How I SEO my WordPress Blog – A Beginners Guide: Part 1
How I SEO my WordPress Blog – A Beginners Guide: Setting Up The Domain
Background
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is something that was completely foreign to me since about 1 year ago. It was only when I got my first job since graduating that I became aware of what it was and how it can help anyone who has a website. Here I hope to explain to you how I go about making How To Solutions more SEO friendly. As I’m writing material that I think will be useful to people I want that material to be found, read and used. This is where SEO comes in, the techniques I employ here on my site will help it to be listed in Google, Yahoo, Live Search and hopefully provide my site with visitors. I’m a complete SEO amateur and as I’ve only had this site running for a month or so I can’t say how successful I’ve been. It’s early days but I’m aiming high!
Google Webmasters
We all know that search is Google and Google is search. So once I had installed Wordpress on my hosting I made an account at Google Webmasters. I can use their Webmasters software to handle the more technical aspects of the domain I’m using and help Google to find my site and get it to appear in search results. Webmasters is essential for any domain admin regardless of whether he or she will employ SEO techniques.
If you have a Gmail account, which every respectable person should as to avoid spam, then you can use this for your Webmasters account. Once you’ve created your account you’ll be presented with your dashboard. This is where you can add your site, so for this site I entered ‘how-to-solutions.com‘.
Importantly you need to verify the site. I found the easiest way to do this is to ‘upload an HTML file’. It simply involves creating an empty HTML file resembling something like google552f837f4815e541.html and upload it to your root directory, htdocs. Verifying your site is the only way for you to get access to data Google collects from your website when it is crawled. This is the beginning of your SEO journey.
Sitemap
A sitemap is an essential part of your site. Put basically it will use an XML file to keep a directory listing of all your pages. This will allow search engines like Google and Yahoo to find all of your pages and make sure they are indexed.
To get my sitemap generated I used a very handy Wordpress plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This simple extension will automatically generate sitemap.xml in your root directory. Once this is done you don’t need to do anything more. The plugin will add in new posts and pages once they’re published. The plugin will also tell you how long ago the major search engines checked your sitemap for new additions.
Google Analytics
Analytics is client side tracking where a website logs visitors and their behaviour within that site. This provides a vital insight into how visitors interact with a website and can help webmasters improve features such as design, layout and features. There are many free packages out there and possibly the best known one is Google Analytics as it’s free and offers an array of data to help the webmaster.
For WordPress users I recommend using Ultimate Google Analytics by Wilfred van der Deijl. It’s very simple to use; create your Analytics account with Google, install the plugin and then copy your Analytics Account ID to the plugin settings and it’s working from the time the settings are updated.
Google this, Google that? What about other search engines?
A fair point! Yahoo!, Live Search (MSN) and Ask.com are all widely used engines and compete with Google on the search front. However, Hitwise illustrates the need to cater for Google more than the average search engine as shown here – market share for search.
Not only that but for pure SEO convenience Google also provides the best tools. They provide comprehensive information on SEO best practices and how SEO techniques can help your site in search queries. But to further help you the reader here are the link to Yahoo’s Site Explorer and MSN’s Webmaster Center. I must admit that I haven’t yet signed up to either of these but it is definitely something I will explore.
SEO & Wordpress
For most people, WordPress out of the box isn’t actually a finished product. SEO is yet to be factored into the finished WordPress release so webmasters use SEO plugins to optimise their sites further. I highly recommend using All In One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert. When usually writing a single webpage you can define the META tags that search engines use to calculate the subject of the document. WordPress is dynamic and can’t do this so the SEO Pack allows the admin to declare the title, description and keywords. This is indespensable in terms of a webmaster wanting to get full SEO use from his/her blog.
Final Thoughts
Doing the five simple basics that I listed above will give you a good solid base from which to build your website. Your priority should be Webmasters and then knocking up a sitemap whether you want to go down the SEO path or not. Analytics however will help you measure the success of your SEO techniques and though you wont have any/much data coming through to begin with, it will be indispensable once you get regular traffic.
I hope you found this beginners guide to SEO useful and please feel free to leave comments – they will be read.
Update: Read Part 2 of How I SEO My Wordpress Blog – A Beginners Guide
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