WordPress is a great tool to start getting your website optimized for the search engines. Here are some tried and true tips and plugins to seriously consider when optimizing your website or blog in WordPress.

Thesis Theme Benefits Designers and Internet Marketers

Our favorite Wordpress theme is definitely “Thesis”. For both design and SEO purposes we have found it to be the most flexible solution available. With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site.  For instance, you can change size of content areas, build in teasers and thumbnails, change number and size of columns and most importantly you have almost all the SEO customization tools you need without adding any plugins.  Beyond a WordPress theme it’s an SEO-optimized code framework that has clean code that the search engine spiders favor. To attest to this, the Thesis theme is used by all the top SEO experts including Danny Sullivan, Google’s Matt Cutts and Microsoft’s Jeremiah Andrick.

Using the Tools

Yes, there are several WordPress SEO plugins and now themes to consider when building your website or blog, but just because you have the tools doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to use them.  For instance, with the Thesis theme you can append the site name or tagline to the title.  Does this make sense for you and your business? It depends. If you are IKEA then your brand name is a keyword itself then most likely, yes, but if you are Acme Plumbing then likely not. If the taglines has relevant keywords that are used on the page, then that may be valid but if not then you may be trying to target too many terms for the page.  Be aware of this when checking off the boxes for all the features.

Faster Load Times

Thesis helps with faster page load times. Recently Google announced that page load times is a factor to be considered in achieving higher rankings. Therefore when your website or blog is built, be sure the code is as clean as possible and the page download speed can help determine if its bloated.  Check out Google’s Firefox plugin for ways to test and resolve issues you may be having.

Canonicalization

This is simply a fancy word for pages with multiple different URLs. The search engines get confused with you have several URLs pointing to the same page, so they (at least Google, Yahoo and MSN) have agreed on a tag that allows you to identify the actual URL that you want the engines to see and the link juice to be credited towards. This is done through a link tag in the head of the HTML: <link rel="canonical">. You can use the plugins posted by Yoast or use the feature already installed into the Thesis theme in WordPress.

All in One SEO Plugin

The “all in one SEO pack” is a very popular plugin that will help optimize a WordPress blog or site by generating meta tags including the title tag, resolving canonicalization issues, custom sitemap, avoid some duplicate content issues and customize navigation links.  They may help optimize the tags and help with certain features, but no tool does it all without the proper expertise. For instance, no tool can automatically set up these tags exactly how they should be set up without some critical thinking skills. You’re off to a good start by using this plugin but you are likely going to need a professional SEO consultant to ensure what goes into the tags is as quality as what you want to see come out of it.

Since Thesis version 1.4, there has been no need for the popular All in One SEO plugin. Thesis already has this baked in. However, if you already have the All in One SEO Pack then you can easily move the same tags over to Thesis.

Creation of XML sitemaps for search engines (and HTML sitemaps for user navigation):

An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of URLs that informs search engines when new content becomes available.  You can also put numeric values to indicate weight or priority on specific content.  When content gets updated, your XML file is updated.  As long as you register your sitemap with the various search engines, the search engine spiders will discover new content by looking at your sitemap file. Use a WordPress plugin to set up a dynamic XML sitemap [http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/].

Validating:

Make sure your website validates according to W3C standards. Google also does their checks and gives preferential treatment to sites that are W3C compatible.  Use the W3C web page validation tools to help with this.  Be sure to validate all template files beyond the front page including the single.php, page.php or category.php. Check broken links on posts and comments with this plugin.  You’ll want to validate HTML/XHTML, CSS, links, feeds, accessibility standards, various browsers and have co-workers check it as well.

Deeplinking:

When you create new posts link to older posts on related topics. This way both users and search engines do a deeper crawl on your website. It has a cumulative effect on search engines indexing more pages and increases your authority and ranking for your keywords.  The anchor text (words in link itself) is important so that the search engines get a clear message that the words used in linking to a page is what that page or in this case older post is about and those are the terms that should be used to rank it.  Of course it also helps with usability because a new reader coming into an inside page may not be aware of older posts unless you link to them.

B Line Marketing is a SEO and web marketing company that drives highly relevant, targeted leads to businesses through custom web marketing campaigns that achieve long-term success.  Founded in 2004, B Line Marketing has cultivated a team of passionate and experienced experts who specialize in search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing, web analytics, blog optimization, online PR, conversion optimization and content strategy. Learn more at http://www.blinemarketing.com .