Thursday, January 21, 2010

How To Super-Charge WordPress Search Engine Optimisation

By David Anttony

Wordpress out of the box provides basic management of the fundamental SEO meta information. To extend the functionality we add our own super-charged version of the All-In-One-SEO Pack. The SEO pack makes it easy to modify the page title and page meta description.

The All-In-One-SEO Pack is a great WordPress plugin that finishes off the SEO aspects for WordPress. For some unknown reason WordPress still has not got the SEO fixed out of the box.

The All-In-One-SEO Pack allows you you to change the most important page components - page title and page description. It also allows you to change the page keywords, but as we all know, search engines no longer take note of these because they have been spammed too much in the past. Google finished using the keywords for page ranking in the early 2000's.

Page Title HTML tags

This is the No1 SEO component to manipulate. Always make sure that you control the page title. The page title appears in the browser window at the very top of the screen. Search engines use this in the listings and display it in their search results.

Ideally the page title consists only of appropriate keywords and nothing else. To make the text more human readable then we often add a pipe character (

Just like with a book the page title of an HTML page is the most significant factor. Never leave this element to chance. Make sure you use keywords in the title.

If your page needs to extend to cover two or three keywords we have found that you can still get great rankings from adding multiple keywords to the title. But do remember that the closer the page title is to the keyword you want to rank for the better.

If you are a larger branded company you will probably want to add your company or brand name into the page title considering this is displayed on Google. Keep it short and simple though. Do not add your brand statement just your brand or company name.

Page Descriptions Meta Tags

This element is NOT used by search engines for ranking purposes. Nevertheless, virtually all search engines will employ this in their search results so it is important. Google does not use the description all the time but we find that it uses it about 80-90% of the time. At other times Google will use the first piece of text that it can find on the page. On Flash pages this can be an issue considering there is no content. This is one reason why you should always add at least one sentence of HTML text on a Flash based page so Google and other search engines have something meaningful to display in the search results.

By having a good description it will increase your click through rates because the text will be more engaging to people. Ensure that you use a maximum of 156 characters. If you use any more characters Google will cut short the rest. If you can keep your descriptions to--0 characters or less this is even better seeing Google sometimes adds a date to the beginning of the description which is part of the 156 characters it displays.

SEO Meta data shown on Google listing

Changing the meta data and page title

At the bottom of every page and post you will find the meta tags plugin details. Update the details appropriately. Note: If you can only use see the title for the plugin and no details, just click the title and the section will expand.

SEO Magic Webs SEO Pack

http://www.seo-magic-webs.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/seo-services-SEO-pack-settings1.jpg


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