Tag Archives: wordpress seo tips

Permalinks – Getting them right can get you more traffic

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Today’s tip is on Permalinks – Getting them right can get you more traffic. Now, what are permlinks, you might ask?

Permalinks are the way WordPress displays the url for your posts and pages.

Here are some examples of different formats that WordPress offers:

Default - http://marketinggeeksinc.com/?p=123
Day & Name – http://marketinggeeksinc.com/2010/01/10/sample-post/
Numeric – http://marketinggeeksinc.com/archives/123

Or, you can use a Custom structure – http://www.marketinggeeksinc.com/how-to-set-up-wordpress-permalinks

In my opinion, the last one is the best format to have your permalinks in for 3 reasons:

1. It’s friendly on the eyes and easier for other people to link back to you
2. It usually keeps them shorter than some of the other WordPress permalink options (day & name can get really long)
3. It’s best for SEO – it uses keywords in your url, and keeps those keywords as close to the beginning of the link as possible, which can be a factor for SEO as well

So if you’re starting from scratch (or don’t have many incoming links), you’ll definitely want to check your Permalink settings. But what do you do if you already have an established blog? You can’t just go in and change them and leave it at that, because any incoming links you already have will stop working.

To get around this problem, you will first need to install the Redirection plugin.  Once it’s installed, go to Manage –> Redirection –> Options, and make sure both that URL Monitoring boxes are set to “Modified posts”. Now you can change those permalinks to SEO-friendly permalinks without having to worry about the search engine consequences. Now you’ll want to change your Permalink structure. Go to Settings –> Permalinks. Select the Custom structure, and enter /%postname%/


One last thing you can do to your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO is install the SEO Slugs plugin. This will automatically remove stop words (words like and, to, from, if, etc.) from your slugs once you save a post, so you won’t get those ugly long URL’s when you do a sentence style post title. It also helps keep your most important keywords (which should be in your title) towards the front. And since they give you no SEO benefit anyway, you might as well take them out and give that SEO priority to your good keywords!

WordPress Privacy – Don’t Shoot Yourself In the Foot!

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Today’s tip is going to be super-simple to implement, if it’s even necessary for your site. But it’s one of those really simple, but REALLY important things that if done wrong, can have major consequences on your search engine traffic (or lack-thereof).

You may not know it, but in WordPress, you can actually tell the search engines NOT to visit or index your site. I guess this is for people that want to do a private blog. Many people aren’t aware of this because it’s something they would never think of – “Why wouldn’t I want the search engines to find my site??”

But unfortunately, certain web hosting companies that offer Fantastico or a one-click WordPress install occasionally set the built in default to keep your site private. BAD! This means you are telling the search engines that you don’t want them to go through your site or put it in the search engine results.

To check this on your site, login to your Dashboard, and go to Settings –> Privacy.

It should be set to:
 “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers”

If it’s not, change it! This should immediately help you start to see more traffic. If it’s correct, good!

As I said, today’s tip may not be necessary for you, but if you have it wrong, you’ll definitely see improvements just with that one simple change.

Get better SEO by tagging your photos and videos

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In coaching my clients (and in my Social Media Content Creation Kit) I encourage taking advantage of the power of already-created content, like YouTube videos, articles, etc.

I also have many clients and readers that would much rather record a video (or create a photo montage) than sit down and write up an article for their blog – the power of video is amazing, and this is a great way to market yourself online. But there is a downside!

Videos and photos give you absolutely no SEO benefit. It’s kind of like creating a project for school, only to find out you didn’t earn any credit for it!

The reason is that search engine spiders cannot watch a video or see a photo – if there’s no text on the post, they have NO idea what the post is about. And so they have no reason to index it. Search engines are all about providing good content in their search results and in their eyes, you don’t have any content on that post.

So how do you earn SEO credit from your videos and photos?

By making sure you appropriately tag them, as well as your blog posts.

People new to blogging are often confused by tags, so here is a quick explanation – tags are simply keywords! You can tag your post, you can tag your images, you can tag your videos on YouTube and other videos sites, etc. So how do you make tags your new best friend for better SEO?

  • Take advantage of the “Post Tags” field in your WordPress blog to add keywords that will tell the search engines what the post is about
  • Make sure you have “alt tags” for all your photos. In WordPress, this is really easy to do! While you’re Inserting a photo, add some keywords or a description of the post to the “Caption” field and voila! You’ve tagged your photo and given the search engine a better idea of what the post is about (note: describing the photo itself is not very search engine helpful – do you really want the search engines to think your post is about a “business woman drinking coffee”, or something like that? No! So use keywords from your post – what the picture symbolizes for the post)
  • If you upload your videos to YouTube (or other video sites) and embed from there, then take advantage of YouTube’s tag feature. It will help for search engine friendliness on their site. But on your own site, you will also want to add a quick sentence describing what the video is about, and why someone should watch it. One - because search engines can’t watch the video for themselves. And two - because the video won’t come through in your RSS feed or in someone’s email, and you want to encourage them to come back to your site and actually watch the video.

This doesn’t mean that you have to give up video blogging since you have to write anyway. One simple sentence is enough to at least give the search engines info on what the post is about so they can index it. And there really is power in video. So just be sure to take that extra step of tagging your photos, videos and posts, and you should start to see improved SEO in no time!