Tweaking A WordPress Blog
Blogs like WordPress, by their very nature, are not usually optimized for the best possible search engine friendliness. It’s true – because blogs tend to be set up with a chronological content organization system, the posts become dated very quickly. Search engines and readers eventually disregard the non-recent material. However, there are a few tricks to tweaking a WordPress blog so it behaves more like a traditional website for search.
One – Choose The Best Category For A Post (Tweaking A WordPress Blog)
By selecting just one category for each post or page published on your WordPress powered blog, the chances will be greatly reduced that the same content shows up in multiple pages to the search engines. Having duplicate content is a huge no-no when it comes to optimization. Another effect of only using one individual category for each post is that doing this will create more tightly focused category pages that can help search engines better understand your blog too.
Two – Upgrade The Stock Template Meta Data (Tweaking A WordPress Blog)
By default, many WordPress templates fill in the metadata for a page (such as the page’s encoded description) with distracting or irrelevant details. We all know that metadata is generally regarded as useless when it comes to search rank nowadays, but it is still often used to display the page’s description in the search results listing. Make sure only optimized info is appearing here.
Three – Fix Page Titles (Tweaking A WordPress Blog)
Just like metadata, many WordPress templates do strange things with the page title. Get rid of the weird stuff because search engines use the page title in their listing displays. You don’t want that title to show “WordPress” or anything else not relevant to the content being searched for. Instead the title field should be used to properly describe the page’s actual content.
Four – Change The Default URL Options (Tweaking A WordPress Blog)
Editing the WordPress settings to create URLs for posts and pages that use the content’s keywords is highly recommended. The default numeric URL system adds no extra benefit when it comes to optimization. Also, setting this option to eliminate the dates from the URLs created can sometimes help to make the post appear fresh no matter how long ago it was created.
Five – Alter H1 and H2 Tags (Tweaking A WordPress Blog)
In WordPress, the H1 and H2 tags generally remain the same across all pages by default. At worst, this can make each page look like duplicate content to search engines; at best, it’s not taking advantage of using these important tags to describe your blog post’s content to the search engines. By customizing the WordPress template to use unique H1 and H2 tags that are relevant to individual posts and pages, the blog will be optimized more like the traditional static website.
When it comes to optimizing WordPress for search, the best strategy is simply to make your WordPress blog easy to understand and decipher for the search engine spiders. To make the process as painless as possible, just follow these five tips to tweaking a WordPress blog for search.
