While wordpress is one of my favorite CMS platforms, out of the box it isn’t search engine optimized. Combine this with people who aren’t SEO aware, and publish a blog, and you almost always end up with an implementation that’s sub-optimal. Here are some tips to help you get things on track and moving in the right direction.
First off you are going to need Stephan Spencer’s SEO Title Plugin. I may totally hassle him suggest improvements at every conference, but it’s a kick ass plugin every wordpress install should have. What does it do … it allows you to isolate the post title from the page title, we’ll get into why that’s important later.
Next is one of my big wordpress gripes. Out of the box wordpress puts the blog title in an H1 tag on every page. While this makes sense on the homepage, on individual posts, it’s just bad information architecture, and shows a complete lack of understanding of SEO . The best thing to do is to put the post title in an H1 tag.
Ok enough with the tech stuff lets get down to business and an example. If you follow Rae or I on twitter you know we read celeb news. So for this example I’m going to use the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy as my topic. By default this is pretty close to what you would start with:
Page Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant
Post Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant
Page Slug: jamie-lynn-spears-is-pregnant
However I’d argue that you could do better, lets get the easy one first the page slug. Take out the stop word “is”. You could make an argument to take out “spears” as well but I think people will use it as a search term so I’d say keep it. I know some people might also search for something like [jamie lynn spears baby] so let’s add that in as a keyword to the slug as well. So we end up with this:
Page Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant
Post Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant
Page Slug: jamie-lynn-spears-baby-pregnant
Next lets look at the post title. Again we’ll start by pulling out the stop word “is”. In the celeb trade the vernacular currently favored for pregnant is “baby bump”. So lets change the title to “Jamie Lynn Spears Baby Bump”. I also know that if you don’t have tween in the house who happens to watch Zoey 101 you may not know who Jamie Lynn is, but chances are you do know her sister Britney. So the terms “Britney” and “Sister” add context to the story, so lets add them, giving us “Britney Spears Sister Jamie Lynn Spears Baby Bump”. There’s one two many “spears” in there so lets drop one, giving us “Britney Spears Sister Jamie Lynn Baby Bump”. Since people are going to get the post title in their RSS we want to spice it up, so lets add in that she is 16 years old, giving us “Britney Spears 16 Year Old Sister Jamie Lynn Baby Bump”. Close we just need to make it english. Now if this was a rumor we would probably go with “Does Britney Spears 16 Year Old Sister Jamie Lynn Have a Baby Bump” however at the time it was a pretty solid story so I would have went with “Britney Spears 16 Year Old Sister Jamie Lynn Has a Baby Bump”. Ok so that gives us:
Page Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant
Post Title: Britney Spears 16 Year Old Sister Jamie Lynn Has a Baby Bump
Page Slug: jamie-lynn-spears-baby-pregnant
Lastly lets look at the title. IMHO the most important factor for your site is domain trust and authority, however page titles are the most important on page factor, so it’s the one you really need to get it right. The phrases that are going to be most searched are “jamie lynn spears pregnant” and “jamie lynn spears baby”. So we want to try and get those words into our title, and we want it to be as natural language like as possible, not looking spammy or keyword stuffed. So I’d go with this “Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant and Having a Baby”. I don’t know how she could be pregnant and not be having a baby, but that’s not the point, we got all of our keywords in the title without looking too stupid. Lets look back at where we started:
Page Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant
Post Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant
Page Slug: jamie-lynn-spears-is-pregnant
and here’s where we ended:
Page Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant and Having a Baby
Post Title: Britney Spears 16 Year Old Sister Jamie Lynn Has a Baby Bump
Page Slug: jamie-lynn-spears-baby-pregnant
A subtle point to notice, “baby” and “pregnant” are reversed in proximity in relation to jamie lynn spears in the title and slug, that was intentional. Experienced SEO’s do this kind of thing naturally within a matter of a minute or so, if you are less experienced it will take you longer. Additionally if you aren’t familiar with the topic you won’t be clued into terms like “baby bump” and you may have to go out and do some KW research to make sure you optimize for as many combinations as possible. For example you could also use the post and page title to target singular and plurals like “Buying a Cheap Airline Ticket” and “Buy Cheap Airline Tickets”. Again look for the term that has the most volume or the least competition and use that as your post title.
