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Over the last five years, I must have installed the blogging engine WordPress over 500 times. Which means I have been through the standard post-installation rigmarole 500 times. Although the installation is a relatively quick and painless endeavour these days, perhaps 3 minutes at most, the post-installation drama can take 20 minutes, so a conservative estimate of the time the WordPress installation routine and I have spent intimately entwined over the last five years would be, oh, 11500 minutes, or about 192 hours, or no less than 8 days solid!

Although this procedure has become second nature to me, and has changed very little over the years, this morning, as I inhaled my tea amid the breakfast rush, I thought why not post a reference list here.

We all have our own personal WordPress tweaks and changes, just as we have all standardized on our own series of favourite plug-ins, but here I hope to capture the essentials from an optimization perspective so that anyone installing WordPress can run through the list and within 15-20 minutes have a robustly optimized blog. If you have any additional post-installation optimization tips then feel free to add them in the comments section after the main list.

• choose an appropriate blog tagline; make it relevant to your blog content;
• adjust your permalinks structure;
• install the platinum SEO pack – this contains many standard SEO tweaks, but perhaps most importantly allows you to include unique customized page titles and descriptions for each of your posts and pages;
• add base categories and change the standard ‘uncategorized’ category to something more relevant;
• upload and install a clean, optmized theme;
• customize your ‘About’ page;
• set up a contact page; you could use one of several contact form plug-ins to do this;
• install and configure the XML sitemaps plug-in; submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central;
• optimize your ping list; this is an ongoing tweak but certainly something you should consider early on in the life of your blog;
• remove the default “Hello World” post;
• set up post archives; there are several plug-ins that allow you do to this; alternatively, consider an HTML sitemap for your blog, again there are several plug-ins to help with this;
• install SEO smart links in order to help with internal linking;
• install RJ Marsh’s post-plugin library along with “Popular Posts”, “Similar Posts”, “Recent Posts” and “Recent Comments”; again, these will help with internal linking and expose a greater amount of your content to a viewer landing from a search engine;

The scope of this list is confined to optimization tweaks for a fresh installation of WordPress. There are plenty of other security and performance related tweaks that you might consider too, but perhaps they will form the basis of a post another day.

We touched briefly on the ways to increase blog traffic by using relevant images within posts in a previous post. This is a great method of generating additional traffic to your site from search engine image searches. However, how can the inclusion of images contribute to a page’s overall SEO profile? And, moreover, what are some of the recognized best practices when including images on web pages?

Images can be optimizes for various entities (for example, viewers, search-engines, social networking use etc.) which can be said of all forms of page optimization. Here, we concern ourselves with optimization for users/viewers, and for search-engines. There is much common ground, but also aspects unique to each.

Here is a broad checklist for image optimization:

• image relevance – ensure images are relevant to the page content;
• image format – usually jpg and png format; some SEO commentary has suggested a slight bias towards png format in Google image search although this appears not to have been substantiated;
• page title correspondence – matching the page title to the image title and content;
• image title – the image title (or raw file-name) can permit the use of extra keywords; do not waste the opportunity to call an image gone-with-the-wind-cover-scan.jpg instead of DC112092.jpg;
• image alt text – use keyword-rich image alt tags although avoid over-stuffing;
• image size – keep images between reasonable size limits;
• captioning - using captions in WordPress postings seems to increase relevance, though I have yet to fully substantiate this claim;
• keyword vicinity – using your target keywords for the image in the same block level HTML element as the image seems to increase relevance; again, I have yet to fully substantiate this;

The web is a very visual medium, therefore every opportunity should be taken to improve the overall user experience of your site with the appropriate use of images.

Image Search Traffic

Although most blogs are primarily text offerings, consistent use of appropriate images in posts can generate a non-trivial volume of traffic. In the scramble for traffic in a competitive blogosphere, it might be considered indifferent to disregard traffic from image searches.

Recently, I saw an immediate 10% increase in traffic volume to one of my blogs simply by including an image in each post. The images were specific to the content of the post, but remained general enough to offer some cross-niche appeal. Likewise, they were images I had created, or photos I had taken, and therefore were not available elsewhere.

