I won’t give some deep details or technical stuff because SEO is a real job which need some theory and a lot of experiences. You will find below the concepts you should know.

Search engines don’t index site but pages. It sounds trivial but it’s very important. It means having a strategy just at the beginning (like submit a sitemap, check pages titles format, or optimize header of the pages) is not enough. If SEO is important for your site, you have to think about it each time you add a new content.

As said before, the most important SEO parameter is the content of the site. It’s your major asset to have a good ranking in search engine results. I give bellow some SEO experts tricks:

• Permalink structure have to be like ”/%postnames%/” or  ”/%category%/%postnames%/“. Others formats are useless since they don’t add any information and they make your URL longer.
• The slug (URL variable part) have to be not too long and avoid stop words (a, one, for, with etc.)
• The main keywords of your page have to be in the URL, in the title and in the first lines of the post.
• The first words of your post will be used by search engines in the result pages. Your first words should make reader visit your website. You can specify the text to use by search engine by adding a meta tag (see plugin below)

A good way to optimize your ranking is to have a thematic page with links to your most interesting or popular pages. This type of page should have a good ranking in the search engines results.

Avoid duplicated content. It is possible that your content is accessible thru different URL or some pages of your website have the same couple title/description. Search engines don’t like it. The main cause for blog is archives. With WordPress for example there are time, categories, tags and authors archives. The risk that the content of the blog is duplicated is very high. There are solutions: meta tag can help you. I let you search the web to have more information on this subject.

The site speed is important for visitors pleasure and for search engines ranking. Two ways to improve your site speed:

•  Use plugins as little as possible. Of course they can help you much but they can slow your site. Many plugins can be replaced by theme modifications. Now child themes make this update really easy.
• Use a cache plugin. There are many of them. Search on internet to find the one corresponding to your needs.

There are many SEO plugins for WordPress to help you rank your pages in search engines results. For me, WordPres SEO by Yoast is one of the best because it adds a checklist in pages and posts edit view to help you optimize your content for ranking.

The last advice I can give is to read regularly about SEO on internet. Search engines update their algorithm regularly and you have to understand and react to keep a good ranking.

Non-exhaustive reading list accessible for newbies:

• Seomix and Le blog de Florian Karmen (French speaking)
• Yoast and Matt Cutts blog (English speaking)

I hope this initiation will be helpful for beginners. Others reader you can correct or add advises in the comments.

This theme is a quick and dirty hack for my bilingual blog and I think it can be helpful for other people like me who trying to make a multilingual WordPress website. So I’ve decided to share my code on Githhub and encourage you to test it and improve it. The code is commented and section you have to update are clearly identified.

Currently the theme works as below:

• IF the visitor requests  yourwebsite.com/ THEN:
• IF the preferred browser language is French THEN visitor is redirected to yourwebsite.com/fr/.
• ELSE visitor is redirected to yourwebsite.com/en/.
• IF the visitor requests an URL like yourwebsite.com/fr/xxx or yourwebsite.com/en/yyy THEN websites of the WordPress network manage the request.
• IF the visitor requests yourwebsite.com/zzz where zzz doesn’t start with  fr/ or en/ THEN:
• IF a static page exists it’s returned to the visitor.
• ELSE:
• IF the preferred browser language is French THEN the visitor is redirected to yourwebsite.com/fr/erreur404 which displays a 404 error message in french.
• ELSE the visitor is redirected to yourwebsite.com/en/404error which displays a 404 error message in english.

I’ve many ideas to improve the theme and make it more easy to use but I haven’t any time and competency to do that. If this theme is useful for you and you want to improve it, fork my Github repo and send me pull requests.

Source on Github : https://github.com/oncleben31/Multisite-Language-Switcher-Theme

I need two independent sites to facilitate the plugins and theme localization with an easy way to switch between languages if a translation is available. Another reason is to optimize the search engine indexing. With this solution I can have some language specific posts without translation.

Below I explain how I’ve implement that with WordPress: 

1. Setup of the WordPress multisite feature. If you don’t know it, it allow to have many WordPress site with only one installation. Administration is simplified and updates are done only once. To have more information go and read the multisite documentation.
2. I have a root blog (oncleben31.cc/) which is useless (see step n°4), a french blog (oncleben31.cc/fr/) and an english blog (oncleben31.cc/en/). The language is setup in wordpress settings. Benefits: I can have specific plugins or theme for each language if needed.
3. I use the Multisite Language Switcher by lloc plugin to display a link in the side bar to go to the other language (sources hosted on github). This plugin is really useful: it allows to display a link to the other available language and it allows to add a link to the translation of a post or a page if available too. This feature is eased by adding a drop down list in the edit view.
   

   Example of the Multisite Language Switcher plugin when editing a post

4. The last thing is about managing visitor coming directly on  ”http://oncleben31.cc/”. Indeed the root website is a third wordpress blog not in french nor in english. I made a hack to redirect users in function of the preferred language return by the browser. To do that I’ve created the ”Multisite Language Switcher Theme” theme which doesn’t display any content but manage the redirection (theme detailed in this post). To avoid disorientating your visitor this theme manages 404 errors too . You can find the theme’s sources and improve it on Github.

Setting up a multilingual blog is not easy and I’ve search a long time to find the good solution corresponding to my needs. If you have simular needs let’s try this solution and share your experiences in the comments.