The ultimate guide to wordpress SEO

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I've kept myself in those high ranking wordpress blogs for quite few months and have outlined some of the WordPress SEO tactics learned from them.

Some of these blogs are:
Quick Sprout
Viral Marketing : ViperChill
https://yoast.com
Niche Pursuits | Find Business Ideas, Niche Websites, and Much More!
The Smart Passive Income Blog -- Smart Ways to Live a Passive Income Lifestyle On the Internet with SmartPassiveIncome.com
SEO Training and Link Building Strategies - Backlinko
And more...

If you are in internet marketing or SEO you may probably know these blogs. They are both ranking high for their specific niches. High quality and valuable content is one of the reasons but not the only one. They are actually using combined SEO strategies that you know as link building, social signal, etc and they are sure to use some tactics on their wordpress blog structure and codes to get a better SEO performance.

Those tactics are what I am going to share with you today. You can find the full article from below link but I will write the key messages in this thread as well if you just need some brief.
Read the full article here: Definitive Guide to WordPress SEO
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I'll cover following topics:
  • 1 Proper Permalinks
  • 2 Optimize the Title
  • 3 Leverage Pinbacks for more backlinks
  • 4 Related Posts
  • 5 Internal Linking
  • 6 WWW or non-WWW
  • 7 XML Sitemaps
  • 8 NonIndex Archive, Category, Author, Pagination or Tag Pages
  • 9 NonFollow "Read More" Link
  • 10 TURN OFF Comment Pagination
  • 11 Display Breadcrumbs
  • 12 Use Pages instead of posts for important content
  • 13 Implement Microdata(rich snippets)
  • 14 Optimize your 404 Page
  • 15 Keep your code Clean

1 Proper Permalinks
Permalinks are simply the URL's for your posts. A great permalinks should tell someone what your page is about, and the words in the URL will also be highlighted in search engine results if your post is relevant to the search query.

I recommend 2 formats:
/%category%/%postname%
%postname%

2 Optimize the Title
The title is the content of your page's title tag. It has long been thought of as a most important on-site factor for ranking better in search engines.
By default, post titles would display as "Post Title> Blog Name". As your homepage is probably already ranking for your site name, you're not helping yourself by putting your site name at the start of post titles. You don't need to rank for it more than once, so we'd like to remove the blog name and only display "Post Title".
To change your title format, you can install wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin.

3 Turn on Pinbacks
This is really one simple way to get more links to your site (which increase search engine rankings). If you are regularly supporting a site, it's very likely that they're going to return the favour. Especially if they're in the same industry. Don't worry about spammed pinbacks as you can take control of them just like comments.

4 Related Posts
There are several reasons why it is beneficial to have related posts on your site. You would actually be impressed to find a successful blog that isn't using it.
You have two options: either use an existing, established plugin that you can easily find one on the web YARPP for example, or get your hands dirty with tweaking your themes.

5 Internal Linking
Just like external links pointing to your pages gives it authority, so too do links that point from pages on your website to other pages on your website. This means that you should be pointing links from other pages, blog posts, and most important from your homepage to your target pages to signal to Google that these pages are important.
There are wordpress plugins like Smart SEO Links that can handle this for you.

6 WWW or non-WWW
Actually I think both format are ok. You just need to make sure you have to do a 301 from one to another. For example, if you prefer a URL without www, then you should do a 301 on the url with www to make it redirect to the url without www

7 XML Sitemaps
To make it easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently, you should use sitemaps.
You can create a XML sitemap with WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin or Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

8 NonIndex Archive, Category, Author, Pagination or Tag Pages
On smallseotips.com, I only index category archive page, but most wordpress sites are also indexing date, tag or author based archives. These might be great for usability, but for search engines, they're really just lots of same pages with too many links. The search engines don't need to crawl through all of them to find your blog posts. For that reason, you should Index one of those archive pages but add NonIndex option to the others.
To do this you can also install WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.

9 NonFollow "Read More" Link
If you show full posts on your homepage then you don't need to worry about this. If, however, you just show a snippet of content, then it's likely you also have a "read more" or "continue.." link in there somewhere. As your post title already links to the page with perfect anchor text, there's no need to give juice to the read more link which simply takes people to the same page.

10 TURN OFF Comment Pagination
Unless you receive hundreds of comments per post (or you're really, really picky about page speed), there really is no need to have paginated comments on your site.

11 Display Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb navigation should be regarded as an extra feature and shouldn't replace effective primary navigation menus. It's suggested to use breadcrumbs in your blogs to improve the findability of your websites.
There are a lots of plugins can help you make this, such as Yoast Breadcrumbs, Breadcrumbs NavXT, etc.

12 Use Pages instead of posts for important content

13 Implement Microdata(rich snippets)
Schema.org is a universal metadata markup introduced in 2011 by the major search engines. It's used to communicate to them the intended type of content on your website. There are still many people not taking full advantage of this!

14 Optimize your 404 Page
If you are using wordpress, then you probably have a 404.php file in your theme directory. But always the 404 page is ugly with the default 404 template for most of the wordpress themes.
A better idea is to redirect all 404 errors to homepage or even a landing page.

15 Keep your code Clean
There are a lot of codes output in your wordpress header by wp_head and many of them can be removed.
HTML Code:
<link title="RSD" href="http://example.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" />
<link href="http://example.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.8.1" />
If you want to keep your blog clean and load faster, then you really need to remove them.

END OF GUIDE​

Again, above are the key concepts on how you can improve the ranking of your wordpress blogs by implementing these tactics.

You can read the full article here:Definitive Guide to WordPress SEO
#guide #seo #ultimate #wordpress #wordpress seo

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