WordPress SEO Tutorials

Best WordPress SEO Tutorial and SEO tips for 2014, your ultimate WordPress optimization guide, from search engine friendly permalinks, through how title tags work to using 301 redirects correctly and why popular SEO plugins like Yoast and All In One SEO are not always best for your sites Google rankings due to their use of rel="nofollow" and noindex robots meta tag.

I wrote an SEO Tutorial some years ago (before using WP), the older search engine optimization tutorial is still very relevant, but like the rest of the world I moved on and now use WordPress as an SEO CMS. Hence this free WordPress SEO guide. WordPress SEO WordPress out the box (vanilla WordPress with no WordPress SEO plugins or WordPress SEO theme) is pretty good from an SEO perspective, WordPress is a really good base SEO CMS for building optimized websites. However, it is far from search engine optimized and it’s very easy to make on-page SEO mistakes within WordPress especially when using popular WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast WordPress SEO and All In One SEO Pack. All the popular […]

For those not familiar with the SEO silo concept, in a nutshell you try to theme or niche every part of a site to a specific content niche so as many of the elements on each webpage support THAT web pages SERPs NOT the site as a whole or other sections of the website. No idea why it was termed SEO silo and not SEO content theming or SEO content niching since silos are large storage devices, used for storing grain, coal etc… below is an image of a grain silo, I just don’t see the relationship? SEO Silo? SEO silo is really niching or theming your content into a distinct organizational structure that limits interaction with non niched content. […]

I’ve been building web sites and generating masses of free Google search engine traffic for over 10 years, in that time I’ve built the best WordPress SEO Theme available online and made tons of money, yet I’ve never generated or used a Google XML Sitemap. When I decided to write this part of the WordPress SEO tutorial since I’ve never used an XML sitemap and have generated tens of millions of search engine visits to my own sites I was entrenched in my SEO view Google XML sitemaps are not only not required, they are a hindrance to SEO analysis. After researching what others think about XML sitemaps I’m not so sure? Rand Fishkin for example advises using XML sitemaps: […]

WordPress SEO Tutorial updated February 2014 WordPress by default does not include the ability to automatically link related posts together. It’s unfortunate because the vast majority of Related Post WordPress Plugins I’ve tested (tested a LOT) get it wrong, not from an SEO perspective per se (most aren’t great SEO wise, but they are OK), but inefficient in the way they generate the related posts (poor PHP coding/database management) which means we can’t use them since page speed is an important SEO metric and most related posts plugins slow a site down. If the WordPress core team added a related posts feature it would be efficient, maybe that’s why there isn’t a WordPress core related posts feature? One related posts […]

WordPress SEO Tutorial updated February 2014 Alt text or alternative text is the text used to describe what an image is about. For example the image to the right of this text (URL to the image: https://stallion-theme.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/stallion-responsive-wordpress-theme-200×150.png ) has alt text “Stallion Responsive Theme”. You can view the code for the image below, with WordPress this is about as simple as it gets when WordPress adds an image to a post via the Add Media button. <img src="https://stallion-theme.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/stallion-responsive-wordpress-theme-200×150.png" alt="Stallion Responsive Theme" width="200" height="150" class="alignright size-post-thumbnail wp-image-491" /> WordPress SEO Alt Text Value Alt text associated with images is very important SEO wise, Google uses it to associate SEO ranking to the image and to the page the link is on. […]

Duplicate Content and Canonical URLs WordPress SEO Tutorial updated February 2014 WordPress has the potential to mess up your websites SEO by generating archive pages (home archives, monthly archives, daily calendar archives, categories, tags and search results) with duplicate content. There’s also other ways WordPress can generate duplicate content, but in recent versions of WordPress those have been fixed via canonical URLs (as long as your theme/plugins don’t break the WordPress core fix). For Stallion Theme users everything below is dealt with by Stallion Responsive other than over using content on multiple categories/tags which is a user issue (see later). WordPress SEO Canonical URLs on Paged Comments Before dealing with duplicate content on archive pages let’s check your WordPress theme […]