subject: Proper Seo For Wordpress [print this page] So, you've set up a blog or website using WordPress (almost always an excellent choice) and now you want to get some ranking on a few popular keyword terms in the search engines to jumpstart that organic traffic. When doing on-site SEO, it can be difficult to strike the right balance; remember: on-site optimization is important, but don't go nuts with it. You always, always want your website to be both attractive and readable for your human visitors.
If you go too crazy with SEO, trying to wedge keywords unnaturally into sentences where they don't belong, and generally compromise the quality of your site so it will "look good" to the spiders and bots, you will almost certainly be making a big mistake. In the end, your site must always provide a pleasant, informative experience to the visitors that you do get, or all the work you do to get traffic will be useless; people will hit your site and bounce like a SuperBall. And then what's the point of all your work?
Luckily, there are a wide range of tools to make it easier to improve the optimization on your website. As a result of the popularity of WordPress, an entire industry is producing add-on functionality in specialized themes and plugins (e.g. this SEOPressor review) to streamline a tested SEO procedure on sites built with the platform. You will find all sorts of tools, from free plugins like HeadSpace2, All-in-One SEO, and Google Image Sitemaps to premium plugins like SEOPressor or SEO Booster Pro.
Generally, the following tasks are known to increase your optimization without risking pages that look too "out-of-whack" to your human visitors. The important thing is to apply them consistently across your site. Whenever you start on a page or post that you want to rank high in the search engines, either because it is a sales/squeeze or show page or just to try to draw in more visitors in general, you should select a SINGLE keyword phrase relevant to your site to optimize the page for. Don't try to optimize for more than 1, other than to add some related keyword phrases as described later. The details of how to select the right keywords are the subject of a whole article (or more), so we won't go into them here.
Once you have chosen your keyword, do the following:
Put the keyword in the page TITLE, that is, in the HTML title tags, preferably at the beginning
Have the keyword appear in an H1 and H2 tag on the page, and an H3 tag if reasonable
Put the keyword in the "alt" attribute and the "title" attribute on the image tag
Put the keyword in the first and last sentences, and in the remaining content to about 2-3% keyword density
Add an image, larger than 200 pixels in size and smaller than 1000, with the keyword in the name of the image file
Put a few related keywords, called LSI (latent semantic index) keywords, in the content
Put the keyword in the "keywords" and "description" meta tags in the header
Clearly, all of these things can be done without spoiling or even harming the reading experience for your visitors. Note: LSI keywords are just words that are reasonably related to the core keyword. For instance, if you were optimizing for "hunting gear", words like "shotgun" or "camouflage" or "ammunition" would be LSI keywords. Their presence reinforces to the search engines that the page content is indeed relevant to the main keyword "hunting gear."
Remembering to do all these tasks whenever you are trying to optimize a page for the search engines can be a chore. A lot of them can be automated by use of the correct themes and plugins in WordPress, giving you less to remember. The very best SEO plugins, like SEOPressor, can track what you're doing at every step and even make suggestions to help you do a better job. Use a tool like that to enforce a correct process, and soon it will become like second nature to do it. Your traffic numbers will thank you!
