ON PAGE SEO CHECKLIST for WORDPRESS sites

[Adam Roy]

This is just a little thing I put together because I've been seeing a lot of questions in here about on page optimization and similar questions.

This is via Wordpress.

Please excuse the messy circles.

Here are the 4 main plugins I install for SEO purposes and why.

All In One SEO--Makes it easy to add meta title, meta description, and meta keyword tags to your website, and the pages/posts within.

Category Posts Plugin--Allows me to display a particular category and it's posts to make site navigation easier for users, and robots via a sidebar widget. This is much more effective than the old "recent posts" widget.

Pretty Links--Easily cloaks unlimited links with attractive redirects. Ex. www.yourdomain/buythis. Also adds no follow to these links.

SEO Smart Links--Creates internal linking within your website by converting selected keywords, into html anchor text links to related pages of your site. Very easy to use and very effective. Internal linking on autopilot basically. You can set external links as well.

So those are my 4 main SEO flavored plugins.

When I'm creating websites, I make sure I have my main keyword, and my LSI's in each of the following ways on my websites.

1. Title Tags-Website title and page/post titles via "All in One SEO" plugin.
2. Description Tags-Description of website via "All in One SEO" plugin.
3. Keyword Tags-Keywords of website/pages/posts via "All in One SEO" plugin.
4. h1 tag-Not found in Wordpress source code.
5. h2 tags-Category Titles in sidebar
6. h3 tags-Post titles on content
7. Alt tags-Alternate image text on images.
8. html tags-Via internal/nofollow external linking with anchor text
9. Div tags-Not sure of the importance but I do it anyways. Via captions on images.
10. Conservatively use keywords in bold, and italic format.
11. Always accompany keywords, with LSI keywords close by.

BTW **LSI's are keywords related to your main keyword according to the search engines. Use "related keywords" via google keyword tool for LSI's.

I personally try to keep a ratio of 5 LSI's per 1 main keyword within the content of posts/pages.

Here's a quick example of the location of these tags to make sure you have them.

Again, please excuse the bad penmanship.

Hope this helps a bit.

[link-master]

Hi ,

I really appreciate what You did, but this topic is described in the internet over and over again on millions of pages.

You might say "ok , but there are still some folks in the net that do not know how to optimize their wordpress".

Still that is unnecessary for me to describe it once again.

[TargetedTrafficSolutions]

The one major thing missing is for nearly every single wordpress theme, to truly optimize your code you must edit the PHP scripts to ensure the right tags show up in the right place, etc.

Perfect example: Ithemes make pretty decent looking themes, they claim to be seo ready or whatever they label it as...

The code is screwed 90% of the time, I have done tons of testing with their themes and the site that I rework the php will rank higher, faster and for longer every single time.

Regardless what you have posted above is great for beginners just starting out.

[jasonmorgan]

is it 4:20?

[Chucky]

Originally Posted by TargetedTrafficSolutions

The code is screwed 90% of the time, I have done tons of testing with their themes and the site that I rework the php will rank higher, faster and for longer every single time.

This is where paid themes like 'Thesis' come to the rescue
Brandford magazine also used to be a great free theme. I assume it's good on SEO because I have 2 websites built on this theme that have the #1 position. Unfortunately, I think it's not FREE any more. That's sad.

Also, one thing about SEO smart links plugin. I activated this plugin on one of my sites and my rank came down by a few spots. Then I deactivated it and I regained my position. Not sure if it was a complete coincident or not

[ericshef]

Very nice post thanks for the tips

[Adam Roy]

Do those paid themes have proper <h1> tags?

[TargetedTrafficSolutions]

Originally Posted by friend

Do those paid themes have proper <h1> tags?

That's one of the things that often needs to be recoded with the PHP...

[nettech]

I do like your sig though, its very inspiring and motivating! :-)

[Stratplayer1]

Hello are you not aware that there is a plugin for everything? Easy upload it set it forget it.

No Problem Cheers Phil