Setting up WordPress for SEO

• in the homepage banner, or just below
• in the H1 title tag of the home page,
• in the title and meta description tags of the site’s homepage.

Although there are rarely unpleasant surprises, it is worth checking out:

Settings -> Writing:

• Click the option to fix XHTML tags, it doesn’t guarantee you a 100% valid w3c code, but if it can limit the mistakes…
• Change the default category of articles and replace “unranked” with “your main keyword”, the one that characterizes the purpose of your site.
  Thus, in case of forgetfulness when putting a post online, your article will be “ranked” on this keyword word.
  Of course, you must have created the famous category beforehand (in the Article/Category menu) (during the creation of the categories,
  fill in their SEO tags)
• Nothing prevents you from having an “unranked” category which can be very useful in a blog
• Do the same for the field that concerns articles published by email.
• The ” update service ” field allows you to report (ping) your site to search engines.
  By default WordPress pingue (from the verb pinger!) http://rpc.pingomatic.com
  You can alert as many engines as you want

Here is a list of addresses from which you can use it according to your desire to disseminate. Being a Quebecer, I tend to warn European engines.

The following list was 100% valid 6 months ago, sorry for not checking it before posting this article. (I’m not early…)
Copy and paste the links into the input box at the rate of one address per line

• http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2
• http://api.feedster.com/ping
• http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://blogpeople.net/ping
• http://blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2
• http://ping.feedburner.com
• http://ping.feedburner.com/
• http://ping.kutsulog.net/
• http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
• http://ping.wordblog.de/
• http://rpc.aitellu.com
• http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/
• http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping
• http://rpc.twingly.com
• http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
• http://www.blogpeople.net/ping
• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?XmlPing
• http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
• www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
• http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Settings -> playback

In the menu there are few settings; yet you’ll check that your encoding is UTF-8 and check the snippet for syndication streams.
In pages built on the fly by syndication flow, WordPress can aggregate

• The full article
• the first X characters of the article (you define X)
• or the excerpt

It is by far the extract that is the best choice.

Why the extract?

In this regard, I refer you to the paired article published on copywriting- practical (configure W-P SEO) so as not to be redundant if you read both.

Settings -> Discussion

Default settings, check all three boxes
The rest is yours

Settings -> privacy

On the day of the launch of your site, check the box “Ask search engines to index this site” and then … Save !!

Settings -> Permalinks

This is about cleaning up the URLs and structuring them:
In the most common settings options, check ” article name ” (appears in the latest WP 3.3.1 update) or custom structure and enter /%postname%/ (previous WP version) this is the advice that can be found everywhere and which gives the most refined urls but it has the disadvantage of flattening your entire blog in terms of its architecture.

This is why this choice is questionable.

A strategy to strengthen the SEO of your menus, your categories, should push you to enter /%category%/%postname%/ This 2nd option gives weight to category titles (normally relevant keywords) and “verticalizes” the structure of your site. Please note that this only concerns articles on the site.
As far as the pages are concerned, you will skilfully play with the ” parent ” function (which can be found on the options on the right in the pages where you input your texts) to build this structure by menus, by themes.

It should be noted that depending on the type of activity and the size of the blog, it will not be structured in the same way.

Last but not least :

The ” Optional ” option, two fields that offer you to replace the WORD Category (present by default) in your category syndication URLs and the MOT tag in keyword syndication pages.
Your URLs will be cleaner if you remove these words completely (read below for the appropriate plugins) WordPress offers you here to replace it with a generic keyword

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SEO plugins that will help you

Let’s go back to the previous advice right away:

Remove the word “category” from your syndication urls:

The ” no category base” plugin does this very well, WordPress SEO /Yoast too.

Remove the word “tag” from your keyword syndication URLs

The “ no tag base ” plugin is simple and effective, WordPress SEO /Yoast too!

About sitemap .

Because of the English term, there is often confusion between ” the two ”

• Create a sitemap.xml file, it’s the one that addresses search engines. Take google sitemap generator for example, but WordPress SEO/Yoast does it very well too.
• Create a sitemap page, it’s the one that is displayed on your website and is aimed at Internet users – and a little spiders-) with Realtime Sitemap which offers good options or PS Auto Sitemap. (Yoast doesn’t!)

Reading the two articles we can see that most of the tools are included in the WordPress SEO/Yoast extension, so rather than accumulating extensions, use one of the Swiss Army knives of SEO for WordPress.

That’s it for the basic settings, I’m not saying that you can’t do better, but if you already refine all this, you won’t hurt yourself…
I’m not saying it’s enough either, but I think it’s the addition of small details that ultimately makes the difference.
I’m still not saying that, without respecting these points, you have no chance of ranking, Yvon’s blog that I kindly pointed out to illustrate some examples illustrates the opposite:

It is in the top 3 on the referral queries of copywriting on the Google.fr

Let’s not forget that SEO is:

• A well-coded, no-barrier, well-configured platform
• Solid SEO-optimized texts
• Inbound links of the highest possible quality.

We have touched here only on the first point, and the other two weigh very heavily in the balance.

What about internal linking?

We could dedicate an article to plugins and widgets that automate internal linking,

• Latest articles
• Latest comments
• Top articles
• Articles related to this one
• Articles that might interest you
• Automating links that associate a word with a page
• The breadcrumb trail: only necessary if your blog has a vertical structure

This will be for another time under the pretext that the personal choice factor is much more involved in this type of task automation

Before loading a new plugin, check that your theme doesn’t already have the feature on board.

Check that WordPress inserts the canonical tag on your default posts (see in source code)

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Your comments or questions will make me happy!