Wow, this is a big topic but I’ll answer it quickly. Yes, in fact WordPress is so search engine friendly, if you have done all the rest right, that is it astounding. But you have to do the rest right.
1. Watching your page ranking is like following the stock market. Do it every day and you will get ulcers. Do it every month or three and you will have a clearer idea of how the whole thing works.
2. Make sure you have titles and alts on all images and links and that the words in them match the keywords and words within your content. Same with headings.
3. Make sure you are not using tables, links and page display inside of javascripts, flash, or other things that aren’t TEXT but which display information. If you do, then make sure there is plenty of text to back up your keywords and site purpose because search engines can only read WORDS not pictures.
4. Make sure you have your most important information in the first third of your page. ALL of your page, coding and all. Try to push things “up” – but that is a more complicated issue. Some search engines troll only the first 30-50% of a page.
5. Research your keywords and use them very wisely. There are tons of articles on the net about this or you can try this article for more info.
6. Learn everything you can about how search engines work, how they work together and separately, and as soon as you do, they will change the rules. But start at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ and selfpromotion.com.
I hope this helps. Being scanned by s search engine isn’t a guarantee that you will be included. They have a lot of criteria that goes beyond the scope of WordPress. But we are working on an article in the Codex that will be released soon on how to make WordPress even MORE search engine friendly. Stay tuned.
wow thanx! that was some answer 😉
ok i will keep an eye open for the Codex (were do i find that?).
many ragrds
Lorelle:
“Wow, this is a big topic but I’ll answer it quickly.”
Hehe, I’d hate to see when you take your time to answer. Actually, I think I have. ;)
You have…you have….you have….you have…………..
Yeah, I’ll throw in and say that even without ‘nice-URIs’, without proper keywords, etc., CHAITGEAR has gotten good rankings. It’s ALL about the content. Well, and it doesn’t hurt to learn how search engines work, and tune things. For instance, my H1 on a single post page is the post title, not the site name. Things like that.
I recently played around also with pushing the post title into the keywords list, but might need to throw in extra keywords as well. Was an attempt to see if I could get some articles up higher than they were (third on yahoo, tenth on google, that sorta thing).
With nice-URIs, and some more reorg of the content, I’d expect to bump up a little bit. But content is king, visits/pagerank helps a lot too.
-d
davidchait:
Are link-backs (link popularity), and things like being on blogrolls and RSS impacting your Page Rankings?
And are you also (I know you probably are but this is for the masses), using alts and titles in all your links and images to help connect those keywords?
WordPress is fairly search engine friendly from the get-go, but the lack of meta tags makes me uncomfortable, so how is that working for you? Did you add some or use one of the keywords plugins?
These questions apply to others.
What have you done to make WordPress even more search engine friendly?
Be sure to set up Permalinks. Use good, descriptive titles for your posts.
