Steps for performing  SEO a wordpress blog using 6 plug-ins. This guide assumes you know basic html, css  and are familiar with using basic tools like FTP software.

First download the latest version and install and activate these plug-ins:

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Google Sitemaps Plugin
3. Redirection Manager
4. Feed Locations
5. WP PageNavigation
6. Google Analytics for WordPress

1.       FTP two empty text files to the directory wordpress is installed named “sitemap.xml” and “sitemap.xml.gz”.  Chmod 777 both of them.  Note: In my ftp program I can right click and choose new text file and then name it whatever I want.

2.       Go to the wordpress homepage – check to see if the site has an h1 tag and look at what’s in it.

3.       If there is an h1 tag -  It should contain a title that has at last 1 keyword string something like “Social Media Marketing Services” or “Denver Colorado Homes for Sale” besides the company name.

a.        If not do the following – Login to wordpress admin and make sure blog has a blog title and tagline that are ready for public launch (ie not just the domain name or a repeat of the blog title in the tag line).  add a keyword string to the blog title after the company name or url, take if from the questionnaire if possible or from https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (type a few words describing their business and choose a string from the generated list)

b.      If there isn’t an h1 tag – check to see if it has an image header or the title of the blog contained in an image as opposed to regular text.

i.      If the blog has the title in an image

1.       Add the h1 tag to the themes footer linked back to the home or main url (domainname.com) , you may need to add css styling to make sure it doesn’t break the header or appear to large.  One quick way to do this is to give the h1 a separate class and copy all the styles it’s normally inheriting to this new class.

ii.      If the blog has the title in text

1.       Add h1 tags around it in the header file in word press, you may need to add css styling to make sure it doesn’t break the header or appear to large.  One quick way to do this is to give the h1 a separate class and copy all the styles it’s normally inheriting to this new class.

4.       Open up single post and page template in theme editor

a.       Check to make sure the title of the post is an h2 or an h1 – if it is leave alone if not add those tags and adjust css if the new header tags overlap or make things look bad.

5.       At the bottom of content area for the MAIN INDEX PAGE  (Page containing all the posts) and at the bottom of the content area on the category and archive templates put the following tag <?php if(function_exists(‘wp_pagenavi’)) { wp_pagenavi(); } ?> – make sure wppagenav is turned on and if there is lots of content you should see pagination.

6.       Upload the all in “one SEO plugin” – activate the plugin – go to options “All in one SEO”

a.       Un-check “use noindex for categories” and check “use no index for tag archives”

b.      If the blog title is short (4 words or so) leave the post, page, and caterogy titles alone.

c.       If the blog title is long (more than 4 words) delete the “%blog_title%” from the post title format, the page title format, the category title format, the arthicve title format, the tag title format, the seartch title format – and replace it with a short branding word or two (like the company name – for example to enhance branding I added “GoToBilling” and “RISMedia” at the end of 2 clients I optimized their blogs.

7.       Add a homepage description.  If the homepage is not the posts page (IE the front loading page on the site is an actual page and not the main blog or page containing the list of posts) Add a separate home title, description, and keywords that are different from the blog title, description(tag line) and keywords)

8.       Go to manage- redirection – check “Create 301 when post slug changes”  and log 404 errors

9.       Go to manage – feed locations – put the feedburner URL in all the entries except comments (if you can’t find feedburner URL , create a new one and update the setup).  If you don’t have a feedburner URL (sign up for one here)

10.   Go to Option – XML- Sitemap – if there are two read sentences at the top click “rebuild the sitemap manually” – you should see “your sitemap was last built…” with a series of success messages.

11.   Check options – privacy and make sure “I would like my blog to be visable to everyone” is checked.

12.   Go to plug-in, google analytics and make sure the US String for that user is entered (there unique tracking number from google, it’s in the code snippet google gives you)

photo credit: adria.richards
The first question is why?  Most wordpress templates display full content posts on the front page, making the main page of your blog have a lot of scrolling and only reveal a very limited amount of content to a first time visitor without lots of scrolling.  Additionally for SEO (search engine optimization)  it’s a good thing to reduce the amount of duplicated content (same content word for word as located in other areas).  Here is a previous article I’ve written on how to identify and fix common SEO problems in wordpress.

Before I go into the details of using excerpts in place of the entire post content, I want to discuss one alternative that gives most of the advantages of excerpts without changing the core templates.  You can use the more tag in the editor to split posts where you want them.  This will give the reader a link to read more about the blog post.  It will also let you make the more interesting or hot posts show longer previews  while keeping others extremely short.

