I see on many SEO and internet marketing forums people asking question about on page and off page SEO. While off page SEO requires a little bit more aggression and time, on page SEO can simply be achieved by using simple plugins and changing up simple terms to create a more SEO friendly wordpress blog.

A lot of webmasters are in such a hurry to get their posts published unto the web and fail to make the posts acceptable to the web.

In this post, I will be pointing out simple tips and settings you can make straight out of the box for a more friendly SEO blog.

For those that know me from guest posts and recent posts, you will know I’m not a big fan of too many plugins, reason being some of them just consume too much resources and can sometime create heavy loads on servers but there are some trusted plugins out there I still use.

I would recommend you download and install the following plugins if you have not already done so.

All In One SEO XML Sitemaps

How To Properly Set Up All In One SEO

Head over to the All in one SEO panel, Settings=>All In One SEO and you should be presented with a page like below. And make the following settings

 

  1. Enabled the plugin. Self explanatory
  2. Home Title: As the name suggest, this is what you would like the Homepage(Blog) called. My blog is a WordPress design blog and thus I have typed that in there.
  3. Home Description: This is a simple description of your blog. Write a brief introduction, keep it concise and simple. I have left the home keywords blank simply because I will be using a lot of tags and would rather have the tags indexed.
  4. Canonical URLs: Enable this. Basically, what this setting does is help your blog prevent duplicate contents. Search engine penalize such sites and this is a precautionary method especially if you plan on having tags indexed.
  5. Rewrite Titles: Enable this also. The main function of this is to present a beautiful title to you wordpress pages and posts. More in-depth below.

Now let’s move on to some simple basic settings to beautify how SE(Search engines) will see our wordpress blog.

  1. Post Title Format: The default setting here is %post_title%|%blog_title%. When a user browses a site or a site is being displayed in SE, a title is displayed. Here, you are simply telling the plugin how you want it displayed and presented.
    Here is a basic explanation of the macro used and other macros that can be used.
    %post_title%  The title of the post
    %blog_title%  The Blog title that you have specified earlier.
    Other usable macros include;
    %category_title% – The (main) category of the post
    %category% – Alias for %category_title%
    %post_author_login% – This post’s author’ login
    %post_author_nicename% – This post’s author’ nicename
    %post_author_firstname% – This post’s author’ first name (capitalized)%post_author_lastname% – This post’s author’ last name (capitalized)
    This is where you can get really creative and make you posts stand out and well presented to the SE. The format here can be changed to suit the needs and functionality of your blog.I will show you an example; say you run a tutorial blog and tend to write posts on how tos, you can specify in here “A Tutorial Post On %post_title% at %blog_title%”  – if you have written a tutorial post on how to configure photoshop and your blog’s name is Easy Photoshop Tutorials, then that post would be presented to the SE as A Tutorial Post On How to configure photoshop at easy photoshop tutorials. That is a very fancy title and it beats the traditional titles we see been displayed by most SE, this will definitely give you higher click through than a traditional title. As you can see from my illustration, I have gone for a more conventional “A Post on %post_title% at %blog_title%”, be creative!
  2. Have a look at No.4 and you will notice I have changed that also to display “More Information on %tag% at %blog_title%”. Simply put, I plan on having my tags crawled by SE and if you remembered the Canonical URLs settings, I should be ok. Now when a user types in a desired tag associated with my WP post, it comes up as a more information as to the actual tags showing up. I receive most of my traffic from tags(long tail keywords) and I cannot stress enough the importance of having this.
  3. I will not bother too much with the other settings on 3,5,6&7 as I plan on having them not followed by SE.

Here are the final settings that you need worry about.

All the settings here are pretty much self explanatory and if you want more info, simply click on a setting and you will get an explanation of what it is doing.

How To Set up Google XML Sitemap for WordPress

I would set you up on how I have set mine up. I have set it up to create and index tag pages whilst including it my sitemaps. This compliments the settings we had set up earlier with All In One SEO.

  1. What this basically does is write out a sitemap for you site in the format yousite.com/sitemap.xml. This is very useful if you plan to submit your sitemap manually to index engines.
  2. Just like the above but in a more zipped format. Search engines like Yahoo(Now Bing) and Google recognize this.
  3. This will automatically build your sitemap for you everytime you change your site’s content. This is very useful and I will advice you have it ticked on.
  4. Automatically notifies all major search engines about your sitemap and will ping them everytime you update your site.
  5. This is very important and I would advice you have it on. Basically, after a sitemap is built, it will be automatically added to your robots.txt. These files are usually in the .gz format and should be kept there. When SE robots crawl your site and obey a robots.txt, you sitemap is automatically included and indexed. Google SE does this.

  1. Google loves new contents and active discussions. Setting this as a priority helps notify SE when there is a new comment and speeds up google indexing especially if you have a do follow blog.
  2. There is no other option here but automatic.

Basically these explains what you want included in your sitemap files.

  1. Have wordpress homepage ticked.
  2. Always include posts as standard.
  3. Remember the settings we spoke about earlier, well here is where it comes handy. Instead of including categories, I recommend using tags instead. This helps a lot more especially if you are targeting long tail keywords and use them as tags. SE will index these long tail keywords as tags and help drive more traffic to your site organically.
  4. Tick this as standard. It helps show the freshness of your site.

All other settings should be left as standard, unless you are running a very large blog.

Final Writing Tips

This final section outlines how to present your written content to the SE. These are tips that you must get accustomed to when writing in wordpress.

  1. Make sure your post titles are always in H1. There are simple ways to do this. You can go into your single.php file and look for the <?php the_title(); ?> line that calls up your post title. It might be a long string of codes and varies from theme structure. Have a look at the heading tags and if it is not in <h1></h1> tag, simply change it.
  2. Try and include at least one <h2></h2> tag in your post. This should probably compliment the title of the post you writing on.
  3. If you are using images in your post contents, ensure these images have a proper name.
Setting Up Image Settings In WordPress

Conclusion

Now that you have your posts ready for the SE, you can be rest assured the ON page SEO has been done and can now focus on OFF page SEO and start building the links.

Feel free to join in on the discussion below.