Difference between revisions of "Learn/WordPress:-Built-for-SEO"

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WordPress naturally handles much (but not all) of the nuts and bolts of search engine optimization. It can help you build a large website with very little effort and no knowledge of code. WordPress also has an economical architecture that generates lean and fast-loading code that search engines love. It serves up simple, text-based navigation menus that search engines crawl and index easily and enjoys respect and familiarity among search engines, which further aids in search spidering. It can also improve the speed and ease with which you publish new content. RSS feeds are built in, so you can reach more readers more easily, and WordPress automatically builds keyword-rich URL strings.

WordPress' Economical Architecture

WordPress employs sound economical architecture to display pages reliably and quickly. In the early days of HTML, each display element on a webpage was displayed through the use of markup tags such as <font face="verdana" color="green">This is some text!</font> to display a string of green text in the Verdana font style. One of the inherent weaknesses of this approach was that it led to the incessant repetition of markup tags. WYSIWYG editors compounded the problem by tending towards excessive repetition of markup tags: a webpage with 20 paragraphs might have 20 font declarations, one for each paragraph. Repeating markup code makes websites display more reliably, but it makes them far less efficient because they take longer to load and longer for the browser to process the markup.

There is another inherent problem. If you wanted to change the text on your website from green to black you would have to edit each individual font color declaration throughout your site.

With the advent of CSS, the declarations for every element on a webpage could be made either at the head of the page, or ideally in an off page text file. This answered the issue of both the uneconomical repetition of markup as well as giving webmasters the ability to change a single element site-wide by changing one declaration. With well-crafted CSS, pages display more quickly and thus can rank better.

WordPress' internal architecture is entirely CSS-based. Unless the WordPress template is poorly coded, WordPress uses off-page CSS files to define elements. A WordPress page might display with 180 lines of code where the equivalent page created by a static WYSIWYG editor might display 350 lines of code. Pages load faster, so the search engines respond with good rankings and users have a good experience while visiting your site.

WordPress' inherent economy doesn't end there. WordPress pages are generated quickly and neatly by a simple and quick processing engine. WordPress sites generate proper, valid HTML code that search engines love, although a poorly crafted WordPress template can undermine code quality.

Build Large Sites Quickly

WordPress began its history as a blogging/publishing platform. Even as WordPress has matured into a capable content management platform it has retained the features that make it adapt as a speedy and agile publishing tool. WordPress will enable you to create content more quickly than other platforms and certainly more quickly than with static HTML pages.

Search engine optimization relies on content. The more content that appears on your site, the more opportunities you will have to rank for wider and wider families of keyword phrases. Also, each page of content on your website contributes to the whole: even a minor page on your website generates a small thimble of page rank that contributes to the overall ranking power of your site.

Respected and Familiar Content Platform

WordPress enjoys both respect and familiarity for search engines. When a search engine encounters a website with unusual or non-standard navigation, the search engine must do its best to follow the navigation to the deepest files within the organizational structure or a website. If the search spider cannot reliably and confidently follow a website's navigation to discover the deepest pages within a website's navigation, then those pages are unlikely to be indexed. Because of WordPress' reliability and familiarity to search engines, spidering errors almost never occur.

Because of the sheer number of installations worldwide, search engines crawl and index content on WordPress sites with ease. Faster and more thorough crawling and indexing means that more of your content will place in search engine indexes.

WordPress also enjoys trust and respect with search engines. There is no direct evidence that the search engines algorithmically rank WordPress sites over non-WordPress sites, however, it is possible. WordPress, for the most part, has been of only marginal use to spammers, although that appears to be changing. There are several plug-ins available for WordPress now that enable the wholesale importation of duplicated content from other websites (we don't recommend employing these tools, duplicate content doesn't rank well). As these plug-ins become more advanced, perhaps WordPress may begin to enjoy an unwelcome reputation as a platform for spammers.

Blogging Capabilities

This capability almost goes without saying because blogging is historically the core purpose of WordPress. WordPress has retained many of the features of a pure blogging platform such as the presentation of articles in reverse chronological order as its default setting and built-in RSS feed capabilities. Perhaps the better way to think of WordPress' blogging capabilities as an SEO benefit is to think of those capabilities when they are employed within a site that isn't a pure blog. The great power of WordPress comes into play when its inherent blogging capabilities are employed within a commercial site.

A sound and standard approach to a commercial site on the WordPress platform is to have the main services pages for a business published on the front page and in the Pages section of WordPress while eduction articles, product updates, general blog posts, and commentary are published to the Posts section. The Posts section of WordPress is traditionally where blog posts appear. With this dual capability, a website owner can outpace competitors that aren't employing a blog.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds come standard with all WordPress installations. RSS stands for “really simple syndication” and refers to a family of formatting standards that allow for the timely publication of freshly updated web content to other websites and devices. In a practical sense, the RSS feeds of your site can be utilized by users to follow your content in an RSS reader without necessarily visiting your site. When a user “subscribes” to your RSS feed, they'll receive regular updates of all new content you generate. RSS represents another avenue by which users can remain engaged with you and your content. You don't need to do anything to set up your WordPress feed-- it's already there. However, you may wish to take steps to ensure that users can find your feed. You do this by use of a link that in common practice is represented visually with the familiar orange RSS icon.

