How to Set-Up SEO Options on a Coupon Code Wordpress Blog

If you are setting up a voucher code or coupon code website, then one of the best options available (as well as being the quickest) is to use Wordpress.  You can set up a coupon code website in no time at all – but what about making sure it gets good rankings in the search engines?  This is the tricky part given the competition that is out there and how saturate the niche already is.  Here are some initial steps you should take in order to help with SEO.

Set Up Titles and Descriptions
Wordpress offers a lot of possibilities in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). To begin with, the title and description of your site must be completed in the fields provided for this purpose. In general settings, you can specify the site title and slogan (which is actually the description of your site).

Avoiding Duplicate Content in Wordpress
Then, in the reading options there is an option that seems trivial at first, but can be useful. Should you have the home page showing the latest articles or a static page? In the first case, make sure to only display excerpts (the first 5 rows for example) rather than the articles in full. This is to avoid duplicate content. Note that a static home page is not the best option: Google loves pages that are regularly updated, the home page is the first site, it must be well referenced. However, it all depends on what you want to do.

Allow for Comments and Feedback
By allowing comments you can press home the importance of an item. Plus if it is discussed, the more it will be important to Google. The Privacy tab is also important. Without it, your site does not even appear on Google, which would be unfortunate so make sure you let search engine index your website.

The “Rewriting URL” setting is also essential and can help with SEO. By default, I recommend the following custom structure: /% category% /% postname% / – this means that the URL of your website will be composed as follows: http://www.yoursite.com/category/article-post-title.

Categories and Tags
Can categories help with SEO though?  Well, the first thing is to understand how WordPress works. At the URL, if you put the structure that I proposed above, the category appears before the title of the article. But what happens if you assign multiple categories to the same article?
The use of several categories facilitates research and it is also useful to bring up the item in different lists of categories. One might think that optimizes SEO, but this is not really the case as Google may think that there is a poor distribution of content if this article is seem in many different locations.

Use Tags to Help with SEO Rankings
But do not panic, there is a solution: link your articles to tags, rather than several categories. Depending on how you use tags, multiple URLs can lead to the same page. So again, it should show only the titles of articles and possibly a sample. You can also consider using a description instead of the extract, which is even better, since it then shows different content on the listing or category page.

Useful Wordpress SEO Plugins to Download
These are just a few tips on how you can set your Wordpress blog up for SEO when displaying coupons and voucher codes.  Some of the best plugins available (which are also free) are the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, the All in One SEO Pack, and also the SEO Nova  – these are the highest rated downloads.

If you want an off the shelf coupon code template for Wordpress then search for Premium Press themes in Google – they have a new download called Coupon Press which works very well and is optimized for SEO.

Article compiled by Jenna McSmith – Check out her Pinterest page dedicated to Brookstone Coupons here – Jenna runs a number of different coupon code websites all of which are running on the Wordpress platform.

Image is licensed under CC Attribution