One of the main reasons many people turn to Wordpress is reputation as a search engine optimised publishing tool, which to a certain extent is true, in that it ticks several of the main boxes (spider accessibility, text, recency, frequency, permalink structure, trackbacks, pings etc).
Additionally, a series of SEO plugins can further enhance your site’s attractiveness to search spiders by allowing you to set robot.txt rules, change page title structures, and even automatically generate links from ‘trigger text’ anchors to your optimised pages.
However, there’s one feature of SEO which is frequently overlooked by bloggers and that is the importance of heading tags. Heading tags (usually take the form of <h1>, <h2> <h3> and so on in your theme code) are given great consideration by search engines when deciding what is most important in terms of text on the page, with H1 being the most important.
In most themes you will find that the <h1> tag is assigned to the blog name on the page. You can check this quickly on your blog by selecting ‘view > page source’ in your browser and then searching (CTRL + F) for H1. An alternative method is to use Firefox, and install the excellent AddOn called Firebug. Once installed you can right click over any element on a page and select ‘inspect’ to see what attributes are assigned to it.
Wordpress SEO: Beyond Plugins
However, it is unlikely that you would want your website to be found in search engines for your ‘blog name’. Sure, I want to ensure that I’m found when people search for ‘Gite Guru’, but that should be achieved mainly through my choice of URL and the very fact that I publish regularly. I’m more interested in being found for the phrase ‘Gite Website Design’, which as you’ll see from my home page is included in my ‘blog description’, where it makes a lot more sense. In most themes, the ‘description’ is given the attribute <h3> meaning it is less important than the blog name, which from an SEO perspective is just daft. So if you’re using a theme which does this, it makes sense to switch things round a bit to give your SEO a boost. Here’s how:
Step 1.
In your Wordpress admin, go to Appearance: Editor and select the header.php file. Search for the H1 opening and closing (<h1> and </h1>) tags, and switch them to <h3> and </h3> tags. Lower down, find your the tags around your description (usually <h2> or <h3>) and switch them for <h1> opening and closing tags. Save the file.
Step 2.
Go and have a look at your homepage. You’ll see that your Blog name is now small, and your Blog description is now big. That looks daft. So you need to switch around how the elements are styled in your theme’s CSS file. Go back to Appearance: Editor and select the style.css file. Before doing any of what follows, I suggest you make a copy of your style.sss file content somewhere in case you mess things up and need to revert to original. Now search for and find h1, and copy the information in brackets. It should look something (but not exactly) like this:
Copy the bit within the brackets as I’ve highlighted below into a text document somewhere as you’ll need it again in a minute. Now find the h3 or h2 tag (depending on which tag your theme has assigned to the description). Copy the bit in brackets, and PASTE IT OVER the H1 stuff replacing it entirely. Now get the bit you saved in a text document, and paste it over your old description bit, so that you’ve essentially switched the styling round. Save the file, and go back to your home page, and you should now find that your Blog name is big again, and your description smaller. However in search engines eyes, your description is now more important than your blog name.
There are an increasing number of themes out there which do this by default, and more cleverly, some of them have ‘conditional’ styling (the excellent theme framework Thematic springs to mind), whereby the h1, h2 and h3 style attributes change according to where you are on the website. Specifically, If you’re on the home page, the description gets the h1 tag, whereas if you’re on a post page, the post title gets the h1 tag. Clever huh?
So when you’re considering which theme to implement on your website, it’s worth checking to see how well it really works for SEO before implementing it (or considering how easily you can do the work to the theme yourself). Check the demo in Firefox, check how the headings all work, and take it from there.
by
Wordpress SEO: beyond plugins
One of the main reasons many people turn to Wordpress is reputation as a search engine optimised publishing tool, which to a certain extent is true, in that it ticks several of the main boxes (spider accessibility, text, recency, frequency, permalink structure, trackbacks, pings etc).
Additionally, a series of SEO plugins can further enhance your site’s attractiveness to search spiders by allowing you to set robot.txt rules, change page title structures, and even automatically generate links from ‘trigger text’ anchors to your optimised pages.
However, there’s one feature of SEO which is frequently overlooked by bloggers and that is the importance of heading tags. Heading tags (usually take the form of <h1>, <h2> <h3> and so on in your theme code) are given great consideration by search engines when deciding what is most important in terms of text on the page, with H1 being the most important.
In most themes you will find that the <h1> tag is assigned to the blog name on the page. You can check this quickly on your blog by selecting ‘view > page source’ in your browser and then searching (CTRL + F) for H1. An alternative method is to use Firefox, and install the excellent AddOn called Firebug. Once installed you can right click over any element on a page and select ‘inspect’ to see what attributes are assigned to it.
Wordpress SEO: Beyond Plugins
However, it is unlikely that you would want your website to be found in search engines for your ‘blog name’. Sure, I want to ensure that I’m found when people search for ‘Gite Guru’, but that should be achieved mainly through my choice of URL and the very fact that I publish regularly. I’m more interested in being found for the phrase ‘Gite Website Design’, which as you’ll see from my home page is included in my ‘blog description’, where it makes a lot more sense. In most themes, the ‘description’ is given the attribute <h3> meaning it is less important than the blog name, which from an SEO perspective is just daft. So if you’re using a theme which does this, it makes sense to switch things round a bit to give your SEO a boost. Here’s how:
Step 1.
In your Wordpress admin, go to Appearance: Editor and select the header.php file. Search for the H1 opening and closing (<h1> and </h1>) tags, and switch them to <h3> and </h3> tags. Lower down, find your the tags around your description (usually <h2> or <h3>) and switch them for <h1> opening and closing tags. Save the file.
Step 2.
Go and have a look at your homepage. You’ll see that your Blog name is now small, and your Blog description is now big. That looks daft. So you need to switch around how the elements are styled in your theme’s CSS file. Go back to Appearance: Editor and select the style.css file. Before doing any of what follows, I suggest you make a copy of your style.sss file content somewhere in case you mess things up and need to revert to original. Now search for and find h1, and copy the information in brackets. It should look something (but not exactly) like this:
Copy the bit within the brackets as I’ve highlighted below into a text document somewhere as you’ll need it again in a minute. Now find the h3 or h2 tag (depending on which tag your theme has assigned to the description). Copy the bit in brackets, and PASTE IT OVER the H1 stuff replacing it entirely. Now get the bit you saved in a text document, and paste it over your old description bit, so that you’ve essentially switched the styling round. Save the file, and go back to your home page, and you should now find that your Blog name is big again, and your description smaller. However in search engines eyes, your description is now more important than your blog name.
There are an increasing number of themes out there which do this by default, and more cleverly, some of them have ‘conditional’ styling (the excellent theme framework Thematic springs to mind), whereby the h1, h2 and h3 style attributes change according to where you are on the website. Specifically, If you’re on the home page, the description gets the h1 tag, whereas if you’re on a post page, the post title gets the h1 tag. Clever huh?
So when you’re considering which theme to implement on your website, it’s worth checking to see how well it really works for SEO before implementing it (or considering how easily you can do the work to the theme yourself). Check the demo in Firefox, check how the headings all work, and take it from there.
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
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