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Follow on Google News | SEO for Wordpress - Definitive GuideAccording to WordPress, as of February 2010 there were over 10.6 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 11.4 million active WordPress installations. It is without question one of the more popular blog engines available today.
By: simon birch Optimizing WordPress URL’s URL’s are one of the first factors taken into consideration when performing SEO. Ideally, the page URL should be descriptive of its content. WordPress’ default, www.yoursite.com/? There are 3 different options for optimizing WordPress URL’s. The first is to have the post title hyphenated: www.yoursite.com/ The preferred option out of these is the first, the hyphenated post title. For SEO purposes, the flatter your site architecture is, the better; both the category and the date method bury your post in a deep pit of directories. Using dates in your URL can make your content seem old, and therefore unworthy of a visit. How to Add Your Page Title to The URL Setting up your WordPress blog to automatically create URL’s from the post title is simple. Locate the “Permalinks” Shorten URLs With Post Slugs What happens if your title is something like, “The Top Ten Ways to Give Your Child a Lifetime Love of Learning”? It’s rather long, and long URL’s are almost as undesirable as generic, non-descriptive URL’s. WordPress has a solution available for this as well: Post Slug. Post Slug allows you to shorten long URL’s, and specify a keyword rich permalink to use instead. To use Post Slug, select Posts -> Post Tags from your Dashboard as pictured to the left. A screen like the one below will appear. This will be on the left side of the page. In the first field, entry the Title. In the second field, titled “Tag Slug,” enter the keyword(s) you want to use as your URL. Enter a description if you choose, then click “add tag” to save changes. Optimizing Titles in WordPress The default page titles on WordPress are Blog Name – Post Title. While this wouldn’t be bad if you were trying to brand your blog name, usually you want keywords specific to your post in the page title, not the name of your blog. To fix this, choose Appearance -> Editor from your Dashboard as pictured on the left. You’ll be taken to a page with a section for editing code, and a list of templates on the right-side of the page. Click on a page from the list and the code will appear in the text box for editing. From the list of theme files, select the header file (header.php). Be sure to make a back up copy before editing any Templates. The code you want to look for is highlighted in the image below: Your goal is to display the post title as the page title, only including the blog name within the page title on the home page. To accomplish this, change the existing code in your header file to the following: [IMG]file:///C:/ Don’t forgot to save you changes! http://www.seomarketingforums.com/ Fixing Duplicate Content in WordPress For every new entry you create in your WordPress blog, it inadvertently becomes stored in four different locations. Initially, the post will of course be stored as a page with the actual post, but it will also be on the home page. As new content is added, the post is stored on paginated pages and in the archives. Search engines don’t like duplicate content, so this can cause serious problems with not only your page rankings, but also your authority. What can you do about this? If you set up posts, so that the entire entry is shown on the home page, your content will not be duplicated. There are two ways to accomplish this. You can either use the “More…” quick tag button, or set your blog up to automatically create post summaries. The WordPress “More…” quick tag is available in the editing toolbar when you create new posts as shown above. Click on this button after the text you want to appear on the home page. A visitor will see a summary (the text before the “More…” quick tag) with a link to read more. The entire post will only be shown on its own page, thus fixing the duplicate content issue. The second option is to set your blog up to automatically create these summaries. To do this, go to Settings -> Reading from your Dashboard. In the “For each article in a feed show” section, select Summary; click Save and you’re done! RSS Feed Crawling By default, WordPress allows search engines to crawl the blog’s RSS Feeds. This provides results that are nothing but illegible pages of XML, which in turn reduces the perceived quality of your site, and therefore its authority. Luckily, fixing this problem is simple and quick. To tell the search engines not to spider these directories, add the following code to your robots.txt file: User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes Disallow: /wp-content/ Disallow: /wp-content/ Disallow: /wp-content/ Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /search Disallow: /feed Disallow: /rss Disallow: /comments/feed Disallow: /feed/$ Disallow: /*/feed/$ Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$ Disallow: /*/trackback/$ All of these solutions are very simple to perform. They are also incredibly important if you want to get your WordPress blog to rank well. If you get one of the many free WordPress themes available, check first before you make any of these changes. Some of them will be already set up with these SEO optimized changes. http://www.seomarketingforums.com/ # # # Http://www.seomarketingforums.com/ Www.seomarketingforums.com/ Www.twitter.com/ End
Page Updated Last on: Jul 03, 2011
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