November 7, 2009

How To Super-Charge WordPress SEO

WordPress out of the box provides basic management of the main SEO meta information. To expand the functionality we add our own super-charged version of the All-In-One-SEO Pack. The SEO pack makes it simple to change the page title and page meta description.

The All-In-One-SEO Pack is a great WordPress plugin that finishes off the SEO aspects for WordPress. For some unknown reason WordPress still has not got the SEO fixed out of the box.

The All-In-One-SEO Pack allows you you to change the most significant page elements – page title and page description. It also allows you to modify the page keywords, but as we all know, search engines no longer take note of these because they have been spammed too much in the past. Google stopped using the keywords for page ranking in the early 2000′s.

Page Title tags

This is the No1 SEO element to manipulate. Constantly make sure that you manipulate the page title. The page title appears in the browser window at the very top of the screen. Search engines use this in the listings and show it in their search results.

Ideally the page title comprises only of appropriate keywords and nothing else. To make the text more human readable then we often add a pipe character (

The page title is the MOST powerful SEO page element because it is like the title of a book. And just like a book title, if it is good it will be more attractive to readers.

If your page needs to extend to cover 2 or 3 keywords we have learned that you can still get great rankings from adding multiple keywords to the title. But do remember that the closer the page title is to the keyword you want to rank for the better.

Even though it is best to keep the page title just to the keywords you want to rank for, if you are a branded business you will also most likely need to add in your brand name so that it shows up on Google in your search listing.

Page Descriptions Meta Tags

This element is NOT used by search engines for ranking purposes. Even So, most search engines will employ this in their search results so it is important. We have discovered that Google will use the description most of the time. We have not yet discovered how it resolves if to use it or not. At other times Google will use the first piece of text that it can find on the page. On Flash pages this can be an issue seeing there is no actual text content. This is one reason why you should constantly add at least one sentence of HTML text on a Flash based page so Google and other search engines have something meaningful to display in the search results.

By having a good description it will increase your click through rates because the text will be more fascinating to people. Ensure that you use a maximum of 156 characters. If you use any more characters Google will truncate the rest. If you can keep your descriptions to 140 characters or less this is even better seeing Google sometimes adds a date to the beginning of the description which is part of the 156 characters it displays.

SEO Meta data shown on Google listing

Changing the meta data and page title

At the bottom of every page and post you will find the meta tags plugin details. Update the details appropriately. Note: If you can only use see the title for the plugin and no details, just click the title and the section will expand.

SEO Magic Webs SEO Pack

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