How I SEO my WordPress Blog – A Beginners Guide: Part 2
How I SEO my WordPress Blog – A Beginners Guide: Wordpress
Read Part 1 of How I SEO my WordPress Blog – A Beginners Guide right here. Part 1 explores what to do with your domain and how to configure it correctly for your SEO needs. Read it first!
Wordpress Theme
I think, and I’m sure a lot of people will agree, that a Wordpress theme is hugely important to a blog. The theme governs how the visitors will interact and find content. Here is what I believe should be factors to consider when choosing a theme…
- First impression: If you are a visitor what conclusion would you come to if you had a few seconds to see the site? If you don’t like it then there’s little chance of others liking it.
- As Maddox once said, “Nobody cares about your stupid rotating icons and fading links…when I go to a website, I WANT TO READ THE CONTENT”. Some of the best sites are very very simple; think Google!
- Try different themes. They’re so easy to install that you can easily try theme after theme until you find one to suit you. It’s even better if you can find specifically created SEO ones. Try these SEO Wordpress Themes.
- Your theme can often be an extension of your chosen discussion area so make sure that the theme can represent what you are talking about. Think of colour schemes, fonts and page layout.
- How customisable is the theme? Do you have an area to play with on the front page (as I do with mine). Is it 2,3 or columned? Does this help or hinder your site structure?
- Most themes are distributed under the GPL License. This means you are free to modify any of the themes until you’re happy with it. By all means find a nice theme that you can work with & then edit the code to suit your own needs and wants. You can even ensure more SEO friendly pages.
The theme I use here is similar to Facebook in terms of colours and general layout as you’ve already noticed. I didn’t choose my theme because of SEO purposes. I wanted usability and ease of use to take precedence. I knew if I had a good theme as a base I could build SEO factors around it.
Static Pages
Static pages are those that do not have their contents regularly updated. You should use them to help show how your site operates or put across information more specific to you the author or the actual site itself.
I have to say, I’m a huge fan of About pages. I think they’re really useful in terms of finding out why a website is online and how much authority the author has. They’re not great for SEO purposes, they don’t change and they’re usually short but from a visitors perspective they’re great. If you want to know a bit more about the impact an about us page might have read Your About Us Page Is Not Just A Placeholder by Terri Wells over on SEO Chat.
A static page I feel should always be included is a contact page. Ideally you’d want a simple web form that sends an email to your own inbox as well as having an email address visible. Unfortunately a web form usually results in a horrendous amount of spam but there are Wordpress themes out there that are very customisable. I’d recommend cforms – lots of nice features and very flexible. If you can use an email address separate to your normal account then that’s better. You can use this separate email for all aspects of your website.
Other static pages are largely down to you and the specific content or area you intend to cover. Try and make sure that they are clearly indistinguishable from actual blog posts. The theme I use puts my static pages at the very top and my blog archive and subjects on the right.
Social Networking & Social Bookmarking
Much like SEO itself I was very far behind when coming to realise what social bookmarking was. However they can be used by a website author to generate a healthy amount of inbound traffic. They can also be proof of success when it comes to your content. The higher the quality of your posts the more people that will bookmark them across Digg, Technorati, Stumble Upon, Delicious etc etc.
I recommend that you get a plugin that allows readers to add an individual post to the most popular social bookmarking sites. Some plugins you may want to experiment with are the Addthis, Add to Any or Bookmark Me. Make sure to find a plugin that will suit the style of your page.
That concludes part 2 of my beginners guide to SEO. In the next installment I’ll cover writing the first post which will serve as a template for all future posts across your blog. It will cover the importance of keywords, URL’s and making sure each of your written blog posts is SEO friendly.
Update: Read Part 3 of How I SEO My Wordpress Blog – A Beginners Guide
Add to Favourites
Hey, thanks for the link and the mention! It’s good to see you sharing some common sense information about SEO.
Hey!, I read this post titled “SEO my WordPress Blog – A Beginners Guide Part 2 | How To Solutions” about a week ago, might have been last Saturday, and thought it was a good point. I’ve been trying for the last few days to find your site again but ended up finding it in Google using the keywords “seo”. Anyway, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to post last week but I will be returning regularly. Bookmarked the page.