ToddW Blog

The Ultimate Wordpress SEO Guide is a step-by-step guide to making your wordpress blog more search engine friendly. Hopefully after reading this seo guide you will be able to put some if not all of it to use to yield better results with your wordpress blog in the search engines. This guide will cover .htaccess, robots.txt, permalinks, titles, google sitemaps, duplicate content and more SEO techniques.

Search Engines & Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a major killer for good results in the search engines. Luckily with wordpress it’s not that hard to SEO your entire wordpress site.

Google has already made it clear on their blog what duplicate content is, and I will share with you so you don’t have to head to the google blog.
“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”

If Google finds duplicate content on your site(s) they will choose themselves which to include in the search engine and which to rank you for. This means you could be ranking for that crappy print version of your page.

Eliminate duplicate content on your wordpress site.

1. Use the MORE tag.
   Having your entire post on your homepage, category page, and archive page definitely constitute duplicate content.
   You NEED to use the MORE TAG (Alt-T) when writing your post. Write a couple sentences that include keywords, and are “meaty” you want to be descriptive for your users as well as the search engines. If you write meaty for your users 99% of the time it is kickass for search engines too.
2. Use .htaccess & Google’s Perferred domain feature in Google Webmaster Tools
   www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com are seperate pages and google will pick and choose which to list for you in SERPs.
   You need to define which you want to rank for by doing one or two things (or both to be extra safe!).
   You can go to google webmaster tools click webmaster tools (ironic?) click the site you want to manage (you are using google webmaster tools right?) click Preferred domain and then select which you would like to use for the site.
   Option two is to use .htaccess to tell google, and force everyone to use the www. version of your site.
   #Force www domain
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com [nc]
   RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
   #End force www
   What this does is that if anyone trys to access yourdomain.com it redirects them to www.yourdomain.com and by doing a 301 it’s telling the search engine to permantly use the www. version of your site and passing along any power the non-www has to the www. version.You can do the .htaccess method or you can tell google or you can do both. Personally I like to do both because you never know what other search engines are using or if it’s working properly on google’s end.
3. Robots.txt prevents Google and others from going into duplicate content overdrive!
   A normal install of wordpress has a post in a ton of different locations. Your post will be on the homepage for a certain amount of time depending how many entrys you do, and if you use the MORE tag. You can also find your post in the category(s) it’s in, the archive section and the feed section!!! That’s a lot of duplicate content and you DO NOT want google selecting which is the “best” to list in their results. With a little tweaking of robots.txt and permalinks your on your way to a search engine optimized wordpress Before we jump into this remember to use the MORE tag to prevent your ENTIRE post from being seen on all the above mentioned pages.Create/Add the following to your robots.txt file located in your blogs’ root directory.
   #If you are using archives disable category indexing, if you are NOT using archives then DO NOT use this or search engines will not find your #posts and you will be doing the opposite of SEO.
   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /category/
   Disallow: /feed/
   Disallow: /trackback/
   Disallow: /cgi-bin/
   (Depending how your blog permalink structure is setup will depend on how you configure the robots.txt file. More on permalinks later, keep reading!) By making the above additions to your robots.txt file wordpress will become much more Google friendly. Google will no longer get confused about which page to add to their search engine, no more getting your feed indexed and not your post page! Google allows the usage of * on the disallow line in robots.txt however NO OTHER search engine I know of allows this so if you use an * on a disallow line you should make a new user-agent line for google bot.
4. Use the same linking structure throughout your site! Did you know that in google’s eyes the following are ALL DIFFERENT pages www.domain.com/article
   www.domain.com/article/
   domain.com/article
   domain.com/article/
   Yep, that’s right google will see that single page of content as FOUR seperate pages! Now add the category page, home page, and archive page and you can understand why the MORE tag is so important. Talk about major duplicate content! If you did nothing about this problem google would pick and choose which article to rank better and it probably isn’t the one you watnt. Luckily we went over the www. problem in #2 above, but what about the rest? How do you fix www.domain.com/article and /article/? SIMPLE, you have the power in your hands! When you link to your other blog posts ALWAYS link the same way your permalink structure is setup (more on this later). If you use /article link /article if you use /article/ link /araticle/ it’s THAT SIMPLE! This is true for when you setup related posts, most recent posts, and NOT only wheny ou link to another post from within a post. Whever you link to your posts from use the same link as your blog is using automatically!If you want to take this one step further and FORCE everyone to use the same link structure Jim has a great tutorial on how to setup .htaccess for re-directing wordpress articles. Be sure to read his entire post and comments before attempting the process mentioned because there have been recent additions to his post.

