WordPress SEO – Naming Your WordPress Blog for Better Search Engine Rankings

I’ve written a general SEO article on choosing the correct domain name and naming a website at Domain Name Optimization that’s still fully relevant today and well worth a read. The above SEO article goes into a lot of detail about choosing the right domain name and name of a site for the best SERPs. I’m not going to cover domain name choice here or repeat the entire article, so please read the above article if you want more details.

The WordPress themes for sale on this site are search engine optimized so the name of a WordPress blog is much less of an SEO issue than for a standard WordPress theme (most WordPress themes are awful in this respect including those listed as SEO WordPress themes!).

When I converted these themes for my own use I realized the name of the WordPress blog is going to seriously impact the SERPs of deep content, that’s WordPress post and pages (these are the pages where your main WordPress content goes) negatively. With this in mind I edited the template code in a way to significantly reduce this negative SEO impact. This means we can worry a lot less about the name of the blog and more on the title of individual WordPress posts and pages (covered later) for maximum search engine rankings.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t think about how we name a WordPress blog at all, if you look through my example WordPress blogs (listed through out this website) you will see the vast majority of them are named in a keyword rich way that’s relevant to most of the content on those websites.

For example this WordPress blog is named

SEO/AdSense Ready WordPress Themes

There were many other possibilities I could have used including

WordPress AdSense Ready Templates and SEO Themes

I may change this in the future to try out different keyword [phrases, see what this website is capable of gaining in rankings from the search engines.

I realized most of my WordPress theme customers are looking for AdSense Ready WordPress Themes to make money online, not SEO WordPress Themes per se to gain more search engine traffic, so I optimized for AdSense SERPs primarily whilst still covering SEO SERPs in the name of this WordPress blog. Reality is if you gain more search engine traffic AND monetize your WordPress blog by adding AdSense ads your going to make more money long term than just adding AdSense, but you have to aim for what potential customers are looking for first, NOT what you think they should be looking for

A lot of SEO consultants believe the first keyword of the title element (little side note here, it’s title element NOT title tag as many so called SEO experts call it!) is the most important on page SEO factor, I’ve seen no evidence to support this SEO view, if it is true it’s a very small SEO boost. In my SEO experience all keywords are treated equally and general SEO benefit from the title element is spread evenly over all keywords, what is important is their proximity (Keyword Proximity) for relevant multiple keyword SERPs, my blog name for example:

SEO/AdSense Ready WordPress Themes

So all five words will receive 1/5th of the total SEO benefit from this title element.

But, we aren’t only after single keyword SERPs and this blog name covers many potential multiple keyword SERPs

AdSense Ready WordPress Themes
AdSense WordPress Themes
SEO WordPress Themes
SEO Themes
WordPress Themes
AdSense Themes
etc…

The phrases above that are created with greatest keyword proximity are going to receive the most SEO benefit from this title element. So “AdSense Ready WordPress Themes” is going to get a bigger boost than “SEO WordPress Themes” because “SEO” is separated from “WordPress Themes” by two other keywords where “AdSense Ready WordPress Themes” is a continuous phrase (greatest keyword proximity). So what you try to do is create a title element that covers a few relevant SERPs with the most important SERP being kept close together if possible to increase keyword proximity: my main SERP would be “AdSense Ready WordPress Themes” for the main page of this WordPress blog.

Now we understand how your WordPress blog name is used by the search engines, how do we choose a relevant blog name? With my WordPress themes as with most WordPress themes the name of the blog is listed in the header as a text link back to home, in some themes (including mine) it’s also listed in the footer as a text link back to the home page. You might also have the name of the blog used as a link in a navigation link as well with some WordPress themes, so two to three links in general derived from the name of the WordPress blog: the anchor text of the links will be the name of the WordPress blog.

Unlike all other WordPress themes I’ve looked at my search engine optimized themes do not use a H1 header to surround the header link on ALL pages. This is very important from a SEO point of view. If you view source of the home page of Make Money Online Guide and a single WordPress blog post of that site and check the code for the header home page link you will find on the home page the link is surrounded by a H1 header, but on the single WordPress blog post (and many other types of content) it’s a div class called “h1div” with the CSS styling makes it look the same size etc… as a H1 header.

Basically to you and me every page looks the same (looks like a H1 header in a browser), but to the search engines none of the deep content pages waste this important H1 header on a home page link! Anyone familiar with SEO knows the H1 header is about the second most important on page code (first being the title element). Since the home page link is on every page of a WordPress blog due to how all WordPress themes are designed, this means on all WordPress themes but mine there is a H1 header on all pages with the name of the blog within it!

Unless every page of your WordPress blog is SEO relevant to the name of your blog this is terrible! With a highly niche content site the name of the site should help a lot of the pages, but you don’t want to be locked into this H1 header on all pages when there is a better way.

The H1 header (ideally there should only be one H1 header per page) should cover that pages (not the entire sites) main SERP(s), so the page you are on now is called

“Naming Your WordPress Blog for Better Search Engine Rankings”

Because I want this page to gain SERPs like:

Naming Your WordPress Blog
Better Search Engine Rankings
Search Engine Rankings
WordPress Search Engine Rankings
etc…

Not particularly great SERPs in a traffic sense, but I needed to cover this information in the WordPress SEO tutorial and these are about the best SERPs available.

And so I don’t want the only H1 header for this page to be the name of this WordPress blog

“SEO/AdSense Ready WordPress Themes”

I want it to be the title of this blog page

“Naming Your WordPress Blog for Better Search Engine Rankings”

Which it is (view source to see).

This is ONE of the reasons why my AdSense/SEO WordPress themes are the best available online today by far (have been for years), because my SEO themes are the only WordPress themes I’ve seen that seriously take search engine optimization into account.

For users of my WordPress SEO themes this means the name of the blog isn’t as important as other WordPress users using other themes, the name of the blog will only be within a H1 header on the home page, monthly archive pages (which if you follow my advice you won’t use anyway) and the home page archive pages.

These archive type WordPress pages have no real keyword focus which is why I’ve used the name of the blog for the H1 header. For the home page ideally you’d name your WordPress blog to cover some main SERP(s) since in general your home page will gain most backlinks which makes that page the best to target harder SERPs.

Don’t over worry about this, try a WordPress blog name out for a month and see how it works in Google, if you aren’t happy with the traffic results try another one, it won’t cause long term SEO damage.

Don’t forget your blogs visitors have to read your blog name as a Google SERP, might seam a good idea to name your WordPress blog just one keyword like “Themes” so all the title element SEO benefit goes into that one SERP, but remember your potential search engine visitors don’t have to click on your search results link in a Google search. If you are looking for “AdSense Ready WordPress Themes” and see two pages listed in Google with the titles:

Themes
AdSense Ready WordPress Themes

I know which one I’m going to click on first.