New White Paper Released- SEO for Wordpress Blogs
Host | 15 February 2008 | 83 Reviews »
UPDATE 3-17-09:
We’ve updated our SEO For Wordpress Blogs whitepaper – You can find a new copy at SEO for WordPress Blogs – a Non-Techie’s Guide
Blizzard Internet Marketing has released a new white paper by SEO’s Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling. The free internet marketing mini-manual is entitled SEO for WordPress Blogs and is available for download on our website.
If you are a regular reader of our newsletter, you already know we are huge fans of the WordPress blogging platform. It’s easy to learn and use and offers a multitude of Search Engine Optimization benefits.
The 14 page, illustrated marketing white paper covers the following topics:
- Why a WordPress Blog?
- Setting Up WordPress for SEO Success
- Start Blogging
- Promote your Blog
- WordPress SEO Plug-Ins
Blogging is here to stay and WordPress is the way to do it. In the world of internet marketing, if you’re not blogging, you’re apt to be left behind. And if you are blogging, make certain you’re taking advantage of all the SEO benefits it can give you.
Get started today by downloading SEO for WordPress Blogs by Mary Bowling and Carrie Hill.
UPDATE
Here are some great suggestions from our readers for more WordPress Tips and Tricks. Thanks everyone for your suggestions and support!
From Ed at BestRankingSites.com
I read the SEO for WordPress Blogs and it’s a good beginners guide. I wrote a more advanced wordpress seo guide if your readers are interested.
One simple thing I thought could be added is that h2 tags added to the sidebar could be changed to make the blog more SEO friendly (since the sidebar titles have little relevancy).
Open up your stylesheet by going to your admin dashboard–>presentation–>stylesheet. Add ,menu wherever you see h2.
* If you’re using widgets
Open up wp-includes/widgets.php and search for:
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2 class=”widgettitle”>’, ‘after_title’ => ‘</h2>’,
Change this to
‘before_title’ => ‘<menu>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</menu>’,
You may need to add a <br /> or two after </h2> if the spacing is off.
* Without widgets
Using the old school sidebar actually makes this easier. Just search for h2 in sidebar.php and replace it with menu
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Jonathan at GInside.com sent us these tips:
I have a few SEO tips that your readers might like,
http://www.ginside.com/2006/383/seo-tips-image-naming/
http://www.ginside.com/2007/993/seo-tips-image-naming-round-2/
http://www.ginside.com/2007/637/seo-tips-enforcing-www/
http://www.ginside.com/2007/677/seo-tips-communicate-with-the-blogsphere/
Hope some of those tips help your readers out.
sincerely,
jonathan
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From Emon Hassan @ Emonome.com
Good morning,
Very good Whitepaper. I particularly didn’t know the usefulness of ‘Optional Excerpts’ option. If I may recommend two plugins very useful for permalink structure and two personal preferences.
1. On page 4 you’d recommended renaming the permalink structure to category and post title before one begins blogging as it is tricky to switch after you’ve blogged for a while and some of your posts have already been indexed on Google. After I’d switched to the category/post title structure a few weeks ago, I’d noticed my posts on Google, with the numeric structure, wouldn’t redirect. I thought I was stuck with that structure for good. That’s when I cold emailed Stephan Spencer, of Netconcepts, asking for suggestion. One of the plugins he recommended solved was exactly what I needed. After activation, this plugin redirects all existing permalink structure to your new preferred one without having to do anything. Awesome!
http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/
2. I highly recommend the FeedSmith plugin to re-direct all existing/original feeds from your blog to the FeedBurner feed. A lot of folks will subscribe to a blog by clicking the orange icon on the browser which is not the FeedBurner feed. FeedSmith will automatically re-direct original feed to FeedBurner even if you click the source Feed.
