would you say it is safe to use only robots.txt as indicated above (no crawling /categories), in addition to excluding categories via the nice sitemap plugin you suggested?

thanks

There are a lot of sites that harp on about SEO techniques but nearly none of them mention that a good SEO strategy starts with a good source code base. I understand that not everyone has the luxury of being able to hand code their own site, but that should not exclude it being mentioned.

You need to shift the source code -to- content ratio to swing drastically in favour of the content.

Unfortunately, nearly all Wordpress themes are an abysmal mess under the hood. Some are even still designed using tables for layout, and nearly none of them use symantic markup or correct progressive layout.

When a client comes to me with a lame word press theme I always end up stripping it right back to bare bones and reconstruct it with CSS techniques.

It’s a long process but worth while. As an example, one particular theme I was able to reduce the source code from about 380 lines of bloated crappy tables-laden code to a 40 line harmony of XHTML Strict and CSS.

Once you understand that and put it into practice, content becomes king.

Let’s say you have 2 web sites, both with identical appearance and identical content. The first one is designed with tables and other dated methods, and no consideration for correct markup. The second site is designed with a light CSS framework and correct markup layout. The second site will rank significantly higher than the first, every time.

And oh yes…code that validates IS important as well. But I wont go into that right now.