Several people have asked about search engine optimisation on wordpress.com. There seems to be a lot of information about SEO and WordPress available on the web, but most of it applies to the .org version and not the hosted .com version. This post is about how to approach SEO with WordPress.com and the difference with other websites.

On the download page there are some SEO tips but I thought I would clarify how these apply to WordPress.com. When developing a WordPress.com site we are unable to alter the source code.

Will Google find my site?

The short answer is yes, although it might take time. Google send out spiders that searches the web and indexes sites. The spider re-visits you side every few days to see if anything has changed. Google is aware of WordPress, so it knows to look on the WordPress servers.

How to discover if Google is aware of your site

It can be frustrating trying to find your site in Google, you type in some words which you think will lead to your site, search, look at a few pages and still can’t find it.

If you want to know if Google is aware of your site type the following into the Google search box.

“cache:www.nameofsite.com” (without the quotation marks) for example cache:www.fnfbrighton.wordpress.com.

If nothing is returned, Google doesn’t know you site exists, its probably best to wait a couple of weeks.

How to improve my rating on Google

There are millions of websites on the Internet and search engines need to decide how to rank your site for a particular search term. They do this using the “Google search algorithm” which is make up of several components.

  1. Having information on your site that changes – Google likes change, so if the spider sees that your website has changed it thinks its more interesting, so will improve your ranking. Adding posts on a regular basis will help.
  2. How many sites link to and from your site – A website does not exist in isolation (which is why its called the web). If there are relevant links to your site and from your site to other sites, your ranking will be improved. They key is relevant link. If you try to add links to sites that aren’t at all relevant to your sites content, your ranking might suffer. Research relevant site and ask them to link to your site and vice versa. You can also add links to your site in “relevant” comments (if you SPAM other sites your comment might get deleted).
  3. Keywords – your site must contain key words that are made up of relevant search terms (see below).

How WordPress.com is different

Traditionally, webmasters would add meta tags that add keywords and descriptions to the head of each web page. The most important of these are the title, description and keyword tags.

WordPress.com does not allow you to add meta-tags (you can with WordPress.org), however, these are not so important today and WordPress.com can do well in search engines. Google takes your sites meta information from other sources.

Title tag – the title tag information is makes up the main link when you do a search on Google. For WordPress.com sites this title is the title of your site and pages.  It is important to make sure the name of your site and the title of each post and page contains relevant key words. You can see the title information at the top of your browser when you look at your page.

Description Tag – the description tag appears in Google as the words under the link, when you do a search. For example if I type “Kate Bush News” into Google, under the link to the site I will see the following “Seán Twomey’s site with news, discography, chronology, and information about HomeGround Magazine.”. This text makes up the description tag. If Google does not find a description tag, which is the case with WordPress.com,  it takes a relevant portion from the first few lines of your post or page. This means  you also need make sure that key words are in your pages, especially where you introduce your site and tell people what your site is for.

To test this try typing SCIP DIY WORDPRESS into Google, look at the words under the link and then go to the site to see where these appear on the page.

Key Words Tag – this traditionally was a list of key words or search terms. Its thought that google does not use this at all but looks for keywords in your content. Since you cannot add this tag to your WordPress.com site, you need to fill your content with key words.

What are keywords?
Keywords and phrases can be though of as search terms that you would type into a search engine to find your site.  To work out what these should be, think carefully about what your site is about, then brainstorm all the search terms you can think of. You can also speak to friends about your site and ask them what they would type into Google to find your site. After you have a list prioritise those that you think are most important.

Next you need to make sure your site contains all these keywords. These can be in the titles, content of pages, description of images, names of images and links to other pages.

I have attached an article about keywords that I have found helpful. Also here is an article about the use of keyword with images.

You can also Google’s Keywords Tool to find suggestions.

Remember to make sure your text reads properly. If you just fill parts of your site with random keywords it might be treated as a SPAM site.

Links and Key Words

When creating links to other sites it useful to write some text describing what you link is rather than just typing the name of the site.

For example, “I was recently staying in this modern boutique hotel in Cape Town” is better than writing, “I stayed in this modern boutique hotel in Cape Town www.theone8.com“. The latter example wont tell search engines what the link is about, while the first example uses some key words (its a pity I haven’t stayed there).

How specific is your site?

This really relates to keywords. For example, if your site is about crime prevention there are thousands of sites about crime prevention, so your site doesn’t get much chance of getting to the top of the Google index, unless you have something radical, new and very popular to say on the subject. However, if your site is actually about crime prevention in Hove, your site will be found if people search for “crime prevention Hove”.

Think about how specific your site is and who the audience will be and make sure these are addressed in your keywords.

Adwords

Google Adwords are worth investigating. These are the paid for links that appear at the top of a search and on the side of a page. You are charged per click, so you need to be very specific about what keywords you use to advertise (see above). The cost per click varies per keyword or phrase, and how popular it is,  so using the above example ”crime prevention” will cost a lot more than the phrase ”crime prevention Hove”.

These are not difficult to set up and not necessarily expensive. You can set up a monthly budget, say £15, and once you have reached your budget you wont incur further charges.

Conclusion

Search engine optimisation is a difficult subject and this is only a brief explanation. Be aware of sites that say that they can get you to the top of Google if you pay them some money, they wont, and there is no “secret short cut” to get to the top of Google. However, many people do spend money with website developers optimising they websites for SEO. They will help you identify your keywords and optimise your content and copy.

If you cant see yourself on Google, give it time, it can take a few weeks.

It would be really interesting to hear your experiences, successes of problems with SEO, so post a comment.