Contents:
Introduction
Which Theme To Use?
Plugins
Configuring Your New Blog
Template Modifications for SEO
Other On-site SEO Ideas
Writing Your Posts
Meta Tags
Efficiency Tips
Where to Go From Here?
Introduction:
There are advantages and disadvantages to using Wordpress blogs for the purpose of building niche article sites. Some of the advantages are:
- Quick setup, once you have your templates, themes, and plugins optimized.
- Quick entry of new articles and posts.
- Rss feeds come built-in with Wordpress.
- You can automate posting by using programs like RSS To Blog, and have a new article posted every day.
- Easy to edit pages. You can make minor (or major) changes to articles after they are published if you want to adjust for different or additional keywords.
Some of the disadvantages are:
- Keywords and description meta tags are not optimized in the standard install.
- In some themes, the xml doesn’t validate, and needs to be corrected.
- Not all themes are SEO optimized.
This booklet will focus on the actual Wordpress setup. I will not venture into off-site SEO, finding niches, or writing good articles. Those are topics for a different book, different day!
Which theme to use?
I prefer to use simple themes. They seem to work better for SEO, probably because they don’t have a lot of garbage diluting the keyword-rich content.
One thing you should consider when choosing themes is to make sure you use themes with the links on the right side, not the left. Search engines don’t always read all of a page, and it’s better to have your content show up as early as possible on the page.
A search for “Wordpress themes” will turn up a list of many freely-available themes. The premier site for finding themes is Alex King’s site at:
http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/theme_browser.php
These are my current favorites:
OptiNiche custom theme - This is a simple, optimized theme from Teli at OptiNiche.
Letterhead - This is a simple white text-based theme that I find works well for content sites. The standard Adsense colors also blend in well, and look attractive with this theme.
Green Marinee - I love this theme for its attractive appearance, but yet it’s still simple.
Minima Plus is a good simple theme that allows you to put a nice graphic on top if you have one.
Stylish blue modern - Another of my favorites, because of its very elegant, yet simple appearance.
Flex - Available from http://ifelse.co.uk/flex, I love this one for its clean elegance.
Wordpress default - I use this a lot on blogs and blog-farms, and there is nothing at all wrong with it!
Whichever themes you use, make sure the links work. Several of them have incorrect rss feed links on them. You may have to edit the template to get them to work.
Plug-ins:
Here are some optional plug-ins you may find useful:
td-optiniche
From Optiniche: (must purchase the Optiniche package)
Creates a description meta tag using the blog’s description, or will use a posts “excerpt” if there is one for the description tag. Adds a keywords tag consisting of the category name, by default, or any keywords you enter in a “custom field.”
Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress:
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
This creates a Google sitemap, and sends a ping to Google. It defaults to creating a new map every time you post. You can also use the output for this to grab site links if you don’t mind doing a little modification to the file.
Customizable Post Listings:
by Scott Reilly
Provides a list of previous article titles. Helps keyword density, and lists the most recent articles. (Some themes already come with this feature.)
Post-schedule ping optimizer
http://www.problogtools.com/
WP-DB Manager:
http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php
Manager for your WP database. It allows you to backup and restore your database as well as optimize it.
Wordpress XHTML validator:
http://rudd-o.com/projects/wp-validator/
Many WP templates come with a link to a validator on them, but some don’t. This one checks your whole blog, lists the errors, and offers suggestions.
WP-Amazon
http://manalang.com/wp-amazon/
Want to ad Amazon products to your posts? (This will only work if you manually post, not with tools like RSS to Blog.) After you make your post, click the button, and it will search Amazon for related products. Then click on them to include them in your post. Amazon has notoriously low click-through and earnings records, but this will add content to your page, and gives your site one more monetization opportunity.
Configuring your new blog
Options menu section:
General tab: Change the tagline - This will become your description meta tag by default, so will be visible to people seeing your site on SERP’s.
Writing tab: Add ping services. Here is a list I’ve been using lately. Many choose to ping only pingomatic, which is the WP default. Pingomatic pings many other services in turn.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
While you are setting up your initial posts, you should remove the ping services. Wordpress by default will ping every time you save or publish a post, including every time you edit. To avoid ping services marking you as a spammer, you must remove the services before you do multiple posts.
Another good place to ping is pingoat.com. However, they only accept manual submissions. Once your blog is complete, you can go to Pinggoat and ping it once. That will put your site on the radar for the 50 or so sites that they ping.
Reading tab: I set my number of posts to show to three. This will give me three articles and three Adsense blocks, one above each one. Change the syndication feeds to summary, so rss feeds only show the summary, and the people have to visit your blog for the full article. At some point, other sites will start picking up your feeds for display on their sites, and you want to make sure they don’t get your whole article.