Finding Your Feed

If you need to submit your feed to search engines or feed engines, you can use any of the following four standard feed locations. Each one represents a different feed standard, but they all accomplish the same thing, and search engines can read any of them. http://YourDomain.com/?feed=rss

http://YourDomain.com/?feed=rss2

http://YourDomain.com/?feed=rdf

http://YourDomain.com/?feed=atom

Promoting Your Feed

Many webmasters take the mistake of not promoting their feed. The single best way to promote your feed is to make sure you have a clearly visible RSS icon with a link to your feed visible throughout your site. If RSS feeds fit within your strategy, put your RSS icon prominently in the header or sidebar. You can also submit your RSS feed to special search blog-only search engines; we'll learn later how to submit your blog to blog engines.

URLs and Permalinks

WordPress seamlessly and automatically handles the creation of URLs through its permalink feature. A permalink is simply the WordPress way of describing the URL for a particular page. Because keywords in the URL of a page are a ranking factor, If you want to rank for “WordPress Development,” then this URL: mysite.com/wordpress-development will perform better in search than mysite.com/index.com?page=5

The WordPress permalink functionality gives you descriptive URL strings for search engines to follow with no effort at all.

First, you'll need to turn on Permalinks within the WordPress dashboard—permalinks are not activated in a default installation. To turn on permalinks, log in to the dashboard and follow the left site navigation to “Settings” then “Permalinks.” At the Permalink Settings page, in the section titled Common Setting, click the radio button for “Custom Structure” and enter /%postname%/. This permalink structure will automatically generate URLs from your Page and Post titles—but you'll still be able to manually change them if necessary. Because the titles of your Posts and Pages are relevant to the topic of your content, the permalinks based on your titles will be relevant as well.

Reliable, Text-Based Navigation

WordPress automatically generates simple, text-based navigation that works well for both users and search spiders. Site visitors employ your website's navigation to browse your site and find content. Search engines use your navigation in a similar way, with a twist. Search engines follow the links in your navigation to find and index your pages. Additionally, search engines use the text in your navigational links to reliably determine the topic of the destination page. In other words, the text you use in your navigation is a search engine ranking factor.

It is possible to create a navigation menu that employs images instead of text. However, when a search engine spider encounters an image link with no anchor text, the search engine has no text to define that element for the destination page. So, for search optimization, it's clearly better to use text links rather than image links in navigation.

Luckily, WordPress generates text-based navigation menus based on your Post and Page titles. WordPress accomplishes this automatically. For the most part, this is an effective approach for search optimization. There was some criticism of early versions of WordPress because the navigation menus that WordPress generated were difficult to customize—they were truly automated in the sense that they were very difficult to adjust manually. For example, if you wrote a Page with a 30-word title, WordPress would display the entire 30-word title in the navigation. For some users, the better approach would be to allow customization of the navigation entries.

In response to this limitation, a host of 3rd-party plug-ins such as “Exclude Pages” and “My Page Order” emerged to give webmasters more control over menus. With the release of WordPress 3.0, a complete menu control area is now fully integrated into the dashboard. With WordPress 3.0 menus, you can now control the following:

• The title of the Page need not be the text of the navigation link, you can enter custom text for the navigation.
• You can create custom links to other websites or pages and include them within your navigation.
• You can place entire Post categories within your Page navigation. Previously, this wasn't possible with WordPress.

There is one limitation with WordPress 3.0 menus: the full functionality is available for Pages, but not for Posts. However, there is a slightly clunky workaround. To make a post appear in the custom menu, grab the full URL of the post and enter it into your custom menu as a “custom link”. That way, you can mix your Posts within your Page navigation as well as create custom text for the navigation links.

One warning goes along with using custom menus: when you are using a custom menu for navigation, new Posts and Pages won't automatically appear in your custom navigation as they would in traditional WordPress menus—you need to remember to enable the new content in the custom menu for the Pages or Posts to appear.

Built-in Collaboration, Contribution, and Community Building

WordPress is ready-made for collaboration, contribution, and community building--the “3 Cs” that can transform a stale, static website into a vibrant web-based community. Two key collaborative features, User Roles and the commenting system keep both new and returning visitors engaged with your websites.

When thinking about search optimization, it is tempting to focus only on the competitive grind of search ranking positions and not focus on user retention and user loyalty. A strong position in search results will certainly bring new customers, but always be thinking of ways to keep your visitors engaged with your website and thus your products and services. A first time user of your website is a visitor, but on their second visit they become a customer.

WordPress incorporates several collaborative and community features that can help you engage your visitors, interact with your customers, and even procure free content.