Wordpress Permalink aka SEO’d Links.

As previously mentioned a standard install of wordpress does pretty crappy in the search engines and one reason for that is the default link structure. We are lucky that wordpress makes it SOOO easy to SEO the links using mod_rewrite and simply changing a few things in the control panel on the permalinks page of wordpress.

By default wordpress uses links like http://www.yoursite.com/?p=111 which is not as bad as it used to be, luckily google CAN spyder those pages (other search engines not so easily, and hey you are optimizing for ALL of them!!) but the URL contains no keywords, and is not as easy to follow as http://www.yoursite.com/how-to-seo-wordpress/ nor is it as easy to remember for humans or look as pretty when other people link to you

Wordpress makes it super simple to change this simply login to your wordpress blog as an admin, click options, click permalinks and then put the radio button on CUSTOM. I suggest using /%postname%/

Why should you use /%postname%/

1. The url will never change no matter how many categories the post is in or if it’s moved from one to another.
2. Word on the street is search engines like files closer to the root directory, so the less crap after the domain and before the page the better. (Not officialy aproved but hey we do what we can to help!)
3. The URL flows better visually and is easier for non-web savvy people to understand, share, and read outloud.

What could be changed? You could put a category base if you want to block the categories from being spydered in robots.txt and allow the search to use the archive pages of your blog to find the post pages. This would only make you have one line instead of a line for each category name in your robots.txt file.

Wordpress SEO Title

The title of a standard wordpress blog is NOT at all SEO because it puts the meaty part at the VERY END!! You don’t want your blog name, category name, bunch of >> crap and THEN the unique title at the end! What a waste of what could be a perfectly search engine optimized title! Titles are VERY important because they are what shows up in BLUE underlined in the search engine results pages. If your title is GOOD you not only will rank better but you will get MORE CLICKS, and more clicks equals more VISITORS YAY!.

Wordpress is so nice they make it very easy to update the way the title is displayed.

1. Login to your blog as the admin.
2. Click Presentaton
3. Click Theme Editor
4. Click Header (found on the far right)
5. Locate [ …Code is missing here… working on getting it to post ]

What this does is sets your homepage title to SiteName - Some keywords, and description of your site, and then sets EACH post page to the title you wrote when writing the post. Make sure to write short, descriptive titles for EACH post you do. “COOL SITE” is not going to cut it, sorry guys!

Using the Heading Tags

Once again we are lucky wordpress comes out of the box using heading tags. The problem arises when people start using custom themes or customizing the layout of the blog themselves. Somethign else to keep in mind is that MSN uses META description for the description of your site in SERPS but it also uses the content of the H1 tag if the description is very short or none existent. Even if you have text before the H1 tag MSN still uses the content of the H1 tag in the pages description.

You should use the H1 tag for the title of the post for the page that you are on and then use H2 and the rest where they fit in. A popular technique is to use H2 for the blog title if you still use text.

To edit the single post page:

Login to your blog as admin.

Click Presentaton

Click Theme Editor

Click Single PostOnce here make sure your [missing code again] looks like this.

Make sure you put it in the right place and not in a tag or in a link as the title is used in a few places on this page.

Wordpress META SEO Plugin

There’s a lot of discussion going around if META DESC helps with your search engine results and personally I believe it does help in a number of ways. The first way it helps is that it gives each page on your site a different description in the search engine results. I have a site from a few years ago that has over 1,000 pages in Google and EVERY description is identical. The reason for this is on every page I have the exact same little blurp before the main juicy content of my page, and here is where a META DESC will help. Google, MSN and probably even Yahoo use META desc. to describe your page in the SERPs if you have it set. So, if your description in SERPs is crappy due to the same stuff on each page OR if you don’t start every article with keywords and a summary then a META desc. can help you.

The plugin I use for this is Add-Meta-Tags which is VERY easy to install.
This plugin will automatically set a description for each page if you want based on the first # of characters IN YOUR POST (not your page). It also can be configured per-page for keywords, and description. You may also set your homepage keywords and description seperate from the rest of the site too.

Search Engine Friendly Navigation

Your category navigation and/or archive navigation may be great for humans to find the articles they are looking for but your homepage is not passing the “power” to the article. Your homepage most likely receives the most backlinks thus has the most power, and spreading that power around your site is very important for ranking well in the search engines. There are a few good plugins that will make your posts more easily found by the search engines, and also rank higher in them.

