WordPress SEO Tips Tricks and Plugins

August 21st, 2007 | 7 comments

In general, WordPress is an awesome blog platform. It’s easy to use and most importantly, there are loads of plugins you can use to make it do just about anything you want.

Unfortunately, the basic software is extremely search engine UNfriendly and there are also a few other things I don’t care for. Fortunately, there are ways to fix those problems.

SEO Flaws with WordPress

note: Plugins can easily be reactivated with newer WordPress versions, but “hard coding” will have to be redone when upgrading to newer WordPress versions.

1. URL Canonization - As I stated in a previous post, there are six different versions of any URL. Of course this isn’t WordPress specific, as this is true for any type of Website, but I wanted to mention it anyway. I use Justin Shattuck’s WWW redirect plugin to solve the most basic WWW and nonWWW problem.

Jim Westergreen explains the rest in his “Sharpen your URL’s with Google” post. Unfortunately, his guidance only works if your blog is hosted on a top level domain (TLD). In other words, his post will set you straight if your blog is at yoursite.com but if it’s in a subdirectory, as mine is, like yoursite.com/blog/ then it’s not going to work for you. This will have to be solved through some advanced .htaccess work, which I’m not fluent with. So, if you notice, I haven’t completely solved this issue for myself yet. If you know how, I’d love to know.

2. Untargeted Title Tags - The title tag is one of the, if not THE, most important on-page SEO factor. The title of any page you publish must be targeted to the content on the page! The default of “Blog Name Post Title” is no good. The first words in your title tag should be the exact text of your post! Optionally, you can you have it formatted with your blog title after your post title, which isn’t necessarily bad in terms of SEO. Most people that do this, do it for name branding purposes.

Correcting the Title Problem: To make your WordPress title tag more SE friendly you can do one of two things.

Download Aaron Schaefer’s Optimal Title Plugin. This WP Plugin moves the blog title past the post title making the post title more targeted.

Go into your theme/header.php file and insert

< ?php if(is_home()) { echo 'Your blogs name | Important Keywords'; } else { wp_title('') ;} ?>

3. Link Structure - OK, I wouldn’t call this a problem, IF you’re using the right permalink structure, but if you’re using the wrong one, it is definitely a problem. When you login to your admin panel and click on options, you’ll see a tab for “permalink.” If you’ve already started writing to your blog and you don’t know what I’m talking about, you have a problem!

The best option to use for your permalink structure is checking the “custom” field and entering /%postname%/ As you can see on my blog, I do not use that structure. The reason being, I wasn’t thinking when I first set this blog up and by the time I realized it, I had already written several posts. Since the structure I use /%category%/%postname%/ isn’t too bad SEO wise, I left it.

4. Duplicate Content - In case you haven’t noticed, every post you write eventually appears in 3 different places on your blog; The archives, the category pages and the main post page. -edit- Your best bet is to restrict the directories you don’t want followed through robots.txt. I had originally posted that Andy Beard created a cure to the WordPress dupe problem by creating a plugin that “adds rel=”nofollow” to all links within the content that are displayed on your home page and duplicate content pages.” But, it actually just helps strengthen the links on your other pages and doesn’t really solve the dupe content issue.

You can find Andy’s plugin here. I haven’t tried it out yet, but Andy is a smart guy who continuously delivers solid advice!

5. Default rel=”nofollow” in comments - If you want to reward your readers for posting comments on your blog, which updates your pages and adds relevant content, you’ll need to get rid of the rel=”nofollow” tags that they so graciously add for you.

This can be solved by installing a simple plugin. I use Denis de Bernardy’s “DoFollow Plugin, which simply removes rel=”nofollow” from your comments and allows PageRank (PR) to flow, rewarding your viewers for contributing.

With flowing PR comes dreaded spam! To combat this I use Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet plugin, which filters 99% of all the spam that comes into my blog.

So do all of those things and enjoy better search engine rankings

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7 comments

Andy Beard (16 comments.)
21st August, 2007 at 9:44 am

I wouldn’t say it cures duplicate content, it just stops them leaking but they are still indexed unlike conventional SEO techniques.
Josh Spaulding
21st August, 2007 at 3:41 pm

Thanks for stopping by Andy. I’m about to go research that plugin a little more right now. I noticed you’re using it, obviously. Why not just restrict two of the three options with robots.txt or nofollow? I realize having them all accessible is good for the structure (spidering) but I would imagine it’s worse for rankings.
Andy Beard (16 comments.)
22nd August, 2007 at 3:57 am

The duplicate content pages on a blog aren’t as useless as many blogging “experts” claim. Look at how powerful the linking structures are on Wikipedia channelling around relevance.

They also bring in search traffic as additional optimized landing pages.

Have a delve through my SEO category, it is in date based order, so the more advanced stuff is nearer the bottom such as my Wordpress SEO for competitive niches
elanso
22nd August, 2007 at 6:50 am

wpSEO: More SEO for Wordpress…

Wordpress is simple, minimalistic and yet extremely powerful. However, being easy-to-use, the engine has also some huge disadvantages - e.g. “naked” Wordpress is very inefficient when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Dicontas WordPress Blog Admin
7th September, 2007 at 4:57 pm

Dicontas WordPress Blog Admin…

An excellent WordPress article on WordPress plugins, themes and how to get the best from WordPress….
Steve (1 comments.)
18th June, 2008 at 7:04 pm

Hi, I was able to cook up a regular expression for .htaccess that will add a slash to the end of directories. (aka “yoursite.com/blog” will become “yoursite.com/blog/”). I just now put it together and have not thoroughly tested it.

# add slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*/[^/]+$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ [R=301,L]
Josh Spaulding
18th June, 2008 at 7:09 pm

Thanks Steve. You really dug this post up from the dead Glad you did, need to update it.

There are several WordPress plugins that will do that for you, although I can’t think of them off the top of my head.

Thanks for the note though!