When using images on a blog, keep in mind the following SEO best practices in order to maximize potential traffic gains:

• use keyword-rich alt tags to describe the image;
• use a keyword-rich name for the image file;
• try to use original images – images available elsewhere in the ‘net can be seen elsewhere;
• use images relevant to the blog post;
• if possible, use an image relevant to the title of the blog post – this can help improve ranking in image searches;

I am sure you’ve tried it! I know I have, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbour’s cat has, at some point in one of its 9 lives, even attempted it. Yes, folks, what I am talking about is starting an Internet forum. There are almost as many Internet forums as there are Internet users, but despite this apparent glut of competitors, how can you improve your site’s SE profile and try to gain an edge over your competitors in terms of SEO?

I have used vBulletin, SMF, phpbb, punbb and mybb in the past and after significant use of each, I have decided to standardize my forum building efforts on myBB. To me, it is straightforward and intuitive to manage and customize, has a reasonable range of, and support for, plug-ins and themes, and the free support community always do their best to help out (even if in a markedly high school-ish way at times.)

So I want to talk a little about ways in which we can improve onsite SEO for myBB forums.

There are several useful plug-ins that help with myBB SEO. The first, and most obvious, is the Google SEO mod which incorporates suggestions from Google’s own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. The mod requires a little effort to get working flawlessly, but all credit to the author for including several SEO features in to a single mod. This plug-in will enable keyword-rich search-engine friendly URLs, dynamic XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, dynamic META tags generation, automatic 301 redirects for broken URLS and a few smaller tweaks.

In order to avoid PR leakage (and to deter forum spammers), it is a good idea to install an additional plug-in that appends the rel=nofollow attribute to all in post links.

Similar to the above, any extraneous links included in your myBB templates should be amended to rel=nofollow links. Again, this will help prevent PR leakage. You can also use a robots.txt file to prevent search engine spiders unnecessarily visiting and subsequently indexing pages that should not appear in the index – these may include your login page, standard help files, member list and more.

Signatures are always of some concern to forum owners. I tend to tackle this by introducing a clear statement about when signatures are allowed. I use a plug-in to disable signature by default. In order to qualify for a  standard signature, a user must make 10 good posts. The standard signature has rel=nofollow appended to all outbound links. When a user has made 25 or more good posts, I remove the rel=nofollow restriction on his/her signature links. Employing this method has allowed me to gain and retain good PR and ranking on many inner pages. There are several signature related plug-ins for myBB. The one I use at the moment is available at myBB Central.

Here, I have tried to provide a broad overview of some of the ways in which to raise the SEO profile of a myBB forum. I will make additional posts on this topic, delving in to more detail on each of the broad points mentioned above.

For many, particularly new site owners in popular niches, being able to compete for chosen keywords or keyphrases is not easily attainable. SEO and search engine ranking is such a dynamic activity that we can never say never, but it remains unlikely for a new site to achieve solid ranking for non-trivial keywords.

New sites, along with many older sites, must compete for keywords that in isolation are trivial and offer a mere trickle in terms of traffic. However, the cumulative traffic from many of these single trivial keyword searches frequently exceeds the traffic from one or more popular keywords. These abundant, but less popular keywords, are frequently referred to as long tail keywords.

Targetting the long tail is niche specific. By their very nature, some niches will have a shorter long-tail than others. Detailed knowledge of trends in your niche, along with a good keyword research tool are your best weapons when developing a strategy to target the long-tail.

Targetting the long tail is also a long-term strategy that should be built up over time. One method I use to good effect in niches that have a shorter long-tail I call the bifurcation method. Here, I begin with an established competing keyword and write and article or two directly about this keyword. Then I think of two closely related keywords and do the same. For each of these two second level keywords I do the same and on and on until I have a multi-layered diagram of keywords and phrases. This way I build a binary tree of relevant keywords I can easily traverse and interlink and have on paper a good conceptual framework for my activities.

Forum owners well aware of the power of the long tail. A quick scan at the statistics of a forum I own indicates 250 trivial keywords each with one or two search-engine referrals for the month of April; this equates to about 500 unique visitors. Likewise for the same month, the principal keyphrase for the forum (which has about 64 K global searches per month) for which this forum ranks on the first page offered up 128 search-engine referrals. This indicates the power of the long-tail.

Internal linking refers to the method of linking from one page or post on your site or blog to another page or post on your site or blog.

