Primer: Wordpress SEO

Before we go into the details of employing SEO methods to your Wordpress blog, here are a few points to note which are very important to the eyes of both search engines and readers alike. In fact, they are applicable to not just blogs but other websites too!

1. Clean Code
Errors in your website may prevent search engine bots from indexing your site fully. There are several tools out there to validate your code e.g. http://validator.w3.org/

2. Content Comes First
Search engines read a site with no styling at all but focusses on your content. The more relevant your content, the higher 'score' you tend to get. Put simply, if it's useful to your readers, it'll be appear higher in the search engine ranking too. It is also important that your theme puts the content near the top as most search engine bot only scans your first few lines of content while skipping the styling before moving on.

3. Content for Searchers
If you are specifically writing an article to be found on search engines, you need to keep in mind what searchers want to find. Try to include the search keywords into your article as many times as possible but of course not to the point where it doesn't make sense.

4. Content in Links and Images
Search engine bots look for alt and title in link and image tags. These not only makes your site more accessible, it provides more content for search engine bots to digest.

5. Clear Navigation Links
As search engine bots crawl through your site with the help of links to tell where it should go next, clear navigational links to the categories, archives, and various pages on your site is important for it to know where to go next.

As you can see no matter what you do to optimise your blog for SEO, content is king!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Wordpress, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.