Following these quality guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your WordPress site.

The quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

Quality Guidelines – Basic Principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users?  Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Quality Guidelines – Specific Guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

• Don’t send automated queries to Google.

• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

• Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Following these design and content guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your WordPress site.

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate (use the All-in-One SEO Plugin).

• Check for broken links and correct HTML (use the Broken Link Checker Plugin).

• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few (choose a Permalinks structure under Settings in the dashboard).

• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

• Review Google’s  image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.

Next time…a review of Google’s Quality Guidelines

The WordPress plugin that addresses the most important on-page optimization needs…A MUST HAVE if you want to generate traffic on your WordPress site.

What does it do?

By default, WordPress uses the blog tagline as the meta description and keywords, but the keywords in your tagline might not relate to content in your individual posts and pages.

My blog tagline “offering WordPress website services” is not very descriptive for a person searching for the how to use the All in One SEO Pack.  I need to edit the Title, Description, and Keywords (or Meta Tags) to let the search engines know what content is found on this page.

Optimize Individual Pages & Posts

This assumes you have the All In One SEO Pack plugin install and activated on your WordPress site. If you need any help, please contact me.

The All in One SEO Pack can be found as a drop down on the post and page editors.

The Title allows you to chose the name of each post. As you can see with this post it is called “SEO for WordPress”. The title tag for this page has been changed to “How To Use The All In One SEO Pack To Optimize Your Website”. The keywords are more descriptive and will allow me to rank higher for search terms relating to the All In One SEO Pack.

The Description is basically the meta description for the post. Whatever you write in this field is what will affect the description search engines will use to describe your website in the search engine results. Make sure that your meta description properly reflects the content found within the post. This is the first thing your readers will see when your site was appears in search engine results. The meta description I used in this post is: “This all in one seo pack will help you optimize your wordpress for better search engine results. Easy to install and use”.

The Keywords are the meta keywords you want to include for the post. All you have to do is make a list of keywords that appropriately reflect the keywords found within the post and enter them in. Use commas to separate each meta keyword and avoid keyword spamming or keyword stuffing. This will hurt your search engine results. The meta keywords used in this post are: “all in one seo pack, seach engine, google, optimize, seo”.

You can also optimize the home page of your site. The All In One SEO Pack allows you to make search engine friendly your home page title, home page meta description and meta keywords.

From the dashboard, select

All in One SEO

Here are just a few options you can set…

Home Title allows you make your homepage title separate from any other pages on your site. It’s recommended to make your home title include the keywords you are trying to target for your site.

Home Description allows you to fill out the meta description for your home page. This is what will appear in search engine results for when your home page is being displayed.

Home Keywords are the meta keywords you want to have included on your home page. These keywords should reflect keywords found within your site. Make sure you include any keywords you want to rank high for in search engines when filling this out.

All in One SEO Pack – The plugins that optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines.

Keywords are the words and phrases entered in a search engine to reach a result page.

How to choose effective keywords

Consider…

• traffic (How often do people search using the keyword?)
• competition (How many other sites appear with this keyword?)
• relevancy (Is this the keyword people will use when searching for this product or service?)

Traffic

Use the Google AdWords free keyword tool to get a quick look at the advertiser competion and the search volume for the previous month and 12-month period.

Go to the tool and enter your keyword in the “descriptive words or phrases” box.

You will get a list of keywords with search volume details. If you don’t check ‘Use synonyms’, you will get a list with fewer keywords.

Competition

Use the same tool to research the competion.

After you select the keywords that best fit your product or service and that have sufficient traffic, go to Google and search to see which web pages rank for it. Make the list of the first ten URLs so you can analyze each site in the keyword tool.

Go to the tool, click the radio button for “Website content” and enter the URL in the box.  You will be able to compare the high-ranking site with your own. Analyze your own page and see which keyword(s) you are missing. Edit the pages to include the suggested and related keywords.

Relevancy

Use the ‘Additional keywords to consider’ list for more related keywords, and the match type dropdown menu to broaden or narrow your search. (Learn about keyword match types.) Don’t be afraid to change one or more of your keywords if you find that you are not getting the results that you expected. Evaluate, analyze, test, and repeat!

Happy Keyword Hunting!

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by Google that assigns a numerical value between 0 and 10 that represents how important a page is on the web.

Google figures that when one page links to another page, it’s casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.  (By the way, Google.com has a PageRank of 10.)

Use this free tool to find the PageRank of your pages.

————————————————