How To On-Site SEO Optimize Your Wordpress Site In Less Than 10 Minutes

So before I begin, I just want to share a little background info about myself. I started internet marketing about a year ago in November. Like most IMers, I tried many methods to make money online. For the most part, I would try something for a little while, then ditch it and move on to the next idea. Interestingly enough, I started with SEO and never gave that up. It was also the one thing that had made me virtually all my income online, so much so that I managed to hit 5 figures in a relatively short amount of time.

So basically, what I want to share here is how I optimize my Wordpress websites and my SEO client Wordpress sites.

Some people might say this is too "basic" but I don't think it's necessary to over-complicate things. I have used this exact method to rank countless sites, and it's worked well for me. So I am here to share it.

So let me get right to it.

The purpose of onsite SEO optimization basically sums up to 3 things:

1) Reducing the risk of Panda by deindexing thin content and duplicate content

2) Reducing the risk of Penguin by NOT over optimizing your keywords.

3) Structuring and wording your pages so that Google reads it the way YOU want it to be read.

Everything that you do with regards to on-site optimization should lead back to 3 of these things. Understand this and it will never be too "complicated".

So how do you do all this quickly?

With Wordpress, it's easy - there are a lot of plugins available that help you do this quickly, but I really like Yoast SEO. They constantly update the plugin and it's free. Also, for the purposes of this guide, I will be referencing Yoast - but you should be able to find the equivalent setting on most good SEO plugins.

So first, let's deal with the de-indexation of duplicate content and thin content. This is what usually kills most newbie sites, usually because they don't know that their site is setup so Google indexes everything on their site as a separate page. There are exceptions to this case, but for most sites out there, your tag pages, attachment pages, category pages and media pages are pages you shouldn't be indexing.

Here's a simple question to ask yourself to determine if a page should be indexed or not, "Does this page offer value to my readers and do I want this page to be ranked in Google?" If the answer is no, then it's thin content and should be deindexed.

Actual settings to get rid of thin and duplicate content quickly in Yoast SEO plugin:

1) Under Titles & Metas

• Under General > Check Noindex Subpages of Archives
• Under General > Check Hide RSD Links, WLW Manifest Links, Shortlink for Posts, RSS Links
• Under Post Types > Check "noindex, follow" for Media
• Under Taxonomies > Check "noindex, follow" for Categories, Tags, Format
• Under Other > Check "noindex, follow" for Author Archives
• Under Other > Check "noindex, follow" for Date Archives

These settings alone will help you eliminate the bulk of your thin content. But moving on...

2) Under Permalinks

• Check "Redirect attachment URL's to parent post URL"
• Check "Remove the ?replytocom variables"
• Select "Force HTTP" under "Force Transport"

3) Additional Settings

If you have any posts or pages that are duplicate content or thin content (squeeze pages, marketing pages, local pages). You can either deindex the page under the "Advanced" tab (you must have unchecked the "Hide Advanced" tab in the Yoast Dashboard settings) on the page/post itself or use the canonical redirect setting to redirect link juice to a more relevant page.

Note that there is usually always some thin content on very big sites. You should only be very concerned if there is a high ratio of thin content to high quality content. So if 50% or even 20% of your pages are thin content pages, you will want to take a look and try to reduce it to at most 5%.

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Ok, that covers removing duplicate and thin content for the most part - let's move on to avoiding onsite Penguin.

This is a fairly short section. Basically, you don't want to add your keywords everywhere. For example, if you are targeting basketball training, and your domain name is "basketballtraining.com", you don't want your page URL to be "http://basketballtraining.com/basketball-training", along with the title "Basketball Training", have it mentioned in the meta description, and then have it stuffed in your content multiple times. I have ranked sites using many combinations, but generally this is how I run it:

1) Target keyword once in the URL
2) Once in the Title
3) Once in the Meta Description

It doesn't have to be an exact match either, you can do "Basketball Newbie Training" in the title or meta. The key thing to remember here is not to sacrifice the quality of your content for the sake of "optimization". Google is smart enough now that they will generally know what your site is about as long as you follow the rules in the next section.

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Now this section will show you how to set your site up in a way that Google reads it the way you want it to. With regards to structuring a page around a specific keyword, it's already pretty much covered in the previous section. You don't need to worry about keyword density, H1 tags and all that other stuff. My tests have shown that they don't really help that much, if any at all. What most people mess up or don't how to utilize is what I term "URL hierarchy". What this basically means is that you want to have your sub-topic pages under an overall topic page. I know it sounds obvious, but most people usually have their page or post URL tied right next to their domain.

For example, if I want to create 5 pages about basketball drills, then I would have my URLs be under "http://basketballtraining.com/drills" and the page about 3 pointer drills will turn out to be "http://basketballtraining.com/drills/3pointer-drill". Most people would just have "http://basketballtraining.com/3pointer-drill". The benefit of doing this is that it paints a story to Google that every page under that URL category is about basketball drills, and it lets you spread link juice easily in the long run. However, I won't really get into that in this post.

The other thing you want to setup is your sitemap. Yoast SEO comes in with an inbuilt sitemap function, but I like to use Google XML Sitemaps.

Because this guide is about basic optimization, I won't get too much into the different functions of a sitemap, but the way you want to use this is basically make sure that you only have indexed pages in the sitemap. So if you have a post that you choose to deindex, you want to include that post in the "exclude post" section.

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Alright guys, so this basically sums up the basic Wordpress SEO on-site optimization guide. It may take you more than 10 minutes the first time, but trust me, once you get the hang of it, you can do it under 10 minutes unless you have a lot of pages.

If you guys like this guide or have any questions, simply reply and let me know. If you don't and want to say something, please do so as well but keep things civil and constructive.

Best
- Dan