How to Make Your WordPress Blog SE-Friendly
People prefer WordPress because the default installation of it is already generally search engine friendly. You can add additional optimizations that can improve your website quality.
Keywords and Post Titles in the Permalink or Link Structure
The default installation of WordPress uses URLs like www.mywebsite.com/?id=1234 to point to your individual blog articles. This works fine, but you can add few benefits if you change the link structure to: www.mywebsite.com/category/title-of-post like:
1) Having in the link the title of the post, will be a benefit because the words that you use for your categories and titles automatically become keywords that the search engines can index every time someone links to you.
Remember that Google takes into account the words given in the anchor text to determine if your page is relevant for any given search engine query. This may not be a huge benefit but it matter. Imagine you have a link referred in a site and an user will decide if it worth to continue reading.
2) Another advantage of having friendly URLs is that you may change with another blogging tool and having your URLs in the form of www.mywebsite.com/?p=1234, how will you maintain such a script-specific URL? What happens if the new software assign another number to your blog entries when you import your existing blog database?
Changing URLs has enormous search engine ramifications. Imagine that all the links from external sites that currently point to those pages will be instantly broken, and along with it, the search engine will penalize your website. It is better to pre-empt the problem by configuring WordPress to use page titles as the permalinks.
How to Put Your Post Titles into Your URLs in WordPress
WordPress makes it easy for you to change your URLs. Follow the steps:
- Log into your WordPress blog.
- Click on the “Options” menu.
- Click “Permalinks“.
- Before you change anything, make sure that you don’t have a category that conflicts with one of WordPress scripts or directory names. For example, check to see that you don’t have a category by the name of wp-admin. If you do, you should change your category names first before proceeding.
- Scroll down to the “Common options” section and select “Custom, specify below“. In the box below, type “/%category%/%postname%/” without the opening and closing inverted commas (quotes). Click “Update Permalink Structure“.
- You will see a message “Permalink structure updated“.
- You can now view your blog and check the individual post pages to see your new site structure.
Post Titles in the TITLE Tag
Also if you want to create a search engine friendly website make sure that your HTML title tags contain relevant text. In WordPress the title tags are created automatically from your post titles.
How to Modify the Default Template to Place Post Titles First
- Log into your WordPress account and click “Presentation“.
- Click the “Theme Editor” link.
- Look at the right hand side of your browser window to locate the “Header” link, and click on it.
- The browser should now display “Editing header.php“. Somewhere in the box below this, locate the line that says
<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> ยป Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>
Change it to the following:
<title><?php wp_title(); ?></title>
If you want to have the name of your blog at the end in the title, change it to the following instead:
<title><?php wp_title(); ?> - <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
- Click the “Update File” button when you are through. You should receive the message “File edited successfully“.
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