In my person blogs I use a multi-column theme which uses both full content in one column where I use the more tag and other columns which use the excerpt.  I do this so that the first time visitor can get a good preview of the different type of content available on the site and click on what entices them.  If you’ve imported tons of content from another blog or site that doesn’t have more tags, it can be a lot easier to change to excerpts on your blog instead of having to edit each of those posts.

The default excerpt tag – by default the excerpt will only show the first 55 words of a posts content.  This will give a nice little lead in and ask the visitor to click to read more.  By default the images and html code are stripped out.  There are however  many plugins available which will expand the excerpts to include images and html markup and will let you specify a custom word or character length.

I’ll discuss these in a followup post, but for now here are a few links to plugins that will expand and improve the functionality of the excerpt function in your wordpress blog:  WordPress Advanced Excerpt, Excerpt Editor,  Thumbnail for Excerpts, and TinyMCE Excerpt.

For now I’ll go over what you need to know in order to change your wordpress theme to use the default excerpt.  Later on you can start installing and playing with plug-ins that increase functionality.

Step 1 – Backup your theme – incase you make any mistakes it’s important to back it all up.  There are many ways to do this, the easiest is via FTP.  Specific instructions are beyond the scope of this post.

Step 2 – Load the theme editor in WordPress 2.X it’s under Design >> Theme Editor

Step 3 – Edit the template you want (probably the main index to start with).  Under ‘Theme Files’ on the right click “Main Index Template”

Step 4 – Find ‘<?php the_content(); ?>' in the Theme Editor window showing the html code from main index template.

Step 5 - Change ‘<?php the_content(); ?>' to ‘<?php the_excerpt(); ?>'

Step 6 – Click “update file” and you’re done.  Repeat the steps for each template file (category, archives etc) that you would like to change the full content tags to excerpts.

I’m going to be blogging a lot more on wordpress tips, tricks, and easy to follow how to’s so stay tuned.  We’ll be dong a lot more with excerpts.

1. Problem: The homepage doesn’t target a specific keyword combination that people actually search for.

Solution: Add specific keywords to the homepage title, use a plugin like ALL in One SEO Pack to rewrite the default wordpress titles.  If you don’t know any specific keyword phrases offhand that also sound good to use for marketing purposes try keyword research.  An easy starting place is:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2. Problem:  The homepage, posts, or pages are missing header tags (most importantly the h1 tag) or they’re not targeting the same keywords as the title tag for that page/post.

Solution:   Some themes do not use the h1 tag properly or at all.  Add an h1 tag with the page title in it somewhere on the post and page templates.  Usually this is put first before the content begins.  Also in some themes the main blog title is always the h1 and the posts are h2, this is not the way I setup the semantic markup, but it is a ‘correct’ alternative.

3.  Problem:  All of the various sections (pages, posts, categories,  archives) do not have unique meta tags and/or h1 tags

Solution:  Every page on your website needs DIFFERENT meta tags, a unique title, description and keyword tag.   There are wordpress plugins which will help you do this automatically by using the content in the posts / pages themselves again see the All in One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin.

Additionally it would be beneficial if each page contained a 4 word exact keyword phrase in the title tag and also on the page in the h1 tag.  You can use any keyword research tool to find exact phrases.  A free one that gives information on google’s searches is located here:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

4.     Problem:  Too many links to unimportant sections on the front page

Solution: Please  reduce the amount of links on your front page.  I would try to keep that number below 40 and for your site we would personally recommend only 20.  (more pages dilute the “importance value” of each page, since your site has no page rank and a high amount of posts and pages which Google will not return in the main results.  Google will only rank a limited number of posts and pages from a low pr website, so it’s better to push the most important parts of your site and have those link to the less important pages / sections).   One easy way to do this is with a simplified front page before they get hit with links to every single section of the site.

5.    Problem: No  alternative text tags on images so the search engines can’t tell what keywords to associate with the image.

Solution:  Make sure to add an alternate description to each image you upload using the visual editor.  Alternatively think about using time saving plugins like Photodropper which insert photos with alt text and credits right from the editor itself.

6.    Problem:  Duplicate content – You have content available elsewhere on the web in your site.  This can hurt rankings as search engines only like to rank the same content once.

Solution:  Please exclude that file in your robots.txt file, or add a <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX” /> tag to the header of those specific sections of the site.

7.       Problem: The site contains structure errors are in the actual html and css.

Solution:  Although it’s not important It’s not important for rankings that your site validate perfectly, but any major errors should be fixed – Run your site through http://validator.w3.org/ and fix any major structure errors.