Powerful SEO for Wordpress blogs

I going to show you in this post

• on-page SEO (what you need to include in a post for it to rank good in Google)
• how to apply it to WordPress
• extra tips and observations

What is SEO do you know?

SEO stands for search engine optimization  and it basically means that you are optimizing the visibility of your page for the search engines. I will skip the mumbo jumbo about the search engine spiders and other things that you don’t really need to worry about too much.
Let me give you some tips about it.

Start with a keyword

Optimizing means that you will make your page just about perfect to be found for a keyword. For best results you should always be focusing on writing posts for a single specific keyword.

A single keyword can be made of several words, so some examples would be: “YouTube traffic generation”, “free Twitter tools”, “cheap vacation rentals Florida”, etc.

Do some keyword research and choose which one you want your post to rank for.

Parts of the page that matter

This is what you will focus on:

• URL
• Title
• Keywords
• Description
• Page content
• Images
• Links

SEO for URL

Your URL is the address of your page.

The URL of our example page would be http://yourblog.com/social-media-icons/

How do you create a URL?

The main thing is to get rid of the default WordPress URL which is something like http://yourblog.com/?p=123. You want your URLs to be simple, pretty and at the same time tell people what will they read about, if they click it.

To change this go to your WP dashboard > Settings >Permalinks. The image below shows my settings. I prefer having post name without my blog name attached to it. So to get the simple but optimized URL like the ones I have, just set your permalinks settings like in the image:

After you set this up let’s go to the post editor. When you are writing a post this is one of the things that can happen:

If you don’t put a title and save a draft, WordPress will automatically create an URL. In this case it assigned the number. Because there is no title.

If you put a title, your title will become a part of the URL. So if you title the post “Social media icons”, your URL will look like in the example - http://yourblog.com/social-media-icons/.

So while you are optimizing for the search engines, do some human optimizing as well. In this case, in the title field, I would put something like “Social media icons | 30 free icon packs you must have”.

If you put all that in the title, it will become your URL. You don’t want all that in the URL.
You should always aim to have only your keywords in the URL.
If there are more words included, you should aim for the keyword to be at the beginning of the URL.
Always delete “stop words” from your URL (in, at, from, to…)

So to fix this, click the edit button (on the right of the URL) and edit it. Just leave “social-media-icons” and delete the rest.
URLs can not contain spaces and the best way to create them are dashes separating the words.

You can use the underscores as well, or put all the words together. I never do, no matter how simple the words are.
SEO for the title

I started to talk about titles above, how to make them SEO but written for humans as well.

The main thing is to include your specific keyword “social media icons” in the title. Put it at the beginning or as close to the beginning as you can. The second or third place is the best, the fifth is the farthest you should go.

One more reason why you need to pay attention to your titles is that your title is the link to your page in the Search engine results.

I have pointed with the arrow to the second title to stress how good it looks for humans, compared to the first one. It might get the click easier.

In this second case I would have written the title like “Social Media Icons | The best freebies all in one place”. You get it?

The best length for titles is 64 characters. Some say 70 is the max, some say 80 characters is the max. Try to keep it up to 70 and you will be on the safe side.

SEO for keywords

Meta keywords is a spot where you are supposed to write down the keyword you are targeting your page for. You should list no more than 5 keywords.

In our case, you could write only “social media icons”. But you could also write it like “social media icons, vector icons, free icons”. The main thing is to include your specific keyword. If you include additional ones, make sure they are describing what’s on the page.

The point of this is telling the search engine what your page is about.

SEO for description

Meta description is a place where you will describe the page. Think of it as an ad for your page. People coming to your blog won’t see it on the blog itself. But they will see it in search engine results and that is where you need to “sell your page” good.

Again, the main thing is to include your specific keyword in the description. Don’t just copy your title in the description of the page.


Include the keyword once so you don’t stuff your description with keywords. Great thing to do, when it comes to the description is write one that will include the specific keyword, a related keyword or a synonym, tell people what the page is about and what’s in it for them.
A great description for a travel page, i.e. would be “Rome, Italy, can be a very expensive place. If you are looking for cheap Rome hotels here are some great ones.”
You should keep your description up to 150 characters.

SEO in WordPress

It is very easy to do this in WordPress cause you can use a plugin that will show you the fields you need to fill in. This blog ran on Thesis theme (at the time of the writing) so I am used the Thesis SEO options:

For those who are not using Thesis, the best option is All in one SEO pack plugin. Here is how it looks for those who are using it:

SEO for page content

Page content is the post itself.

Start your post with your specific keyword, in different words put your specific keyword in the first sentence. Try to include it in the first 90 characters (space counts as a character as well).

Of course, you will mention the specific keyword in the post again, that is what natural writing requires, but never stuff your post with keywords.

Some keywords you want to rank for sound weird, because often people will type them in Google like that. For example “buy laptops London”.

You can’t write like that and not sound funny. But you can write “Are you searching for a place to buy laptops in London?” In this case “in” is the stop word and Google will, most likely, disregard it. So you can still target the words that are weird but have great numbers.

SEO for images

Images can be optimized as well. What you need to optimize in this case areALT tags.

Here is how it looks in the code:

<img title=”title-of-the-image”

src=”img URL” alt=”keyword”

width=”300″ height=”300″>

Put your specific keyword in the ALT tag. This is how I was first found for the first site I have ever built. By Google Image Search.
Of course, it would be the best if the image is actually the keyword If the keyword is “puppy training” the best image to use is – puppy training.

How to add ALT tags in WordPress?