Knowing what WordPress already does for your SEO
Now, we will turn to what WordPress accomplishes naturally for your SEO efforts. Luckily, WordPress handles much—but not all of the nuts and bolts of search engine optimization naturally. WordPress has an innate economical architecture that generates lean and fast-loading code that search engines love. It enjoys respect and familiarity among search engines, which aids in search spidering. It is a speedy platform that lets you build bigger and better sites in less time. RSS feeds are built in, so you can reach more readers quite easily. WordPress automatically builds keyword-rich URL strings for further SEO benefit. And WordPress effortlessly builds reliable text-based navigation. We'll handle each of these elements in turn and learn how to harness these strengths for maximum benefit.
Understanding WordPress' economical architecture
WordPress employs sound economical architecture to display pages reliably and quickly. In the early days of HTML, each display element on a web page was displayed through the use of markup tags such as <font face="verdana" color="green">This is some text!</font> to display a string of green text in the verdana font style. One of the inherent weaknesses of this approach was that it led to the incessant repetition of markup tags. WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get) compounded the problem by tending towards excessive repetition of markup tags: a web page with 20 paragraphs might have 20 font declarations, one for each paragraph. Repeating markup code makes websites display more reliably, but it makes them far less efficient because they take longer to load and longer for the browser to process the markup.
There is another inherent problem. If you wanted to change the text on your website from green to black, you would have to edit each individual font color declaration throughout your site.
With the advent of CSS (cascading style sheets), the declarations for every element on a web page could be made either at the head of the page, or ideally in an off-page text file called a stylesheet. This answered the issue of both the uneconomical repetition of the markup, as well as giving webmasters the ability to change a single element sitewide by changing one declaration. With well-crafted CSS, pages display more quickly and hence rank better.
WordPress' internal architecture is entirely CSS-based. Unless the WordPress template is poorly coded, WordPress uses off-page CSS stylesheets to define elements. A WordPress page might display with 180 lines of code, where the equivalent page created by a static WYSIWYG editor might display 350 lines of code. Pages load faster, so the search engines respond with good rankings and users enjoy a good experience while visiting your site.
WordPress' inherent economy doesn't end there. WordPress pages are generated quickly and neatly by a simple and quick processing engine. WordPress sites generate proper, valid HTML code that search engines love, although a poorly-crafted WordPress template can undermine code quality.
Building large sites quickly with WordPress
WordPress began its history as a blogging/publishing platform. Even as WordPress has matured into a capable content management platform, it has retained the features that make it adapt as a speedy and agile publishing tool. WordPress will enable you to create content more quickly than other platforms and certainly more quickly than with static HTML pages.
Search engine optimization relies on content. The more content that appears on your site, the more opportunities you will have to rank for the wider families of keyword phrases. Also, each page of content on your website contributes to the whole. Remember, all indexed web pages generate PageRank. So, even a minor page on your website generates a small thimble of PageRank, which contributes to the overall ranking power of your site.
Earning respect with search engines
WordPress enjoys both respect and familiarity from search engines. When a search engine encounters a website with unusual or non-standard navigation, the search engine must do its best to follow the navigation to the deepest files within the website's organizational structure. If the search spider cannot reliably and confidently follow a website's navigation to discover the deepest pages within a website, then those pages are unlikely to be indexed. Because of WordPress' reliability and familiarity to search engines, spidering errors almost never occur.
Because of the sheer number of installations worldwide, search engines crawl and index content on WordPress sites with ease. Faster and more thorough crawling and indexing means that more of your content will be placed in the search engine indexes.
Leveraging WordPress' blogging capabilities
This capability almost goes without saying, because blogging is the historically core purpose of WordPress. WordPress has retained many of the features of a pure blogging platform, such as the presentation of articles in reverse chronological order as its default setting and built-in RSS feed capabilities. The great power of WordPress comes into effect when its inherent blogging capabilities are employed within a commercial site.
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Understanding Pages and Posts
WordPress publishes two separate classes of documents, namely, Pages and Posts. Posts are traditional blog entries that are displayed in reverse chronological order and are assigned to categories and tags. Pages are static documents, not listed by date, and do not employ categories or tags. A business' website will typically use WordPress Pages for static company information, such as a Contact page, About us page, Home page, and will use Posts for blog entries and updates.
A sound and standard approach to a commercial site on the WordPress platform is to have the main services pages for a business published on the front page and in the Pages section of WordPress, while the educational articles, product updates, general blog posts, and commentary are published to the Posts section. The Posts section of WordPress is traditionally where blog posts appear. With this dual capability, a website owner can outpace competitors that aren't employing a blog.
Displaying RSS feeds
RSS feeds come standard with all WordPress installations. RSS stands for really simple syndication, and refers to a family of formatting standards that allow for the timely publication of freshly-updated web content to other websites and devices. In a practical sense, the RSS feeds of your site can be utilized by users to follow your content in an RSS reader such as a Google Reader (now as a Chrome Extension) or an RSS reader app without necessarily visiting your site. When a user subscribes to your RSS feed, they'll receive regular updates of all new content you generate. RSS represents another avenue by which users can remain engaged with you and your content.
You need not do anything to set up your WordPress feed—it's already there. However, you may wish to take a few steps to ensure that users can find your feed. You do this by using a link, which in common practice, is represented visually with the familiar orange RSS icon.
If you need to submit your feed to the search engines or feed engines, you can use any of the following four standard feed locations. Each one represents a different feed standard, but they all accomplish the same thing and search engines can read all of them:
http://yourDomain.com/?feed=rss
http://yourDomain.com/?feed=rss2
http://yourDomain.com/?feed=rdf
http://yourDomain.com/?feed=atom
Many webmasters make the mistake of not promoting their feed. The single best way to promote your feed is to make sure you have clearly visible RSS icon, with a link to your feed visible throughout your site. If the RSS feeds fit within your strategy, put your RSS icon prominently in the header or sidebar. You can also submit your RSS feed to special search blog-only search engines; we'll learn later how to submit your blog to blog engines.
Automatically creating descriptive URLs with WordPress permalinks
WordPress seamlessly and automatically handles the creation of URLs through its permalink feature. A permalink is simply WordPress' way of describing the URL for a particular page. Because keywords in the URL of a page are a ranking factor, if you want to rank for WordPress Development then this URL mysite.com/wordpress-development will perform better in search than mysite.com/index.php?page=5. WordPress' permalink functionality gives you the descriptive URL strings for search engines to follow, with no effort at all.
First, you'll need to turn on permalinks within the WordPress dashboard—permalinks are not activated in a default installation. To turn on permalinks, log in to the dashboard and follow the left side navigation to Settings | Permalinks. At the Permalink Settings page, in the section titled Common Settings, click on the radio button for Post name or Custom Structure, and enter /%postname%/. This permalink structure will automatically generate URLs from your Page and Post titles—but you'll still be able to manually change them if necessary.
Because the titles of your Posts and Pages are relevant to the topic of your content, the permalinks based on your titles will be relevant as well.
With the adjusted permalink setting, the WordPress page editor will automatically construct a well-formatted permalink from your Page title. This feature aids in search rankings. The permalink can be customized if you desire a custom URL.