How to Optimize Your Wordpress Blog by Setting up the Right Meta Tags and Other Code

This instruction goes deep into the optimization of a Wordpress blog. I started out with 2 earlier posts and it would be best if you went through the steps outlined there first. Those links are:







Now I want to show you a plugin that will reverse your URL so that your keyword rich post title comes before the rest of the URL. One thing that could mess it up though is your html code. To make sure the code is right you need to go into the theme editor and load up “header.php” and search the html code for where it says “wp_title();” and make sure there is two single quotes marks between the parenthesis like this: wp_title(‘’);


You can go ahead with the plugin and come back to this step if it doesn’t work right. The plugin you need is “Headspace 2” by John Godley. It is a very powerful plugin that unlocks many SEO options for your Wordpress blog. You can just Google some tutorials about Headspace 2 to find out more.


Once you have it activated, click “settings” and “headspace.” That will bring you to a page that says “Headspace / Page Settings.” Once there you will see many different selections and you want to open up “post settings.” You will see 3 fields: page title, description, and tags. In the field marked “page title” you want to put this short code starting with the percent sign - %%title%% - Your Blog Title. So since the title of my blog is Dan Lambeth, I have this in mine - %%title%% - Dan Lambeth

Then go to the category selection on the same page and put this code in but replace the title with your own. There is a space on each side of Archives and the dash>
%%category%% Archives %%page%% - Dan Lambeth

Then go to the tags selection and do the same thing>
%%tag%% Archives %%page%% - Dan Lambeth

Next I want to tell you that Wordpress will let you write a description for posts, pages, and categories but most Wordpress themes will not actually put the description anywhere. With Headspace you can control that by putting this code (%%category_description%%) without the parenthesis, into the description field of each of those pages. Then you should write a description for the categories and you will have a default description for every article you don’t write a description for.

You can also optimize your images if you use them. There is a plugin called “SEO Friendly Images” to install that will do this. After you activate it there are three settings. In the ALT attribute field you should put (%title) without the parenthesis.
In the Title attribute field you should put (%title photo) without the parenthesis. And check the box that will override Wordpress’ default alt tag. Then if you don’t specify a title for any image you upload into a post it will use the post title.

You can also install an html site map with a plugin called Dagon Design Sitemap and then go through the settings and you will have a page that has a link to every page and category on your site. People can use this for navigation and the search engines can use it to index all of your content. Another site map plugin you should install is an XML site map for computers to read and it is called Karailiev’s sitemap


How fast your pages load also affects your SEO rankings. There is a plugin that will speed up how fast your pages load called WP Total Cache and there are some options with the CDN or content distribution network you can configure with this that will cache your content on Amazons S3 CDN.