Remove Previous & Next Post
With anchor text like Previous and Next you are not helping yourself in the search engines and are also not enticing your users to read other articles on your site. You need to remove the Previous and Next text and replace them with the title of the previous and next article accordingly. Now, not only will you have better anchor text for your other articles but humans may actually spend more time on your site!

Related Posts Plugins
There are many related posts plugins out there and they do exactly that they show a number of related posts to the one you are currently viewing. This will help spread the power of a popular page to other related pages thus helping more pages rank.

Most Recent Posts Plugins
The most recent posts plugins available are a great way to spread link love to your newly written posts from older more established ones. This also will interest readers who find old posts on search engines to checkout your newly written ones. This is a good addition to your sidebar, and listing 5-10 new posts is a great idea.

Most Important Posts
Surely you have a few important posts that you want ALL your readers to know about, and that you want to rank the best in the search engines. Well, the easiest way to get a few posts ranking better than others is to ALWAYS link to them from your homepage. This can be accomplished with the category post plugin. This plugin allows you specify a category and any articles you place in this category will be listed on your homepage. This plugin requres a few tweaks to the theme files but overall is not that difficult to install. This plugin alone could make your most important pages rank a lot higher in the search engines.

NoFollow & Linking to other people
By default wordpress places nofollow on links to other people’s sites in comments/names and this should be left the way it is. You don’t want to be linking to “bad sites” and get penalized for something another user of your site did. It’s also important to NOT use nofollow when linking to pages on your OWN site that you do not want the search engines to follow. If you don’t want search engines to visit areas on YOUR site then you should use robots.txt to limit their access. You DO NOT want to tell Google and other search engines that you don’t “trust” the content on your site even if it is only a feed or archive.

Do not link to 100 people from your homepage… or really anyplace on your site. Keep the external links to a minimum if you want to help your own site out. By providing links to a bunch of other people you are dilluting the power you pass on to your own pages and this will in turn negatively effect your search engine rankings. If you have some stores or other sites you want your visitors to be aware of but don’t really care if the search engines go to them then use nofollow to prevent the leakage of your super duper pagerank power!

Wordpress Google Sitemap Generator Plugin
Most likely if you take the advice written on this page you wont have any need to implement a sitemap on your blog. However it never huts to do more for SEO, especially something google tells you MAY help your site if it’s not easy to navigate already. Luckily for us there is a nice Wordpress Google Sitemap Generator already available. The plugin is easy to install, and requires no knowledge of programming. Once you’ve got your google sitemap plugin installed and generated your sitemap it’s time to submit it in the Google Webmaster Central.
Linking to your own blog posts within another post or page.
It’s always good to link to other parts of your blog especially related posts and pages. When linking be sure to use a descriptive text and not “Click Here”. Click Here does nothing for you in the search engines while using the title of the other post/page does wonders for ranking for them in SERPS.
MISC Wordpress SEO Tips

• Do not submit your new wordpress site (or any) to 200 directories or anything of the sort, EVER! Most of these places are spammy directories and to google and other search engines your site will appear spammy as well. This could cause penalization by google and take months or years for your site to recover.
• Unique IP Address. While google has claimed that having a unique IP per-site has no benefit it doesn’t hurt to have one, and you never know what other search engines are looking at. Unique IP’s are cheap normaly under $5 a month and provide more than SEO benefits. A lot of large ISP’s block e-mail from domains that don’t RDNS to their own UNIQUE IP address, it will not be as easy for someone to find out what other sites you own, if your IP is blocked only one site you have is blocked not every one, etc.
• You should try to write 150 or so words as a minimum per-post and make sure your posts are quality not a copy. The less original content in your post and the more of a quote or copy the more it will look like duplicate content to google and other search engines. Be sure to write more unique content than what you’ve quoted from someone else.
• Do not link to unrelated sites, especially from your homepage or sitewide. (Unless using nofollow)
• Sitewide text links unless using nofollow are a bad idea due to dillution of link power.
• To create more content give the user/visitors something to interact with on your site. Start a poll, use mybloglog (homepage only), ask for user input, have a friend start the commenting, etc. User input is a great way to gain uninque conent by comments and also a great way to gain backlinks from other users when they start writing their own blog. If the user feels “attached” to your site in any way they are more likely to link back to your page.
• Use a pinging service to let the world know you have written something new. You can set this in WordPress by logging in as admin, going to options and then writing, scroll down and enter: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/