So hopefully this helped give you some suggestions on how to get the most out of your wordpress install.
Related posts:
- Analogies in Blog Titles are Like Dirty Underwear As I cruis
- Two Wordpress Plugins That Need to be Developed After my S
- Wordpress – Clean Up Your Backend There are
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What about using different titles etc when submitting articles to social media sites. That would be a nice addition to this article
Loved this post. I’m going to use it on a client ASAP. Thank you!
Awesome stuff man. Thanks!
Looks like you put in “post title” where “page title” needs to be in the examples.
You have this
Post Title:
Post Title:
Page Slug:
Rather than this
Page Title:
Post Title:
Page Slug:
Not to hard to figure out, but it may confuse some people.
@dave got it thanks for the heads up
@Reese will you be tipping Michael for his teachings? lol
Thanks for this detailed breakdown, Michael. I’m just now getting a Wordpress blog put together. And learning to use the SEO plugins can get frustrating. Plus, no one really details what search engines look for nor what would be a “better phrase” to use for maximum optimization! (You’ll have to pardon me for my redundancies). (lol) Thanks again for this post. I’ve stumbled it!
Although this topic – SEO for wordpress – is already covered more than extensively on thousands of blogs, it is nice to see authors who can still bring some value to the topic. Great post Michael. I would however suggest to your readers the all in one SEO plugin which is doing everything you said plus unique description for each blog entry.
Will this plug in work with all in one?
Hey… loved the tips and techniques. Thanks.
I saw a recommendation for the all in one plugin, but I like the Headspace plugin… ever use it? See overview tutorial at:
http://webhelpermagazine.com/2007/10/using-headspace-wordpress-plugin-for-seo/
- Scott
@SpostareDuro If you have the All in One SEO Pack you don’t need the Plugin that Greywolf suggests as it does the same thing.
How about “Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant with a Baby” for the title? It replaces “and having” with “with” and seems a little more English-like. Though it’s not like you can be pregnant with a crocodile or something like that. I just think it’s a tiny bit denser.
@lazyman good question the answer is because more people are going go to google and type “jamie lynn spears having a baby” and less people will type things like “jamie lynn spears with a baby”.
Great post, Michael. I use the All in One SEO Pack instead (as others have mentioned) but the benefit of the features is the same. I apparently need to explore the slugs more, though…
@Ken Savage yes, was thinking of sending him some pizza
Clean archives is quite useful too at http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/projects/clean-archives/
But most of my wordpress blogs are still not seo’d as I have way too many DVDs to watch.
I do think that something more should be done with Wordpress H1 tags and the displaying of the website name. (test post ok with firefox, must be limited to IE7, ok to prune after verifying Michael)
I do think that something more should be done with Wordpress H1 tags and the displaying of the website name. (test post ok with IE7 without javascript, must be limited to IE7 and js issue, ok to prune after verifying Michael)
A very interesting read, Michael.
Just subscribed to your feed and look forward to more tips.
Michael,
I am concerned about your unnatural fixation with optimizing Jamie Lynn Spears and her unborn child. Your family has asked that I swing by and chat with you. I’ll be by in about 10 minutes..and don’t worry, anything we discuss will be confidential.
Very good points. A part of publishing … regardless of the medium … that is very often overlooked – though everyone gives lip-service to: Know Your Audience! And knowing HOW they SAY and READ is a huge part of this. Thanks for flippin’ the switch and lighting up this point! We all need a ‘flipped switch’ action – every now and again!
Great Post!
i love these tips. i’ve customized my titles and slugs in WP for SEO but i like the suggestions of mixing up the keywords to catch all of the various combinations in all 3 places. i’ll be tweaking my blog soon!
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