WordPress blogs SEO

Today there are so many blogs that if you want to let people know that you have one, you must try to optimize it. Sometimes this optimization is right in front of our eyes and small changes can make a difference. In this post i’ll give some advice to improve your wordpress blogs index position in search engines. However, this are not proved actions to improve blog indexing, but are some SEO improvements discussed in SEO world.

Permalinks

Permalink is the permanent URL of your blog pages. This is the URL that visitors will see and that other web bloggers can use to refer a post of your blog. WordPress allow the configuration of the URL format. It offers different options, some of then very ugly and not well accepted by search engines. However, you can define your own format. This way you can either have a good and simple URL and a format that the spiders (search engines bots) like and extract your keywords from it.

The format that i choose to my blog and that i recommend is the “/%category%/%postname%”. The result is a simple and friendly URL that is parsed by the spiders. This bots get the keywords in the URL using them to define your pages value. If you’ve a URL with the date of the post or with a code what the meaning of the URL?

Visit WordPress permalink page

Post and category slug

To complete the benefit of permalinks, the WordPress allows you to choose the name that appear in the URL for each post or category. With post and category slugs you can define a much friendly URL. By default, the WordPress put your post title separated with ‘-‘. Some keywords are not necessary and can be removed. This way you can define your category and post parts of the URL format defined above.

Meta Tag

Another step to improve your blog value to the spiders, is defining some meta tags. Beside the definition of the page title, one of the most important information, we must define the description, the keywords, and other tags.

Bold fields

Some SEO professionals says that we must put strong tags on the keywords that we want to highlight either to the users an to the spiders.

WordPress Slug fields and permalinks

The search engines are the primary source of visitor to a web site. This engines have some crawlers that analyse our blog frequently and check our content. However, the content is not everything. One thing that matter to the spiders (name called to the engines that analyse our site) is the web site url’s. Like i said in WordPress blogs SEO, this engines don’t like query strings with many parameters and give more importance to first keywords in url.

WordPress have some fields that must be used to provide a crawler and user friendly urls. The called post slug and category slug can be filled with url friendly names that are well parsed by the crawlers. For example, if we create a post with the title like “WordPress Slug fields and permalinks”, wordpress will transform in a postname for url “wordpress-slug-fields-and-permalinks”, this if we have our permalink well optimized. With this slug fields we can set the best keywords reducing the url size and rising the crawlers position. In this post i set my post slug to “slug-permalink”, making the url with the keywords wanted with wordpress (category), slug and permalink.

Using this fields and with a optimized permalink strcture and a good category organization we can rise our index pontuation and, who knows, get more visitors.

About

This blog pretends to be a place where can be stored some technology and life experiences that may be useful to people with the same interests. I’m an informatics engineer in Portugal and I like to search the web and share knowledge with others. Indeed, I’ve solved many problems reading other bloggers posts, so I decide to have my own blog.

To achieve more people I decided to write in English. However I’m a little rusty and I apologize for that.

I like you enjoy my posts and comment them.

My Profile:

  • Name: Bruno Amaral
  • Age: 23
  • Sex: Male
  • Occupation: Information Systems, Web development, SEO

Contributors:

  • Name: Mário Cunha
  • Age: 23
  • Sex: Male
  • Occupation: Information Systems student

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