WARNING: This tutorial is unfinished! It will be continued as soon as possible. 

WordPress is a great platform for both blogs and even static websites. They have a ton of free and paid themes to easily change the look of your site(s) and lots of plugins to change the functionality. This WordPress SEO article is going to be a guide on changes you can make to your WordPress site in order to dominate your niche.

Note: WordPress constantly updates their platform and so this tutorial’s screenshots might become outdated. If they completely redo the admin, we will redo the screen shots. However keep in mind if things are slightly different you can follow the basic principles in this tutorial and still accomplish the same end result.

Okay so the first thing I am going to do is start with an example. This example is a site I just whipped up in 5 minutes, I installed a popular theme and made about 10 posts using Lorem Ipsum. The domain is a domain name I bought a while ago thinking I was going to develop it and then flip it, but I never got around to developing it so I am using it for this tutorial. CreditNegotiation.com is the domain name so I’ve named the articles to do with Credit and Debt. (side note: if you’re interested in buying the domain name  it’s for sale! lol)

This is generally what a word press blog would look like with little or no customization. The first thing we want to do is go in and edit the general settings so that we have everything looking the way we want it to.

WordPress SEO Step 1: Change The Tagline

The default tagline is Just another wordpress blog. You want to change that to something that has your main keywords in it but reads well to humans. Learn how to negotiation your credit! Is the one I used for CreditNegotiation.com.

WordPress SEO Step 2: Change Media Settings

 

This is where we change the folder where our images are saved. WordPress’s default is something like /wp-content/uploads/year/month/ which isn’t very attractive for SEO. Instead we want to change it to /keyword-images/. For more information about why we’re doing this, check out the Image SEO page here at Upzee.com.

This is a bit tricky, so you want to make sure you enter it exactly as above. The first field has “keyword-images”, its NOT “/keyword-images” or “keyword-images/” or “/keyword-images/” if you enter it like that it will not work. The second field has “http://domain.com/keyword-images” with no trailing slash. Again, if you enter “http://domain.com/keyword-images/” it will NOT work.

The next thing you have to do is connect to your server via FTP and create the folder then set the permissions to read/write/execute for all.

You also want to make sure you “uncheck” the button that says “Organize my uploads into month and year based folders”.

WordPress SEO Step 3: Permalink Structure

As you can see in the screen shot above you want to select the Custom Structure and then enter /%category%/%postname%.htm and then click on Save Changes. What this will do is create a url structure that nests your posts into the categories that they belong in. This is very important for your site structure. If you want to know why please check out the website architecture page here at Upzee.com.

WordPress SEO Step 4: Install Ultimate SEO Plugin

We are going to use two SEO plugins to optimize our wordpress websites, the first of which is Ultimate SEO Plugin. They are both free to use and can safely be used together. Neither of them has the complete features we need and so we’re going to use both to get our website exactly how we want it.

You can find plugins by going to Plugins -> Add New as you can see in the left hand menu, then in the search bar pop in SEO Ultimate and then click Install Now. Once it’s installed there will be two links, activate plugin or return to plugin page – click on the activate plugin.

Once you install and activate the plugin you’ll see a new category in the left hand menu called SEO. Under that menu the first option should be modules, if you click on that you’ll see a page similar to the above. SEO Ultimate comes with a ton of different modules, all of which you can turn off and on. Here is the full list and whether or not they should be Enabled or Disaled:

For title tags, meta tags and a lot of the other stuff that SEO Ultimate offers we are going to use the other plugin.

WordPress SEO Step 5: Install WordPress SEO by Yoast

Same as SEO Ultimate you want to go to Plugins -> Add New and then search for WordPress SEO and then click on install and then click on Activate Plugin.

WordPress SEO Step 6: Edit Widgets

The widgets handle your sidebar and you want to make sure your sidebar is working in unison with your main navigation. We will do the main navigation next, but for now we are going to remove all widgets from the sidebar and add the SEO Ultimate Silo’d Categories Widget to your sidebar. As you can see from the image above, the widgets menu is under appearance.

The above show’s I’ve removed all of the default widgets and I’m just adding the SEO Ultimate Siloed Category Widget. What we’re doing right now is tightening up our internal linking structure. Outbound links (both internal and external) play a major factor in on page SEO. You want to remove all unnecessary outbound links. We’re starting with a blank sheet right now. Once the SEO is completely done, you can add more widgets depending on necessity and user experience.