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart
3. This is a personal preference. Chances are, a lot of your readers won’t visit your blog but will read all your posts via their preferred Feed reader. They’re likely to browse through all the feeds they’ve subscribed to and don’t have the time to visit each site. In that case, you may want to consider making the full feed available on your FeedBurner settings. If people like your post, they will click the link to your page to leave comment or find the trackback link to post on theirs. I have readers who can’t get to my new posts every day but they check them out when they get a chance because they’re all waiting for them in their Readers. Sure you can argue that that would make you write compelling titles so people will click on to your site and read the posts but chances are, if you’re new at this, it won’t work for you and even if it did, readers just might not have that extra click in them to divert their attention to your site.
4. Most bloggers often make the mistake – I had as well – of requiring registration to leave comment on their blogs. It is, frankly, annoying for most readers. After a few people let me know of the annoyance, I realized I had unknowingly chose the option thinking it was a better way to block spam. Well, Akismet does an excellent job of blocking spam. Random visitors are likely to drop by your blog and want to leave comments and if you ask them to register and require them be logged in, they won’t and you lose a comment and, maybe, a subscriber. On the Options>General page, I have the ‘Membership’ options unchecked. I then went to Options>Discussion and required commenters fill out name and email; I hold all comments for moderation and put ‘1′ in the ‘Comment Moderation’ option. Again, a personal preference.
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February 16th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Thank you for the blog set up white paper. It’s a really useful resource for clients.
aimClear
February 16th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Great report!! Easy to follow, and nice friendly tone.
I will be sharing the link love for this one!
February 16th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Finally, something easy to read and understand. Thank you!
February 18th, 2008 at 8:06 am
I’ve downloaded the rapport. It is a good read, but nothing really new for me. For beginners it’s a nice manual though!
February 18th, 2008 at 10:20 am
A great primer, but one little issue stood out for me: I loved UTW, but Simple Tags plays much better with the most recent versions of WordPress. Have you experimented with it, or other more compatible tag plugins?
February 18th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Great ideas about the permalinks and slugs. I look forward to testing out the plugins.
February 19th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Lots of great stuff in there. I did have one question I’d like to get clarified if anyone can help out. It’s my understanding that there is a big difference between a “dash” vs. “underscore” in article titles. In your section, “Take advantage of slugs” you use a dash between the words in the title so it reads, “/costa-rica-vacation-rentals/” vs. “/costa_rica_vacation_rentals/”.
I thought google looked at the first version as a single string or word. Whereas using underscore makes it clear to Google that these are really four unique words. Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks.
Dan
digitalsignagetoday.com
February 19th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
This is really a fantastic resource, astonishingly easy to comprehend. I highly recommend Ed’s advanced tips as well, I’m just starting to tear into h1 tags; satisfying stuff!
February 19th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
@ everyone – Thanks SO much for your feedback and support. This paper is meant to give a few tips and tricks and definitely isnt a be-all-end-all resource for setting up WordPress – there are other things you’ll need to consider and you all sound like you’re on your way to building some great WordPress blogs!
@Dan Scofield
Hi Dan, thanks for your question. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the dashes vs. underscores debate. I’m not sure where the debate has come from as Matt Cutts (Google Blogger and WebSpam team Engineer) and Vanessa Fox (former Google Webmaster Central team leader) wrote posts on Matt Cutts’ blog telling us WHY to use dashes instead of underscores. I’m linking to those articles here, mostly because these are MUCH Better explanations than I could come up with.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-post-vanessa-fox-on-organic-site-review-session/
I hope this helps!
~Carrie Hill
February 20th, 2008 at 5:58 am
Well done!
If only I have found it a few months earlier… It would solve a lot of the puzzles in my head, and saved me a lot of time. I still learned a lot!
Ivan | http://www.JobsBlog.ie
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Thank you for Blizzard Internet Marketing for releasing a new white paper, an internet marketing mini-manual . And thanks again because this is a free internet marketing mini-manual. It’s a great help.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:05 am
I must say that it is a great article, thumbs up! Wordpress starts to impress me by the day.
