Something we discuss often and like learning about is search engine optimization (SEO), and we have found that WordPress is very useful in helping our SEO efforts.
While continuing to research WordPress SEO, I came across ViperChill.com and their WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need, and to this day, it is still one of the most useful guides currently available.
Before I discuss ViperChill’s guide, I would like to remind you to review our own SEO guide, which you can access by signing up for our mailing list in the upper left-hand corner of this website. Alternatively, you can check out some shorter videos with our SEO 101 series.
On to “The Only Guide You Need.” Like I said, they cover everything, even some extra goodies that most SEO experts wouldn’t tell you about.
The Basics
Let’s start with the basics. Title tags and Meta Tags (description, keywords, and others).
Tried and true, the Title tag is one of the best ways to clue in the search engines about your content. Something brought up on ViperChill.com that I think is important, is removing, or moving, the blog name in the title of pages.
By default, WordPress includes the blog name on every page, before the page title. Getting rid of this leaves just your page title, which if optimized properly, can be very effective in optimizing your website for search engines.
With Meta Tags, they did not mention the fact that the search engines return your keyword phrases in bold if they are mentioned in the description. This acts as one additional opportunity to draw in the search engine users’ eyes.
Otherwise, what they say is true. It is better to add your own description manually, than to let the search engines just grab random text off of your page to populate that field. IF you let the search engines just grab any content, you could end up with content in your search description that is not relevant.
WordPress SEO Plugins
They also mention two different WordPress SEO plugins that are both great.
All In On SEO, which is my personal favorite in that it gives me all of the SEO options that I need for any website. The other is Headspace, which is also very powerful. I just prefer using the other. They both essentially do the same thing, but each one has a couple different additional options that the other does not. Try them both and see which one feels more right for you.
Let’s Get Advanced
Something that I covered in the Changing Your Default WordPress Settings video is Permalinks. Getting your permalink settings right is very important for maximum SEO. Access to your permalinks allows you to add your keyword phrase directly into your URL.
For instance, they give the example
“By default, post titles tend to look like viperchill.com/?p=38 but if you look at the URL for this post you will see http://www.viperchill.com/wordpress-seo/. I’ll let you decide which one you think looks better.”
Not only is it friendlier to the eye and mind, it is also SEO friendly.
One Keyword Phrase Per Page Please
This ViperChill article talks about focusing on a keyphrase for your entire site. For instance they are using “viral marketing”. While they certainly are attempting to rank high for many other keyword phrases throughout their site, their main one is viral marketing. <– this is an example of us helping ViperChill out. By linking to their website, using the anchor text ‘viral marketing’, they are getting one more little SEO bump.
While focusing on one keyword for your entire site is a good idea, it is not necessary, and you can still get plenty of traffic by just focusing your efforts on one keyword phrase per page. This particular article on their site focuses on “wordpress seo,” not “viral marketing”.
What Is a Pingback and How Does It Help SEO?
Pingbacks are important, but for a different reason. A pingback is a way for two websites to communicate.
For example, WebDevils.biz has pingbacks turned on, so does ViperChill.com. When I posted this article, their site was notified because I have a link in this post, to their site.
Does that make sense? If not, read over it a couple more times. 
That’s Web Devils saying “hello, hi, we are here and we are writing about you.” When they check out this article and see it is more information about their topic, there is a chance they may link back to us in the future. The idea here is more social than it is about optimization.
That said, you can also show the pingbacks on your posts and pages, so if your title and links are optimized correctly, you could be optimizing your pages even more.
Attributes, Titles, and Filenames
Something that I find many people do not think about is using their code to help optimize their page. Normally “on-page seo” is thought about as what you, as a human, can see when you are on the page. The page title, the content with the keywords dropped through out, links, etc.
When the search engines look at your website, they digest everything, including the background information. So why not use that to your advantage? Here is an example, naming your image files with your keyword phrase, adding an ‘alt’ and a ‘title’ tag to the image code.
For each image you put into your post, you get a few SEO options.
- The ‘alt’ tag. alt=”keyword phrase”
- The ‘title’ tag. title=”keyword phrase”
- The file name. keyword-phrase.jpg
Keep in mind that you can use the title tag in your links HTML as well.
Linking Within Your Own Site
One of the best pieces of information on this Viper Chill article is about how to link within your own site. They mention the use of nofollow and noindex on pages that will be prominent throughout your website, but probably do not need as much “link juice.” By using the noindex and nofollow attributes, your “link juice” to other pages on your website become more powerful. So find the ancillary pages on your site like Contact Us, Directions, or maybe even your About Us page, and think about adding the noindex/nofollow tags to those links.
Think about it this way. If you were trying to push several giant boulders up a hill, and you have 1,000 people to help you. Would it be better to have each of those 1,000 people working on their own to carry smaller rocks up, while only one person is pushing that boulder? Or, is it going to be more effective to have everyone group together and push the giant boulders up the hill? The same idea works here, eliminate the small rocks (links that don’t matter much for gaining traffic) and focus on pushing the giant boulders (the pages you have spent time optimizing) up the hill.
Links back to your pages, from anywhere, are one of the strongest ways to boost your search engine rankings, probably more so than on-page SEO. So why not link to your own pages from inside your own website? When writing new articles, take the time to link back to older posts or pages for which you are trying to rank. If you’ve spent time optimizing a page’s title, and you “name drop” it in one of your later posts, then link to it, you have a very strong link.
Other Information
There is some other useful information in their post such as the use of http://WWW.domainname.com vs just having http://domainname.com, Noindexing your Category and Tag pages, as well as turning off Comment Pages. If you are interested in learning how those things can effect your SEO, read through their article.
I recommend that you read through it anyway because it is seriously full of useful SEO information even if you are not using WordPress.
Thank you for reading, if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment or contact me using any of the information below.
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