Firas is a staff writer on Mike’s Life, and you can find out more about him here.
The majority that go with ready made themes, just have the theme installed and start blogging as if it's a plug-n-play process. The blame is not to be put on the users all the time, since most of the theme clubs have these messages spread all over their sites “A Plug-n-Play Theme” or “Upload it, and start blogging.” The problem is that most of these themes require effort in customizing them to become Search Engine friendly and therefore rank higher.
Please note that the following tips are Wordpress Tips, so that's why you may find some missing that are either for regular sites or maybe work with both.
1- Unblock Search Engines Bots:
Wordpress by default, blocks all search engine bots, so you have to set it in order for it to be visible to all bots and users. This is done through the “Privacy” section under “Settings”.
2- Check the Header Tags
Almost all ready-made themes mis-use the Header Tags. They give the Blog Title an H1 tag and the Post Title an H2 or H3 tag, where those tags should be inverted, post Title to have an H1 and Blog Title to have an H3. Another related issue is that the title of the single page should be “Post Title” or “Post Title – Blog Title” instead of “BlogTitle – Post Title”.
3- Set your permalinks to include the post title.
This point was also mentioned in my first article 11 things to do after installing Wordpress, which should be done from the “Permalinks” section under “Settings”.
4- Edit Robots.txt file
Robots.txt file is the file which defines the privileges of each bot trying to crawl your blog. You don't want Google or any other search engine to index your images, admin links, plugins files, or any back end files. So all you have to do is to edit your Robots.txt file and have the following lines in it.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /comments/
5- Pinging
We have mentioned earlier the benefits of pinging directories and search engines when having a post published, which will notify all these directories and search engines that you have published a new post so that they can send their bots to crawl it. We have also mentioned that in order not to have your blog flagged as a Ping Spammer you may use MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin which is a free plugin that will really help and optimize your pinging process.
You have to add the urls of these directories in the “Writing” section under “Settings”
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com/
6- Install Google XML sitemap Plugin
This plugin was also mentioned earlier, where it helps you in creating a proper sitemap for your blog that is Google friendly. This will increase the opportunity of crawling your blog and indexing your pages.
7- Blog Submission
Submit your blog into directories such as DMOZ and search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and so on.
8- Install “All in one SEO Pack” plugin
This plug in, so far, is the best to optimize Wordpress blogs to make them search friendly. It has several features including canonical URL’s, fine tune page navigation links, search engine optimized titles, automatic meta tag generation and so much more.
Slug is the word which is in the permalink of your articles (if you have set your permalinks to include Name in it). This plugin will help you optimize your permalinks and omit all unnecessary words such as; the, as, in, to, for, etc... making it more search engine friendly.
For example you have an article titled: How to make my blog search engine friendly. By default, Wordpress will create the following permalink.
By using this plugin and defining which words you want to omit, the permalink will look like
10- Link to other pages within your blog.
Internal Linking (sometimes called Deep Linking) is to link to different pages within your blog. For example, you can see that we have linked you to my first post within this one, this process will help crawling bots know about new pages in case they were not indexed, increase the keywords so that your blog is ranked high when searched for, and it also helps in passing on Google PageRank to internal pages.
11- Update your blog frequently
Throughout the first couple of months of your blog's life, Google and other search engines, focus on how frequently your content is updated in order to schedule and control their bot’s visits to your blog. So if a while passes without having updated your blog, search engines will be giving you lower priority, lower SERPs and lower a rank as well.
12- Check for Valid XHTML
After making your changes made to the theme you are going to use, you have to check if your XHTML code is valid or not. Some minor errors are acceptable but there are some other errors that may affect how the search engine bots are going to read your content. Some errors turn the content to unreadable content for search engines, so its best to be careful when it comes down to this.
12- Use Thesis Theme for Wordpress
Thesis theme is the most search engine friendly theme on the web. It’s customizable and focuses on the back-end functionality so it gives the user the best results. Apart from that, Thesis has a separate menu in the admin panel where you can customize and control how your blog looks. Personally I’m in live with it and use it on Steitblog.
As well as being a staff writer on Mike’s Life, you find Firas at his own blog Steitblog and on Twitter @steityeh
Disclosure: The link to Thesis is an affiliate link, so Firas will earn a small commission if you choose to purchase through that link.
Some other good ones:
1/ How many posts a week should I do?
3/ How to create and use a Pull-together list
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