How to SEO your Wordpress site quickly

Perhaps you own a blog or are looking into operating your own Wordpress site all by yourself. A live weblog or whatever you see fit, maybe a wonderful niche advertising hub just for your Google ads. No matter what, you should be well armored with the invaluable SEO knowledge that will grow your audience for free. Remember that the described techniques are largely free, although there are many services that will go above and beyond to make your SEO conquest extra prosperous.

Probably the most user friendly plugin of its kind related to Wordpress SEO, the SEO Ultimate plugin makes optimizing your blog a snap. This here plugin lets you easily tailor the SEO settings of each post for laser accurate keyword targeting; from the url string, keywords, description, and even title.

After a little paying around with the plugin you quickly discover just how easy and fun it can be to get rank for keywords and niches of your choice.

A quick copy and paste method, that works, for getting the proper search engine robots to correctly crawl your pages and index them on an somewhat regular basis, is to simply add a little php code to your Wordpress sites header file template in the admin panel, like this :

<?php if(is_single() || is_page() || is_category() || is_home()) { ?>
<meta name="googlebot" content="index, noarchive, follow, noodp" />
<meta name="robots" content="all, index, follow" />
<?php } else { ?>
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, noarchive, follow, noodp" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
<?php }?>

Essentially you would want the robots to index you home url, if that's where the fresh posts are then - noarchive, and follow for updates. Be careful not to break any existing php code when copying and pasting, that can break the whole Wordpress site.

For even more awesome SEO robots activity create or modify an existing robots.txt file and place it in your root Wordpress site web directory. With the newly created robot.txt file place some instructions for those good robots, I prefer to focus on Google so this is pretty close to what I like to use:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /author

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /


User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /


Sitemap: http://www.your-lovely-Wordpress-site.com/sitemap.txt

Start at line one of course and modify to suite your needs but be careful. Notice how we prevent the robots from crawling sensitive places with "Disallow", comes in handy when you don't want certain stuff appearing in search results.

The site map can come in a few different flavors, .xml and .txt are the most common, if your not comfortable missing with xml files for your Wordpress site yet just use .txt format, its just as effective depending on how frequent your content changes. Within your new site map file, just place all the pages you want indexed and regularly crawled line by line from top to bottom priority.

After you complete all this madness, be sure to get a Google webmaster tools account, its free and it easy. Here, you will be able to submit your site map and check out your robot crawler access success. In order to verify ownership of your site to use the tools you have to either upload a special .shtml file to your Wordpress site web root directory, or place some simple meta code in your header. I've always preferred the upload method for any Wordpress site I'm performing the verification on, in my experience it just works better without problems, however use the meta method if you do not have access to the web root and the ability to access files. Google provides thorough instructions for each described method.

For whatever you are selling or rambling on about, use your keywords, again and again and again. When you provide a healthy genuine article/post that is optimized by the SEO Ultimate plugin, make sure the keywords you want rank for are used in the content over and over but with proper grammar and diction.

Do not stuff your meta keywords or description, stay concise and stick to the desired keywords. Try to keep it under four keywords per page, and a description under 150 characters containing the keywords. Keyword stuffing will hurt your SEO. Keep the title of the page short and keyword relevant, something no more than five-six words.

For all the images on the post or page, use alt="" tags with the desired SEO keywords; robots can't exactly index/read images so when you specify the tag it helps the bots understand what the image pertains to. When you do not specify the alt tag, you get a negative mark in your overall SEO score for the whole site.

When you are building links to your Wordpress pages and posts be sure to link back with the proper keyword anchor text. Link with a keyword or two-to the desired page. Submit to to big directory sites with relevant categories, exchange links with other that operate similar Wordpress sites as yours, post to relevant forums and write a few good articles on Hubpages with back links to your Wordpress site.