Preparing your WordPress blog for SEO will give you a better chance in ranking, even before you do content and keyword research. It’s a good training to lay the foundation first before using them and rather than learning the hard way.
Today I sum up some of the things that we should be do before publishing a WordPress Blog, hopefully this will be helpful to as it did to me. Things like preparation will have a greater impact on your blog, and will be take your advantage between competitors.
Here is the step-by-step guide:
1. Choose Domain Name
Choose an intelligent domain-name which contains keywords (if possible)
Choose the Right Targeted Keywords / Competition / Niche for you
2. Robots.txt
Create a file and name it “robots.txt”
Put it in the root Directory of your Domain
Be careful with the use of robots.txt, you can harm your blog by using it the wrong way. Here is a great tutorial about that.
3. .htaccess
WordPress creates .htaccess in root folder insert this code and make sure you change the domain name.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ hEp://www.domain.tld/$1 [R=301,L]
WordPress will also use .htaccess to create speaking urls
Here is the complete list of .htaccess hack
4. URL structure for Post
Optimize your URL structure by using the properties of WordPress (permalinks)
Don’t include the category in your post url, because if you change the category of your post later, WordPress will not create a new URL. (Personal Choice)
Don’t include too much unnecessary words like the, a, is, or on your URL
5. Choose your theme
Choose your theme appropriately; your Website will embody your personality make sure that it fits.
You can download some themes you like, but make sure you inspect the source code. Also make sure that the theme is well structured. Here is a WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin that will detect code for you .
6. Optimize theme Header
Optimize your title; choose an ideal title for all kinds of pages in your blog
Don’t let search engines index all of your pages to avoid duplicate content.
Add some language information like these <meta name=”language” content=”en” />
Specify the location of your robots.txt
7. Optimize Theme Body
Use headlines to highlight text passages as important, not to style your design.
Use PageRank sculpting carefully
8. Must have plugins
Add link attribute for doing PageRank sculpting the easy way.
Yoast SEO plugin for complete SEO package
W3 Total Cache to speed the loading time of your site
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is the most SEO Friendly related post said by Matt Cutts
9. Usertracking
Install a usertracking system to analyze your traffic, use Google Analytics,, Woorank and Woopra.
10. Adding a Sitemap
Add your sitemap to Webmaster tools, Bing Webmastertools and other SE’s
11. Archives
Create monthly and weekly archives.
12. Feedburner
Use Feedburner to optimize your feed.
Track the activities of your search engine spiders with Crawltrack
13. Back up
Install WP-Backup and make sure it emails you the back up every week.
14. Ping
By pinging other services you can accelerate the indexing of your post
Don’t ping too much, or you’ll be marked as spam.
Here are some ping lists
hEp://ping.wordblog.de/
hEp://ping.blogstart.de/
hEp://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
hEp://rpc.pingomac.com/
hEp://rpc.technora.com/rpc/ping
hEp://ping.feedburner.com
hEp://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
hEp://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
hEp://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/
weblogUpdates
hEp://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
hEp://ping.wordblog.de/
15. Linking
By linking to the x new post from many pages you can accelerate the indexing of these posts.
By not linking to all the archive pages (after 2 years of blogging you have 24 links to monthly archives) you can use the power of each post more intelligently.
If you wanted to know what to do to your WordPress Blog after fresh install, I create a tutorial about that too.
Conclusion
Those are the 15 things that you should do to prepare your WordPress blog for SEO before hitting that traffic. If you have other tips on how to do this or add to the list, please fill us in by using the comment below.
