Video: SEO for WordPress

Hi, today I’m going to be talking about SEO for WordPress. WordPress is a really popular CMS system, but out of the box it’s not necessarily that optimised for SEO. So here’s a few things that will help you optimise your site.

So firstly, SEO plugins, there’s the All In One SEO Pack and the Yoast plugin, and these basically help you manage a few elements of the website. You could edit the meta, the robots.txt file, the XML sitemaps, and it gives you a really good way of just managing these as you create more content and create more pages for the site.

Secondly there’s URL parameters. It’s important to keep a clean URL structure in SEO. One way of doing this is in the permalinks section of the admin page you’ve got the choice of automatically making WordPress create certain URLs every time you create pages. Say for example, every time you create a page, you could get WordPress to create it so it’s /categories, /post-title, and this is a really useful way of creating a clean URL and also having keywords in the URL as well.

Then thirdly there’s Google Analytics. As most of you are aware Google Analytics is a really good way of tracking site visitors and viewing lots of different details and statistics for your website, and this could be quite annoying to add to the site manually for any WordPress site because there could be many, many pages. You don’t want to add it every time you create a new page. So there are a few plugins available which install a code on every page of the site, and this makes it really easy. You don’t have to worry about it. You just install the plugin and you’re away.

Then next there’s images. Firstly, you want to make sure the image title, that’s the actual title of the file is optimised. Optimise it for keywords relating to the page content. Optimise it for the contents of the images as well. And secondly the alt text, when uploading an image to WordPress, you’ve got the option of editing the alt text. So if you do that straight away, it’s good. It makes sure that every image on your website has optimised alt text. This is really good from an SEO point of view.

And next there’s internal links. There’s a nice plugin called SEO Smart Links, and you can program this yourself. You basically program it so that every time a phrase is mentioned on your website, it automatically links through to a certain page of your website, another page. So this could be really good for your internal links. Obviously, not to be overdone, but then it’s really useful for certain phrases. And there’s also links to related content. There’s a few plugins for this as well, once you install them, for each blog post for example, it has a bit at the bottom where you can link to related blog posts. This is a really good way of creating internal links, but also enabling users to stay on your site longer, and it links to similar content they might be interested in.

And finally site speed. This is becoming increasingly more important. There’s image size. So as I mentioned earlier, it’s important to get the image titles right. It’s also important to get the image file size right. There’s no point of uploading a massive file, an image file, to your website, you want to make sure it loads really smoothly and quickly. Because WordPress sites can be quite image heavy, it’s important to optimise this before you even upload it to WordPress. There’s also a plug in called WP Super Cache, and this basically converts the dynamic PHP pages for WordPress into HTML files, and this could really help speed up the website, not just for search engines, but for users as well.

So I hope that’s given you a good overview of what you can do to optimise your WordPress site. For more information, visit the Koozai.com site or visit the links below. Thanks for watching.