On page SEO with WordPress

WordPress is unlike any other CMS available. It is free, got tons of plugins, modules and themes. It can be customized so easily to suit one’s needs and the best feature is it’s On-Page SEO options available.

We start with a detail of few on-page requirements:

1) Keyword in URL or an Exact Match Domain – As the name suggests, it means the use of keyword in your url or domain name. Exact Match Domain is the domain which has the exact keyword in it like buycar.com, electroniccigarette.org etc.

How in wordpress :
- Go to permalinks options in Settings
- Put /%postname%/ in custom structure. You can also use /%postname.html.
- The outcome – Your posts will have URL like mysite.com/where-to-buy-cars/ or mysite.com/where-to-buy-cars.html

2) Keyword in Title – This means the availability of the keyword in your title tag. Usually in wordpress whenever you make a post you usually write the title in provided box. But i recommend All-In-One SEO plugin for various on-page settings like title etc.

3) Keyword density – This is easy to achieve in wordpress. It means the appropriate usage of keywords in your posts or your page. This can be controlled by using your keywords in category, tags, few places in your posts and also in keywords section of all-in-one seo pack.

4) Anchor text interlinking – Make sure whenever you interlink your posts and pages with each other, you link them with anchor texts. Anchor texts are your keywords for that particular page. Make sure you select index,follow attribute for your links within the domain. This will make sure the spiders will index and follow your links.

5) Outbound links – Their is a dispute on whether you should have outbound links to authority sites like youtube, google, facebook etc. Even if you do make sure you use no-follow attribute or else you PR gets divided amongst these links.

Both no-follow and follow attributes can be tweaked in all-in-one SEO pack.

6) Deep-Interlinking – This is used to index your pages. You see if you don’t create any backlink for your pages, they will hardly get indexed. A good method to get them indexed is to link your posts with other posts. A good way to do this in wordpress is using related posts plugin or making them manually.

7) Keyword in H1 tags – These are the header tags and must often include your keywords with their variations. Like when writing a post you can use this technique – Title : Places to buy used cars, H1 tag – These are good places to buy used cars etc.
To manage this in wordpress, when you create a post just select your sub-titles and change its font to Header1 <H1>.

 Unique Content – To make sure you rank higher you should always use unique content because search engines love unique content. You can use copyscape (premium) to see whether the writeen content has been copied or is unique.

9) Images Alt tags – This just increases the keyword usage on your posts and page. Often people neglect this but this is totally important for SEO. When adding images, in the dialog you can see title, caption and Alt tag. Try to use keywords in all of these fields.

10) CSS Validation – Usually all themes which come with wordpress are completely validated. But when you buy other themes, make sure you check them for any errors or CSS problems. Because it can create trouble for search engines to index your content.