Since search engine spiders may follow outbound links on your popular or frequently indexed pages, then it is a good idea to give the spiders plenty of your own internal links to follow. This may increase the number of pages from your site that are read, and consequently indexed, by the search engines. It may also disseminate PageRank within your site.

As blog owners, what options do we have to increase our internal linking?

Post Plug-in Library

One method is to use the series of plug-ins developed by Rob Marsh, namely the Post-Plugin Library and its related plug-ins: Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, Popular Posts, and Recent Comments. These can all be found at the main WordPress site, or at Rob’s site. The main WordPress site also lists a series of similar plug-ins which do the same job. For the most part, I have standardized my blogs on Rob’s plug-ins because they offer everything I need and provide a consistent means of managing the several plug-ins (using 5 plug-ins from one author, instead of one plug-in each from 5 different authors.)

Once you have a reasonable head of content on your blog, these plug-ins can be used either as widgets, or by inserting them in to pages or posts, to provide on page links to other posts on your blog. This gives the aforementioned search engine spiders plenty of local content to chomp on, but also – perhaps more importantly – brings before the eyes of readers additional content they may be interested in seeing.

These plug-ins can be used in numerous configurations, either individually, or in combination. Experimentation will allow you to build the best profile for your particular circumstances.

Manual Internal Linking

Another method to increase the internal linking from individual posts is to manually link to previous posts. For example, if you have a past article on blue widgets and you make mention of blue widgets in a newer article then be sure to link back to your previous article when first mentioning blue widgets in the newer article.

A popular method that embraces this technique and takes it one step further by using older articles as the basis for present material. This way, you can start out your new article with an opener such as: “Regular readers may recall my previous article in which I discussed blue widgets. In today’s post I will be looking at blue widgets in a little more detail…”

Automated Internal Linking

A natural extension of manual internal linking, is automated internal linking. Fortunately for blog owners, Vladimir Prelovac has created a plug-in to allow the association of links (both external and internal) to a word or phrase, and more. The plug-in is called SEO Smart Links and is available from the main WordPress plug-in directory of from Mr. Prevolac’s excellent site.

Once installed, the settings allow you to configure a series of words or phrases each with a corresponding link. Each time the word or phrase is parsed by WordPress, a link to your specified target is automatically inserted.

This plug-in is extremely useful, particularly if you already have a large body of content on your site.

One aspect you should bear in mind when using this plugin is that, depending on the number of links you configure, it can impose a non-trivial overhead on your site.

I run several other blogs on various subjects. The Google SERPs for these blogs for their chosen key phrases has been a little unstable over the last year. They have ranked anywhere from #5 to #100 for their respective key phrases. Very little SEO work was undertaken for each of these blogs and any improvement in the SERPs and PageRank I accredited to organic activity, and the quality of the content.

Two months ago, I made a small change to each of these blogs. I used the their respective target key phrases in the leftmost position of their home page title tags. This had the effect of narrowing the uncertainty in the page’s rankings. The SERPs for each blog now spans a far narrower range of positions, ranking consistently between #9 and #20. The other, in a more competitive field, ranks consistently between #40 and #50.

This is a standard best practice in SEO however, I was interested to see how much impact this parameter has on SERPs – it seems to be, as the general consensus, a very major contributor.

For a long time now, I have wondered whether Google considers how often your site is visited via a direct click on a search engine results page.  For example, if a Google user enters search term X and your site returns on the first page.  The user then elects to click on your link (instead of the other nine on the page).  Does Google consider this in evaluating the future rank of you page?  It seems like a fairly objective measure of the appeal of your site’s description when presented on a page against nine of its competitors.

I have yet to fully explore this, but I do have some semi-empirical evidence to suggest some correlation. 

About three months ago I started two blogs.  They were both on the same broad topic.  I was the sole writer for each and kept the post rate constant.  SEO work was identical for each.  Each now has about 15 000 words on the same subject matter. 

Until a month ago, they were both returned in the SERPs at about the same position for the same search terms.  However, an article on one blog contained a slightly different keyword variation for the post topic.  This subtle variation in the keyword meant there were more collisions with a popular search phrase and therefore a few more Google clickthroughs (this was reflected in looking at traffic and referral statistics). 

This small perturbation seems to a contributed in a very disproportionate way and the blog in question now ranks far higher on many search terms, sometimes on page one or two of the results for quite general terms, and also a good deal higher in Google Blog Search than its sister blog about the same topics.