Thanks
Cheers
Marcel
May 16th, 2008 at 4:09 am
this is great blog article thans for sharing
May 18th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Thanks for the valuable article. Good information.
June 12th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Loved the link, thanks man! Geld lenen
June 13th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Great ressource! Even for me some aspects found in your whitepaper were new. (e.g. the “slugs”)
June 19th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Even for non wordpress users it has some good value ;)
June 26th, 2008 at 7:50 am
I’m using wordpress since 4 years ago but don’t know how to optimise it. thanks for the paper and will report the progess to later ;)
June 30th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Absolutely awesome white paper, passed on to app dev team and I can’t tell you how happy I am to have a “go to” for best practices. This adds so much support to any pro seo / wordpress stance. Thank you for making my life easier.
July 8th, 2008 at 7:24 am
I love wordpress because it seo friendly and its plugins. When i need something i look on the wordpress site and its there
Yhank you community
July 8th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Random question I’m sure but has anyone here properly integrated Ning with Wordpress?
July 17th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Good stuff guys!
July 31st, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Thanks for the report, I have just subcribed to your reader. There is so much confusion out there about plugins, but this seems concise to me.
August 18th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
A great resource for Wordpress is Revolution Themes, as it provides WP templates that can be embedded within a core site, but do not look like a blog.
From an SEO standpoint, this is advantageous for the client and their visitors as newly created pages on a variety of topics can interlink to core target pages in efforts to increase internal linking numbers.
This is a great resource!
Also, for those who havent seen SEO Digger yet – CHECK IT OUT. It does a reverse index of Google pages to accurately assess all top two page positioning levels. As an seo services company, this data helps us set gameplans into low hanging fruit
August 21st, 2008 at 11:04 am
Apologies if my previous comment appeared spammy it was genuinely meant to aid not hinder blogging seo
September 1st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Your blog and information on it is very usefull. I am a bigginer in WordPress.
September 6th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I love wordpress, but sometimes when i use wordpress with al those plugins i think it’s flippin’. Is there any information available of using different kind of plugins next to each other?
September 8th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
We look forward to downloading the whitepaper. As a Seattle SEO firm, we’ve recently been experimenting with many of the Wordpress plugins and already, within a couple weeks, we’re seeing some benefits. I agree with the other commentator though…there are so many plugins available for Wordpress that pretty soon we’re going to need a plugin that manages all the other plugins.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:39 am
Is there any plugin available for wordpress with the help of which we can place adsense?
September 16th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Yep… there is a plug in called Adsense Manager. Try it out. Wordpress has a plug in for everything!
September 18th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Great resource, thanks for providing this. Im glad I found it. Wordpress is such an amazing toolset for marketers to use when trying to optimize their site from a content perspective, and too many businesses just dont use it.
The reason, in my opinion, that it works so well is the frequency for which content can be quickly updated…not to mention the integrated ping capability which garners backlinks at an accelerated rate. As a seo services company, we manage this component for our clients and use RSS submission software to help drive the viral effect that builds pagerank.
Again, thanks for the sweet resource, we will pass it along…
September 24th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Thanks for sharing this useful resource. I like to browse useful stuff and read about SEO. Better than playing computer games ;)
October 1st, 2008 at 11:36 am
I’m glad I found this. You provide a lot of useful information in your 14 page guide. Instead of me trying to explain Word Press SEO to friends and family, now I can just point them to your guide. Time saver for me.:)
October 10th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Am I the only one who likes blogger templates better? lol
October 30th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
yes lenen, you are the only one!
November 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
although I use blogger now, I intend to move to WordPress and start my own wordPress blog soon this paper will be of great help
November 12th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
I always give preference to wordpress, because of it’s wide variety of seo plugins and extra ordinary style.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:42 am
outstanding info, the idea of unique seo techniques just for wordpress promotion is a good one. Excellent white paper, thank you
November 15th, 2008 at 12:51 am
Blogger has it’s place, but WP is way more versatile.