WordPress SEO Step 7: Setup Main Navigation Menu

Setting up a main navigation menu is very easy in WordPress however it involves several different steps. There are two important things you need to understand before setting up your main navigation. The first thing is that your theme needs to be compatible with custom menus in the main navigation. Most new themes are compatible with this, however if you’ve downloaded an old theme it might not be. Your main navigation is very important and so I would recommend changing themes to one that does support custom main navigation rather than skipping this step. The second thing you need to keep in mind is what categories you’re going to include. If you’ve read the Upzee.com pages on website architecture and internal linking structure you should know how to cascade your categories into sub categories. You only want about 5 with a maximum of 7 main categories. From there you can have unlimited sub categories. Whatever the topic of your site is, you can always break it down into 5-7 main categories.

Here are the steps for creating a main navigation menu:

1. Put in a name for the custom menu, it’s not public so it can be whatever you want. From there click on Create Menu.
2. Creat Custom Navigational Menu Step 3:
   Select your main categories on the left hand side under Categories by checking off the box and then click on Add to Menu. They should automagically appear on the right hand side under your menu. From there you can drag and drop them to rearrange the ordering, once you’re done click on Save Menu.
3. Setting Up WordPress Custom Menu Step 3:
   What this final step does is tell your WordPress theme to put the navigation we’ve just created in the header of your site as the main navigation.

So what we’ve done is created a two tiered navigation system. Your main categories are linked in your main navigation through out your entire site. In the sidebar, you have used the SEO Ultimate SILO widget to link to relevant categories as a sub navigation.

WordPress SEO Step 8: Editing The Theme

This is the dirtiest step of all, we’re going to roll our sleeves up and do some edits to the code. This is fairly simple stuff, especially if you have experience in editing code like HTML or PHP. If you have no experience at all, make some back ups!

To edit files you go to Appearance -> Editor. Under editor there’s a selection of files you can edit on the right hand side. The first file we’re going to edit is the header.php file.

You want to remove everything that is in between the <title></title> tags and replace it with:

<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>

The end result will look like this:

What we’re doing here is removing whatever your theme had as the editor, which could be Blog Name | Category name | Post Name and replacing it with the default tag, which will allow whatever you enter into the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin to show up exactly as inputted. We’ll get more into this later.

The second edit we want to do is adding a description to the category pages. For this you need to select the archives.php file and because every theme is different, this might not be the exact same for you. However the idea here is you’re inputting the categories description into the category pages. Where the description shows up, depends on where you put it into the page. If you put it somewhere and it shows up in the header, then try reading the code and placing it lower down the page. If all else fails, ask a friend or leave a comment here.

Where you want the description to show up you add the following line of code:

 <?php echo category_description( $category_id ); ?>

The reason you’re adding this is that the default for wordpress is listing all your posts. Say for example your category is Credit Information and you have a bunch of posts about how to repair your credit, how to figure out your credit score, what is a good credit score, etc and they’re all filled under your Credit Information category, what we want to do is isolate the theme of your posts from the category listing page. We want your category page to be about credit information in general, and keep the theme of your posts onto the post pages.

The default for wordpress is to either display an excerpt or in some themes to display the entire post on category pages. You can see how if your category has the entire post, then by the time Google gets to your post page its already read all of the content and associated it with the category page. We want to change all of this around by adding (static) category descriptions to the category page and unique excerpts that are either an image or a unique description of the post, or both. This makes sure your post’s content stays on the post page and doesn’t spill over into the category pages.

The next thing you MIGHT want to edit is the post date from posts. If your blog is time sensitivity like a news blog, then you will want to leave the time stamp as it’s relevant. If your blog is about history, you want to remove the time stamp because when you wrote your article on the American Civil War is not really relevant, the facts haven’t changed between now and 10 years ago. In order to remove the date completely from all post/pages you need to edit several files and every theme is different. If you’re familiar with editing HTML or PHP you will be able to do this relatively easy, if you’re not, you’ll either have to learn through trial and error or pay someone to do it. This is a very quick job and using a website like oDesk.com you can hire someone pretty cheap to do it. $10-$15.

While you’ve got your sleeves rolled up, you might also want to edit the theme to remove any non-necessary links. WordPress themes tend to have a lot of extra links like “Jump to comments” and “Leave a reply”. If these are integral for your user experience, then by all means keep them. However on some blogs where the posts are short, you don’t need a Jump to comments. Other themes will have “Leave a reply” basically at the end of the post, where the comment box is any way. If you can remove as many links as possible that aren’t essential to the site, you’re tightening up the flow of link juice through out the site and making sure the links you do have up, count for the most.

Here are some screen shots of how the category pages and posts look now:

 

You can see that these pages are very tight in terms of what they link to.The only loose links I’ve left in are the links to WordPress and the theme creator. Strictly in terms of SEO, you might want to remove those. However that would be considered unethical. I mentioned strictly in terms of SEO because this is an SEO guide, not an ethics guide. I’ll just leave it at that.