The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

 I started writing my beginner's guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It's time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.
Note: this article hasn't been updated yet since the beta release of my WordPress SEO plugin, but that plugin does cover a lot of the stuff needed below, so do check it out! When that plugin goes into a more stable development mode, this article will of course be updated.
If you're more of a visual type, try this WordPress SEO video. It's an hour long presentation I gave at A4UExpo London, that covers most of what's in here too. If you'd rather have me figure out what you should be doing, feel free to order a full site analysis by yours truly.
As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices. If you don't have the time to do this kind of optimization yourself, consider hiring us to do it, check out our WordPress consulting services.
As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot, check out the table of contents for some quick jumping around.

1. The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog
   1. 1. Basic technical optimization
      1. 1.1. Permalinks
      2. Optimize your Titles for SEO
      3. 1.3. Optimize your Descriptions
      4. 1.4. Optimize the More text
      5. 1.5. Image Optimization
   2. 2. Template Optimization
      1. 2.1. Breadcrumbs
      2. 2.2. Headings
      3. 2.3. Clean up your code
      4. 2.4. Aim for speed
      5. 2.5. Rethink that Sidebar
   3. 3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content
      1. 3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages
      2. 3.2. Disable unnecessary archives
      3. 3.3. Pagination
      4. 3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links
   4. 4. A site structure for high rankings
      1. 4.1. Pages instead of posts
      2. 4.2. New wine in an old bottle
      3. 4.3. Linking to related posts
   5. 5. Conversion optimization
   6. 6. Comment optimization
      1. 6.1. How you get people to comment
      2. 6.2. Bond with your commenters
      3. 6.3. Keeping people in the conversation
   7. 7. Off site blog SEO
      1. 7.1 Follow your commenters
      2. 7.2. Use Twitter
      3. 7.3. Find related blogs, and work them
   8. 8. Conclusions on WordPress SEO