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:32 am
Lots of great stuff in there. I did have one question I’d like to get clarified if anyone can help out. It’s my understanding that there is a big difference between a “dash” vs. “underscore” in article titles. In your section, “Take advantage of slugs” you use a dash between the words in the title so it reads, “/costa-rica-vacation-rentals/” vs. “/costa_rica_vacation_rentals/”.
I thought google looked at the first version as a single string or word. Whereas using underscore makes it clear to Google that these are really four unique words. Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks.
December 4th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Now google sees dashes and underscores as word separators
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9748779-7.html
usability wise dashes are easier to type and remember than underscores and when a hyperlink is underlined underscores don’t really show up very well. We always recommend dashes over underscores for this reason.
Thanks for your question!
~Carrie
December 7th, 2008 at 2:34 am
Wordpress is awesome! I have been using it for awhile now and it seems to be 100% better than blogger! Great post!
December 13th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
This is exactly the info I was looking for.
Wordpress is king, but there are always tweaks!
Jayden
December 16th, 2008 at 2:02 am
A lot of your readers won’t visit your blog but will read all your posts via their preferred Feed reader.
December 18th, 2008 at 7:47 am
I agree – wordpress is much better than blogger – so many more options.
December 18th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
I just downloaded the pdf – I have used bloggers platform when it comes to free hosting but from what I read in the e-book there is more seo options you can use than blogger with the wordpress.org platform, so I will be making a couple new blogs trying it out :) Very good e-book by the way
January 5th, 2009 at 6:46 am
Lots of great stuff in there. I did have one question I’d like to get clarified if anyone can help out. It’s my understanding that there is a big difference between a “dash” vs. “underscore” in article titles. In your section, “Take advantage of slugs” you use a dash between the words in the title so it reads, “/costa-rica-vacation-rentals/” vs. “/costa_rica_vacation_rentals/”.
I thought google looked at the first version as a single string or word. Whereas using underscore makes it clear to Google that these are really four unique words. Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Wordpress is such a great tool for online web development, and the SEO Tools available for it are great and very easy to use. Using your whitepaper along side this will help further increase the knowledge for people new to SEO and Wordpress. Nice work.
January 9th, 2009 at 10:20 am
I can’t tell you how happy I am to have a “go to” for best practices. This adds so much support to any pro seo / wordpress stance. I have used bloggers platform when it comes to free hosting but from what I read in the e-book there is more seo options you can use than blogger with the wordpress.org platform, so I will be making a couple new blogs trying it out :)
January 14th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Word press is great for seo. I have personally found a bunch of plugins strictly for seo on word press.
January 16th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Thanks Mary, Very nice white paper you have there this should come in very hand for anyone looking to improve there WP SEO efforts.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Nice post. I use 20 plugins for WP that simply were not available in Blogger and over half are SEO related.
January 20th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Wordpress is a really great Blogging tool and its great to see some great SEO plugins to compliment it.
January 26th, 2009 at 4:06 am
I think that this manual is great, it will show newbies how to star with seo. Overall great stuff. 8 from 10 stars from me.
February 1st, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Ed’s tip on the h2 tag was spot on. I’d played around with code twice before with no success. Ten minutes with his tip and it was done.
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm
This manual has become my WordPress Bible. But it needs to be updated a bit because I’m sure with the new versions of WP that it may need some tweaking. Overall and basics are definitely priceless and timeless!
~W.H.
February 5th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Wordpress is such a great tool for online web development, and the SEO Tools available for it are great and very easy to use. Using your whitepaper along side this will help further increase the knowledge for people new to SEO and Wordpress. Nice work.
Greetings,
Koen Tabouret
February 11th, 2009 at 12:58 am
Thanks for the post. The reason why wp is so popular is the fact that it looks like an actual website and due to all the plugins.
February 14th, 2009 at 1:12 am
I have downloaded the material really nice one for beginners esp like me..thanks
February 16th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I love using Wordpress. Most of the time you can get great SEO results with very little effort through the use of the plugins and great theme optimization. One thing that I do find tricky about Wordpress is how the permalink structure affects the SERPS. It just boggles my mind sometimes.
