WordPress SEO
One important dimension to running a WordPress website, or indeed any website, is SEO or Search engine optimisation. If you don’t know what SEO is we have a brief guide to SEO on our website. Now as WordPress is a CMS system, i.e. a dynamic website, it presents its own problems to SEO.
Some of these issues are to do with setting up the pretty permalinks correctly so that rather than pages on your site having a web address that looks like www.idiglocal.co.uk/?p=33 it will look like www.idiglocal.co.uk/about/. The latter type of address is better for SEO, having your web page indexed for the keyword 33 would not be very useful. But WordPress has the functionality to manipulate how your pretty permalinks look already.
Another issue, and one that can prove more problematic is the use of the description meta tag. Each page has two very important meta tags, pieces of information encoded within it that add contextual information for the content of the page and in fact it is this information that is displayed to you when you carry out a search on a search engine. The keywords used in both the Title and description of your page are very important for how search engines index the keywords that are associated with your website.
The Large text, in this case in purple as I have previously visited the link, is the page title that is populated by the page title name of your WordPress Post or Page. WordPress is OK at dealing with this and it is a straight forward matter to tell WordPress to use the title of a post or page as the meta tag title by adding the code <title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title> to the <head></head> section of your theme. However adding the description meta tag is not as straight forward. The description is the sentence that appears underneath the title and url. In this case the two words in black bold font, bikes and Stroud were the two words used in the google search result displayed and are both written in the pages description meta tag.
There are numerous WordPress plugins out their that can do this but they all seem to be overly complicated and some have issues with creating descriptions for categories, tags and for the home page. What we have done is right a simply WordPress plugin that will allow you to use the built in WordPress excerpt field and category and Tag description fields. It makes it all very easy to manage.
Again, in keeping with iDigLocal’s ethos of bespoke website solutions we do not list our WordPress SEO plugin on any WordPress plug-in database. If you are interested in what iDigLocal can do to help you with the SEO of your WordPress website please contact us so that we can build a solution that best fits your companies needs.