SEO Your Site

Probably 99% of my readers are using a free Wordpress theme. The truth is, almost all pre-made themes are horrible for targeting search engines! I know of some premium companies that charge a few hundred to a thousand dollars for a theme, and they are not following the SEO rules!

What can I do about this?

There are a few things you could do, it depends on your skill level with computers. You could insist your theme be SEO friendly and follow the rules I am about to tell you. Any theme design company shouldn’t have any issues with this. You could pay and have your theme made, then edit the code yourself to make it SEO friendly. Last, you could just create your whole theme from the ground up.

Do It Yourself:

If you choose to take care of the SEO yourself, then read on my friend. This is the best way to make sure the job was done right! CAUTION: You may see a dramatic increase in traffic!

H1 Tags:

The H1 Header tag should target you site’s main keyword. Mine is “Make Money Online Blogging”, so every H1 tag is wrapped around that keyword.

H2 Tags:

The biggest misuse of this tag is to use it in your sidebar. This should never be done, but MOST pre-made themes use it. The proper way to use the H2 tag is by wrapping your post titles with it. The title of this post, “SEO Your Site”, is wrapped with the H2 tag. The pages that you want to double check are index.php, single.php, and page.php. In the php code, it should be presented this way: <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>. If it isn’t, then you want to fix that now.

once you have your post titles using H2 tags, view the source of all your pages and search for H2. Look for it being misused in weird places. If it is, then you want to adjust accordingly. If you notice your sidebar is using H2 tags, then you can replace them with H3 or div tags. You may have to edit your style sheet. You could create a new entry like: #sidebar-titles. Copy the settings for h2 to the new class, and call it by: <div class="sidebar-titles">Categories</div>. That should take care of it.

Keyword Authority:

Having keyword authority can help you rank better. If many sites link to you as “Make Money Online Blogging”, then Google will think that other sites agree, and rank you higher in SERPS rankings. You can help this by creating a link, usually in the footer, to your homepage using your sites main keyword. If you look at my footer for example, I have “Make Money Online Blogging” and it links to my homepage. This is a keyword you want to use if you comment spam. I use “Make Money Online Blogging” for my name on many blogs while commenting. I still use my real name on the sites I highly respect, like John Chow. Another way is create a sidebar section that points to pages on your site about your keyword. I could have it titled “Make Money Online Blogging”, and point to popular posts I wrote on my site related to it.

Cut Out Duplicate Content:

Duplicate content is a no no! The only time the full text should be shown is on your main page, and the actual page of the post. Your archives page should only show an excerpt. When search engines index your site, it will see your index, the posts page itself, archives, and so on. If you have the rest of your site showing only an excerpt, you cut back drastically on duplicate content. It may not matter now, but if you don’t, you will have at least three times the amount of duplicate content!

Don’t use no index. If you don’t index the pages, just so you can show the full post, then you are limiting the amount of chances your site shows up in a search. For example, if someone searches for “SEO Your Site”, and it is no longer on my main page because I have made many new posts, then my site will not show up (at least where it should). If you index the page, then they will find http://www.shudogg.com/seo-your-site/.

To show excerpts instead of full text (useful on your Archives page), make sure your code uses this: <?php the_excerpt(); ?> instead of <?php the_content(); ?>.

SEO AIO Plugin:

I highly recommend using this plugin. You can add keywords to each one of your pages and posts! By using more keywords, and specific to each page/post, you could post off topic and get traffic from people you never would have found. The best thing about this plugin is that it rewrites the titles of your pages. It puts the title of the page/post before the title of your site. Without this plugin, all of your page titles would be the same. This has a HUGE affect on the traffic to your site from search engines!

One Last Thing:

Most plugins have to inject code into your site’s code. If you have noticed that AIO SEO Pack didn’t rewrite your titles, Brians Threaded Comments didn’t inject into your site, or your ShareThis isn’t showing up and giving a Java Script error, then your theme may be missing one very important code! Go to your site’s dashboard, Design, Theme Editor, and click on header.php on the right side. You need to make sure you have <?php wp_head(); ?> in there before the </head> tag. Plugins that need to inject information into your header look for that code. If it can’t find it, then it doesn’t know where to inject.

I hope you learned something from this post. If you did, or you just like what I have to say, then please sign up for my Full Feed RSS!