do this, go to the “nofollow” section and add the page slugs of the pages you want to add. To find the page slug, click on “Pages”, then click on “Edit”. For each of the pages you want to include go to the top of the page and look at the Permalink path. Copy the last part of the pat, this is your slug. For example, let’s say you are editing the page Contact Us. The slug for this page will be “contact-us”. Do this for each one of the pages you want to include, and copy the slug on the “nofollow” box.

Next, click on the boxes for Nofollow archive links, register link and login link. When all the changes are done, click on “Update Options”.

 

NOTE: If your WordPress Theme has footers, you need to add the “noindex” and “nofollow” tags manually, if necessary. This is very easy. Click on “Appearance”, then on “Footer”.

For example, let’s say you have a link for “Contact Us”, it should look something like this:

Change it by adding the code in red:

Make the same changes to all the other links as appropriate.

IV. Permalinks

Permalinks define how the path on the pages of your site will be structured. In order to have a more “website-like” pathnames (for example: www.domainname.com/pagename), we need to set a custom permalink setting.

Click on “Settings” drop down menu and select “Permalinks”. Click on “Custom Structure” and type the following setting: /%postname%/

Click on “Save Changes”.

V. Pictures

If you are going to use pictures in your page, make sure you do not call them P1.jpg, P2.jpg, etc. Use related keywords to name the pictures. For example, you are adding pictures to a page dealing with dog barking. Call the pictures something like dog-barking-poodle.jpg, or dog-barking-muzzle.jpg, etc.

The easiest and most SEO friendly way to store your pictures is by creating a directory in the root directory of your website (this is the directory in which WordPress is installed), and call it something like “dog-training-images”. Then set WordPress to store your images there. This will make the structure of your site look more like a website than a blog.

After creating the directory on your root directory, click on “Settings”, then “Miscellaneous.” Replace the pathname under “Store uploads in this folder” with the name of the directory you created (for example: dog-training-images/), and uncheck “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”. Click on “Save Changes”. From now on, when you upload a picture it will be saved in an SEO friendly directory.

 

VI. Backlinks and Anchor Text

Backlinks are very important for getting your site indexed quickly. Backlinks are links from other external websites/blogs/articles back to your site.

For example, let’s say you are publishing an article, and at the end you put the following sentence:

For more information on Dog Training your puppy, click here.

In this example, you are setting “click here” as the link back to your website. The words you use for your link are what’s called “Anchor Text”. The anchor text will become the “title” for that link. In this example, the search engine will index the link under the title “click here”. This is not good. What you want to do is include your keywords as part of the anchor text. For example, let’s re-write the previous sentence:

For more information, check Dog Training for Puppies for tips and ideas…

In this case the link (Anchor Text) is “Dog Training for Puppies”, which will give you a more powerful backlink.

I hope these tips and ideas have been helpful. To learn more secrets, click on the link Make a Website using WordPress.