Featuring a blog on your site is a great way to provide continuous fresh content for your SEO. Using WordPress as your blogging tool is also an easy option, one which millions of bloggers all over the world have taken. Like many of the internet’s easy options, though, WordPress does come with quite a few search engine optimisation pitfalls.
WordPress is not your only option when it comes to hosting a blog on your site, and it’s worth investigating some of the other blogging tools out there. Most of the following apply no matter what form of blog you’re using:
- Check the use of header tags. Some of the themes in WordPress put the wrong sections in h1, h2 and h3 tags. Having your blog’s title in an h1 tag is ideal, with your post title in an h2 tag.
- Use the nofollow tag wisely. The nofollow tag is something of a villain in the optimisation community, as it is seen as robbing sites of link juice. It can be a helpful tool for sculpting the flow of links on your own site, though, particularly when it comes to WordPress. WordPress blogs tend to automatically present the sidebar on every page. This is not a wise use of link structuring. The nofollow tag can be used to sculpt your links a little better if you don’t want to change the layout.
Many bloggers recommend nofollowing all kinds of areas of a blog, including comments. As a site owner, it’s a good idea not to engage in behaviour that annoys you yourself. In other words, there is no real need to nofollow comments. The links you give to those posting comments won’t harm your ranking, and you’re likely to be given links in turn if you don’t begrudge others the link.
- Make sure your code is valid. One major problem WordPress bloggers encounter in relation to SEO is code errors. Although WordPress is pretty reliable itself, some of the plugins and themes can result in code errors. It’s a good idea to check that your code is valid every so often in any case, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about the value of valid code.
- Use the Sitemaps generator. One of the handier things about WordPress is all the plugins you can obtain. One of these is the Google XML Sitemaps Generator. Having your Sitemap generated automatically can be very handy indeed.
- Use Pretty Permalinks. The permalinks on WordPress form the URLs of your posts. Setting up Pretty Permalinks allows you to insert your keywords into these URLs, instead of the decidedly search engine-unfriendly number system which is the default.
One last tip: One of the best things to do with any tool you use on your site is ignore the defaults. The vast majority of default settings are not going to be helpful, no matter what tool, program or website they come from. Always check the defaults on your WordPress blog, or any other tool you use, to safeguard your SEO plan.
