Wordpress seo checklist
This article gets a Wordpress blog installed and SEO optimised. Its advised that you test the site for W3C HTML and CSS validation each step of the way, especially checking your chosen theme is compliant. The blog files will be located on your web servers domain within the httpdocs folder. If you want to install it into a sub directory of the domain then create this first (ie yourdomain/blog). Another method is to create a sub-domain for the blog, and a fully optimised index.html file in the domains root. This index file will then point to the blog in the sub-domain (http://blog.mydomain.com). For Amen the sub domain is created in the user area – Domain TAB – DNS expert – Add record
(1) In your web servers Plesk admin panel create a database and user. Ensure your web server MYSQL version is adequate for the version of Wordpress and theme you intend using.
(2) Upload the wordpress files to the web server directory
(3) Open and edit the wp-config-sample.php file to reflect your connection details (ie DBname/User/password/localhost). Then save it as wp-config.php
(4) Install wordpress as instructed in its contained instruction file.
(5) In Wordpress enter your new password, web log title and email address
(6) Upload your chosen theme to the wp-content/themes directory.
(7) Upload a blank .htaccess file to the Wordpress root directory. Set its permissions to 666
(8) For a more SEO friendly permalink. Change it In settings/permalinks to : /%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/ This will ensure each page and post has a good SEO link title for google.
(9) Download and upload “all-in-one-seo” into the plugin directory http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ This adds extra fields to your post and page creation templates.
(10) In themes/header.php replace the <title> with
<title><?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘ :: ‘; } ?><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>. This gives a well structured name to the page title ie softpages :: Links
(11) From the themes header.php remove :
<meta name=”keywords” content=”<?php bloginfo(’description’); ?>” />
<meta name=”description” content=”<?php bloginfo(’description’); ?>” />
This prevents duplicates by inserting default description mettags based on yout tagline entry
(12) Insert standard metatags in header.php :-
<meta name=”author” content=”your name” />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”your company – 2007″ />
(13) Download google sitemap generator and upload into your plugin directory. Upload 2 blank files to the root directory called sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz, make them writable CHMOD 666 Activate it.
(14) Go to the google analytics page and create a new profile for your site Insert supplied code into the themes header.php. You can now monitor your sites activities.
(15) Set up google webmaster tools.
High google ranking
The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.
Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank. Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.
Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags dont seem to have an effect.
Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.
Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.
Keywords in the file path dont seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.
The file size doesnt seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.
Its no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.
Search-this
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Search-This is a team of web developers, programmers, entrepreneurs and all-around geeks that have been at it since the beginning. Combined, this team has 51 years of real-life experience working with the web, and we’re excited to impart some of our knowledge to you.