Discussion tab: Uncheck the first three selections to disable comments, to help you avoid comment spam.
Permalinks tab: One of the most important SEO items for your Wordpress blog is to properly set the permalinks setting. This will give your page numbers meaning, by making them reflect your post titles, which should be keyword-optimized! I find this permalink setting to work well:
/%post_id%/%postname%/
If you use categories, this works well:
/%post_id%/%category%/%postname%/
You can also plug a keyword (subdirectory) if you want, and do something like this:
/%post_id%/%dogbiscuits%/%postname%/
Or you can use a structure including the date. The important thing is to put the postname in it, because this is your keyword-optimized post title.
Note that some permalink structures may not work with all hosting, so make sure you try this before you start publishing. Setting permalinks requires you to change your .htaccess file. Wordpress will do this for you if it has permissions, so change the .htaccess permissions to 777 before you start with your blog. Make sure you change it back after you finish your permalinks changes.
Plug-ins menu section:
Check to enable any of the plugins you are using.
Manage menu section:
Categories tab: Change “uncategorized” to a keyword.
Users menu section:
You can change your password here. Also, you may want to change the “display name publicly” to admin if you want.
Links Menu Section:
Here is where you delete all those default links. Also, this is where you can add links to your other sites.
Template modifications for SEO
These two files must be deleted or renamed to avoid automated comment spam:
wp-comments-post.php
wp-trackback.php
Adding Adsense to your templates:
There are various places you can put your Adsense code on your blog. If you put a couple of banners right at the end of the header, they will show up on all pages.
Another place you can put it is at the start of a post. Doing it this way will put an Adsense block before each post, so if you use multiple posts per page, the ad will show multiple times.
You can put Adsense in your sidebar also. I prefer to use this spot for other affiliate advertising.
One thing to keep in mind, is that Wordpress uses a few different types of pages. They use index.php for the home page, single.php for pages consisting of a single post, and somehow builds pages that show category views. (This is beyond my knowledge of how Wordpress works.) The important thing to know though is that if you put your Adsense on index.php, it will not show up on all views that people may see.
See Adsense’s heat map page for tips on best ad placement:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=17954
Other on-site SEO ideas:Use keywords in your post and page titles.
Use keywords in your page url’s, by changing the permalinks (see blog configuration section)
Use keywords within bold tags. One easy way to do this is just ad the title again at the end of your post, and bold it.
Use keywords in a header (h1) tag. Most themes do this for you by using h1 tags for the post title.
Use keywords in image “alt” tags. For example, instead of putting in a picture of me and calling it “David”, I could call it “David after his successful weight loss diet” or “results of the new organic acne medication” or even “David looking at his new access control security system.” You get the point!
Writing your posts:
Make sure you have enough content in your posts. Try for 400-800 words. Put the keywords in your title.
Within your post, put a couple other text links to other articles on your site. This builds the interlinking on your site.
Use keyword-focused categories. This will add the keyword again in the category view of your blog.
To automate your post-writing, use a tool like RSS To Blog, and have the posts made automatically. I will insert many articles into an RSS To Blog setup, then set it up to automatically post one article to the blog each day.
Meta Tags
Wordpress does not come with the “description” and “keywords” tags. The templates I’ve seen do have the “title” tag in them, but you should look to make sure yours does.
There are plugins to use for keywords and description. See my info above, or check out the Wordpress page on meta plugins:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Meta
Efficiency Tips:
Sometimes it seems cumbersome setting up a Wordpress blog to use for a site. There are several things you can do to speed up the process.
One thing I do when starting to use a new theme is this:
- Do a manual install of WP on a new domain, using this theme.
- Install all the plugins you want.
- Make any necessary modifications to the code, such as adding advertising.
- Once all your mods are made, ftp the entire site back to your local PC, and put in a new directory.
- Zip up these files.
Now you’ve got a zipped file containing your customized WP install. To do a new WP install all you have to do is this:
- Ftp the zipped file to your new domain.
- Unzip
- Set up a WP database
- Change the config.php file to reflect your new database settings.
You are all set! It takes me less than five minutes to do a full WP install this way. There are also several WordPress automation programs on the market, if you want to automate this. See webtooltime.com for reviews and descriptions of some of these.
Where to go from here?
I have learned a lot from reading Teli’s posts and e-book at OptiNiche. (So much that I would rather promote his products than tweak this and sell it myself.)
Go to wordpress.org, and search for SEO or optimization. There is a wealth of information there.
Of course, you can just Google “WordPress SEO” or optimization and you will find many resources.
I hope you were able to find something of use here. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to e-mail me.
Happy building!
David