February 17th, 2009 at 4:29 am
We went from from being stuck on the 3rd page pf Google for our primary targeted phrase using a static site. We switched to WP and now are on the first page of Google for that some phrase more often than not. I can not say enough about the advantages that we have over a static site. Also the blog allows me to do two things that I enjoy. They are writing and educating.
March 7th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Yeah I agree this is a great post for beginners. I am still very new to this whole blogging thing but this really laid it out very simply for me.
March 25th, 2009 at 5:06 am
Thanks for the heads up about wordpress, I’m also a big fan of wordpress and its the reason why I’m searching new ways on how to improve my skills on managing it myself and how to drive traffic to my blog..
March 31st, 2009 at 4:25 am
I downloaded the report and I want to give you a compliment; it’s easy to follow and very useful to me. Thanks
April 1st, 2009 at 3:59 am
As a novice blogger I’ve found this white paper really helpful. It’s helped dispel a few worries I’d had and made the whole process a lot more achievable, so thanks!
April 10th, 2009 at 6:06 am
Great information. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for the info!
April 13th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Blogs provide natural advantages in optimizing for the Search Engines..Among other blogging platforms, WordPress provides superior flexibility and more advanced options that enable administrators to customize their designs with specific components..
April 21st, 2009 at 11:57 am
I love wordpress because it seo friendly and its plugins. When i need something i look on the wordpress site and its there Thanks for the report, I have just subcribed to your reader. There is so much confusion out there about plugins, but this seems concise to me.
May 10th, 2009 at 2:40 am
We went from from being stuck on the 3rd page pf Google for our primary targeted phrase using a static site. We switched to WP and now are on the first page of Google for that some phrase more often than not. I can not say enough about the advantages that we have over a static site. Also the blog allows me to do two things that I enjoy. They are writing and educating.
May 10th, 2009 at 3:16 am
I think wordpress is having tough competetion nowadays, so many blog platforms are launching like weebly, which is almost looks like wordpress but so many advance freatures and having an edge over the wordpress.
May 15th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Great resource for bloggers – since I am new to blogging the SEO can help my new blog. Thanks
May 20th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
I am enjoying reading this post.
I love blogging on wordpress, and now I start to learn how to optimize wordpress for business purpose. This post is very help.
Thanks for sharing…
June 4th, 2009 at 6:23 am
Great article, i use wordpress myself and this is what I was looking for, Thanks again :)
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:28 am
I’m a real fan of wordpress. Easy to use, easy to customise, has 1001 uses!
July 17th, 2009 at 6:00 am
Hi thanks for sharing this informative blog with us. I am downloading this report
July 26th, 2009 at 6:10 am
Great post. Search engine optimization is crucial for any blog or website to get traffic. Maybe it is time consuming and expensive but seo is very important.
Thank for this post.
This is very informative blog and I will deffinitely bookmark it for more posts like this one.
August 6th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Thank you for the blog set up white paper. It’s a really useful resource for clients.
seowebnuts
November 27th, 2009 at 4:21 am
wordpress is the most convenient way of blogging
December 28th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
A lot of blogs are using WordPress because it is one of the most SEO-friendly Content Management System (CMS).
December 30th, 2009 at 4:29 am
Wordpress is always the winner for us, it’s easier to manually edit in terms of SEO, and there are ready-made tools like this which make life a whole lot easier. You can be more creative too!
January 13th, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Lots of great stuff here. Very informative for noobs and advance internet marketers.
January 30th, 2010 at 5:08 am
You should never force readers to register to post comments, as people do not have the time or energy to register to comment on every single blog they read. It’s also important I think to use .htaccess properly to clean up URL’s, like taking off file extensions and ‘get’ data.
May 6th, 2010 at 6:12 am
Wordpress is easy to config. and easy to use. Download the all in one seo pack