Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Submission

WordPress is ready to embrace search engines straight out of the box. WordPress will help search engines index your site and gather the necessary information as part of its design. But, and there’s always a but, once you add a WordPress Theme and customise WordPress to your needs you will undoubtedly break some of WordPress’s search engine friendly features.

Contents

• Search Engine Optimisation
  • Validate your site
  • A Picture is worth nothing to a Search Engine
  • Write Your Content with Searchers in Mind
  • Content is King
  • Keywords, Links, and Titles
  • Links, Images and Content
  • Search engine favouritism
  • Generate incoming links
  • Good Navigation Links
  • Meta tags
• Robots.txt Optimisation
• Search Engine Site Submission
• Search Engine Submission check-list
• Top_search_engines
• Remove your site from search engines
• Optimising your web sites search engine performance

 

Search Engine Optimisation

To ensure your site is search engine friendly follow these simple rules:

Validate your site

Make sure your site’s code validates.

• That means meeting the strict standards set by the W3C Organization for CSS and XHTML.

A Picture is worth nothing to a Search Engine

A picture is worth a thousand words, wrong.

• Search engines can’t see a site. Search engines can only read a site. Fancy graphics and layout mean nothing to a search engine. Search engines are only interested in the text and the word associations within your site.

Write Your Content with Searchers in Mind

If you want to be found you have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.

• Think about the words and phrases someone would use to find your information. Use these words and phrases at least twice in your text, but don’t become monotonous.

Content is King

Search engines generally scan no more than the first third of the page, so put your main content at the top of each page.

• Items such as styles and CSS are ignored but ensure your theme keeps sidebars and footers towards the bottom of the page.

Keywords, Links, and Titles

Search engines give credit to certain words and combinations of words. Your meta tag keywords, document titles, links and content are compared. The more that match, the better your search engine rating.

• Use key words and phrases in your HTML title tag.
• Have an engaging meta description tag for each page.
• Use keywords in your URL’s whenever possible.
• Use Google Ad Words’ keyword tool [https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal/] to find the most popular keywords related to your web site.
• Use Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool [http://www.google.com/sktool/] to quantify the popularity of key phrases that will drive the most traffic to the site. These tools will help you identify the best overall phrases for your site.

Links, Images and Content

Search engines look for <alt> and <title> tags in links and images.

• Putting good descriptions and keywords in these attributes provides rich content for search engines to assimilate.

Search engine favouritism

Search engines play favouritism.

• A search engine cannot tell how good your site is, so it works on the premise that if lots of other sites link to your site then your site must be good. This would be a reasonable premise, in an ideal world. So it’s not about having a good web site, it’s about having incoming links to your site. Blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks are all built into WordPress to help with this. These facilities help you link to other people and also helps them link to you.

Generate incoming links

The ways to generate incoming links to your site include:

• Add your site’s url to your signature on forum posts on other sites.
• Submit your site to directories (see below).

Good Navigation Links

A search engine moves from page to page within your site using the sites navigation links.

• The better your sites links, the better the search engines indexing results.

Meta Tags

Are Meta tags still necessary? They used to provide important information to the browser but because of abuse and better technology some search engines no longer use the meta tag information. The biggest contributor to search engine page ranking is quality content.

Of all the Meta tags, the Keywords meta tags, is still used by some search engines to categorise and rank your web site. Those search engines compare the keywords with the sites content and give you points for having matching keywords and content.

• WordPress does not include Meta tags in the default installation. If you want Meta tags they must be added manually, through changes to the Theme template files or through WordPress Plugins.

Robots.txt Optimisation

Search Engines read a robots.txt file which resides in the top level directory of your website. This file contains information on where the search engine robots and spiders should parse your website. Specifying where search engines should look for quality content can increase the ranking of your website considerably. This is a recommendation by all the major search engines. More information about the robots.txt file and an example WordPress robots.txt file can be found in the article, How To Manage Robots.txt for WordPress.

Search Engine Site Submission

You can manually submit your site to search engines yourself for free. Plus there are many resources that will help you submit your site to search engines, though the feedback about automatic submission is, don’t do it, manual submission provides much better results.

Search Engine Submission check-list

• Do not submit to search engines until your site is online and has been validated (W3C Organization).
• Make sure your content is ready for the search engines to index.
• Do not submit your site to the same search engine more than once a month (see specific search engines rules).
• Have your web site’s address/URL ready.
• Have the title of your site ready.
• Have a description of your site ready, max 200 words.
• If possible have the search engine directory categories available.

Top Search Engines and Directories

A list contains the top search engines and directories, covering 98% of all searches, can be found in the article, Top Search Engines and Directories.

Remove your site from Search Engines

There may be times when you don’t want search engines to crawl your web site or just parts of your web site. One method outlined above is to use the robots.txt file. Other methods include using .htaccess, noindex, rel=”nofollow” and simply not linking to that part of the web site. The only method that really works (or should work) for all search engines is the .htaccess method. For a general discussion on this topic just watch this video by Matt Cutts who discusses Google’s Webmaster Tools on the subject of site removal from search engines. It’s very good.

 

Optimising your web sites search engine performance

To gain a deeper understanding of your sites visitors several tools are available, the best known being Google Analytics which tells you where your visitors come from and how they interact with your web site plus Website Optimiser which lets you optimise your sites content and increase visitor conversion rates and satisfaction based on your analysis from Google Analytics.

Reference

This article was inspired by the following articles:

• Codex: Search Engine Optimisation for WordPress
• UC Berkeley’s Guide to Search Engines
• W3 Organization’s Global Structure of an HTML Document and Meta Tags

If you have any comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to leave a message.