Making a self-hosted WordPress website

SEO friendly

Whether you have an established WordPress website or are setting up a new WordPress website, there are SEO practises you can put into place, to improve the search engine optimisation of your WordPress website.

This article is aimed at those who have setup their own WordPress website on their own server, but also we will tips later in the article applicable for those running WordPress.com sites.

Before we begin though, please consider hiring Neogain, a Hull website services firm to manage your WordPress website.

We provide a range of WordPress services, including being able to migrate your wordpress.com site to its own server, and running website SEO campaigns.

If you need WordPress SEO services, please hire Neogain.

Turn on search engine friendly urls.

If you are not running search engine friendly urls, then you are missing a great search engine placement opportunity.

You can turn on sefs via the administrator’s WordPress dashboard, but first you need to make sure you have a .htaccess file already in the root of your website.

Then via the dashboard you find ‘permalinks’ via the ‘settings’ section. The best option for search engine friendly urls, is to select ‘post name’. Now each blog post url will be the same as your blog post title, rather than a post number.

Use plugins to improve search engine optimisation.

The ‘All in One SEO Pack’ is a powerful plugin, that will help improve the SEO of your blog posts.

However many people forget that internal page linking, is also a worthwhile SEO technique, which can be automated via the ‘Yet Another Related Post Plugin’, aka YARPP.

Once you’ve setup the ‘All in One SEO Pack’, you can add a meta title, description and keywords to each blog post.

Sure these don’t count as much as they used to, but it would be unwise to overlook these meta elements, even in 2012.

When using YARPP it will list related blog posts at the end of each blog post.

However if you already manually add a number of links to your blog posts, you might want to skip using this plugin, as it will increase the number of links, as well as perhaps stopping people clicking on the links you primarily want them to select.

Search engines do take your internal website linking into consideration.

Too many links per page can negatively impact your website listing, and even cause you to lose page rank and placement!

So be careful when deploying your internal page link strategy. However if SEO plugins are deployed correctly, it could result in a nice boast for your search engine placement.

Writing your blog posts and web pages.

When putting together your content, you should use be using researched keywords, but never forget to write high quality content.

You want to make sure you content helps lower bounce rate and without stopping people from acting on your site’s objectives, that people stay on your website for at least a minute or two.

You will discover the more traffic, the tougher it is to keep the bounce rate low and the visitor times high. However both can contribute to SEO.

Also when embedding images, you should make sure they are already optimised.

You should make sure the image file name is related to the image, as well as the image being the correct size before being uploaded.

For more tips read our archive!

We have lots of WordPress search engine optimisation tips in our archive.

Please browse through our old tips, plus don’t forget to subscribe to our blog to stay updated with our latest articles.

If you require search engine optimisation training, please get in touch.