I realise it is difficult to definitively establish whether this factor alone was responsible for the sudden upturn in the SERPs, but given all else was kept fairly constant and the very marked nature of the change, it might suggest that clickthroughs are a ranking factor.

One aspect of onsite SEO for blogs is to configure a desirable permalink structure.  Essentially, a permalink is a permanent reference url used for access once the post passes from the first page of your blog.  It is what others will use to link to the post and, perhaps more importantly, the link the search engines will use to identify your post, page or article.  Permalinks should be unique.

There has always been debate about whether, and the extent to which, keyword-rich urls contribute to a pages.  It is commonly believed that keywords in the permalink do indeed contribute to a page’s SERPs.

The structure of WordPress permalinks is dictated by a series of settings and parameters found under the Settings -> Permalinks section, within the administrator console. 

In order to fully optimise the permalink structure, aim to use your tagret keywords in the leftmost position of the url.  In order to do this you’d need a custom structure containing the single parameter /%postname%.  This creates a permalink based on the post title.  It is then up to you  to choose a unique, keyword-rich and compelling title for each of your posts.

Be aware that using just the /%postname% parameter compels you to create unique titles for every post on your blog in order to avoid collisions (where two articles might have the same permalink, clearly not a good situation).

Also, be aware that if your blog is established with numerous indexed pages then your should avoid altering your permalink structure without a full understanding of the consequences.  It will affect your backlinks, trackbacks and ultimately your SERPs.  Usually, optimising a blog’s permalink structure should be undertaken during the early stages of the blog’s development, and before  a substantial content base is developed.

There are several plug-ins available that allow auto-manipulation of post slugs and consequently permalinks.  These often remove “noise” words (such as “the”, “and” and alike) with the belief that increasing the overall keyword density of the permalink, and shifting the keywords leftward, will ultimately increase the link weight.  Although these plug-ins might offer some small SEO benefit, be extra cautious when using these on active blogs for the same reasons stated above.

Later iterations of WordPress offer the facilty to edit the permalink before publishing in a box just beneath the post title when writing it.  This way you can manually create a permalink for the post or manually crop noise words prior to publishing.

The internet is chock full of blogs.  It’s a harsh reality that as the internet becomes more densely populated, rising to the top of the search engine rankings (SERPs) will naturally become more difficult.  However, there are numerous SEO methods available to all bloggers that will help increase search engine exposure.

First, we will consider blog posts.  Each blog post should be tuned to maximise its contribution to the overall SEO effort of your blog.  Usually, each post will appear on the front page of your blog for a period and subsequently be linked to from the front page of your blog.  So it is important that it be fine tuned in accordance with accepted SEO best practices.

For each post, ensure the post title includes its target keyword or keyphrase in the left most position and ensure that you have your permalink structure set up appropriately.

Contribute to the overall crawlability of your blog by linking within context to other articles or post on your blog.  For example, you could start out “In my last post on this topic found here” etc.

If using images and/or links within blog posts, be sure to  include concise and accurate HTML ALT and TITLE tags.

Within the main body of your blog post, attempt to repeat your main target keyword or keyphrase several times.  Some ‘experts’ seem to brand figures of anywhere between 1% to 5% of the overall body text should be keywords.  I have never noticed any empirical conclusions that back up these figures.  But I do recommend repeating your main keyword several times.

Additionally, repeat similar keywords or keyphrases or popular search variants and synonyms of your main keyword or keyphrase.  This will increase your exposure for searches that couple a variant of your keywords.

Where possible and when appropriate, use HTML <strong> tags to emphasize your main keywords or keyphrases.  Some say that this has no overall effect on your SERPs, however, I have noticed some improvement when using this technique in particular situations.  For example, I once had a sports blog and used HTML <strong> tags to highlight inline the names of players.  I used such highlighting consistently for this purpose across the entire blog and mid-term results seemed to indicate that I did start to see more traffic from search engines when these names were used in the search phrases.  Although I do not believe the evidence behind these claims to be entirely anecdotal, the gains might be very small.

The above are pointers that should help you increase organic traffic through search engines.  However, the most important rule to consider for every post is to write clear compelling content for human readers.  Above all, do not get overly pre-occupied with writing for search engines.