WordPress SEO – the Post Title

First up, the one thing to say as far as SEO is concerned, WordPress runs fine out of the box – provided the theme you’re using isn’t doing anything too weird, if you don’t want to get involved in the more structural on-site SEO, there’s really no great need.

The one thing you have instant control over is the post title – and, usefully, this can make a huge difference, far out of proportion to any time and effort spent in other SEO directions.

Don’t forget, if you’ve got pretty permalinks set up on your blog, and there’s little point in reading further if you haven’t, these keywords will form the post url and play their part in the search engines’ algorithms.

So here’s a title:

SEO for WordPress – which’ll do well enough, but you aren’t going to be on the front page for that search phrase, you haven’t got any inbound links

Wordpress SEO Strategies – now you’re starting to catch the long-tail, competition is less, you’re more likely to hit the front page of google…

Never a bad idea to search out likely candidates depending on the context – “commercial”, “marketing”, “free”, even “new”, etc etc.
One extremely useful free tool for this is https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

How I learned to stop worrying about WordPress SEO and produced a Successful Blog because of it – trying to catch too many keywords, the impact is diluted… If there’s one guiding principle in SEO, it’s…

Not too little, but definitely not too much.

Here, it’s a good tip to remove the pointless the’s, a’s (stopwords in search engine talk) from the permalink before publication – it’s going to bring a slight dividend. Note the difference between post title and permalink on this post.

And lastly, if you’re planning a trip to Digg or Stumbleupon for some link-baiting then you’ll want to be catching the eye, and it’s the shallow mentality that works so well in Digg etc in propagating a meme – so when you launch the story on any of these sites, change the title when prompted…

WordPress SEO with added Bikini Blondes