SEO Your Blog
WordPress straight out of the box is a total mess search engine optimization (SEO) wise. While you would think that the default WordPress configuration would be Google friendly by now, that is anything but the case.
WordPress does a lot of weird stuff. For example, it generates automatically a totally useless robots.txt file while it causes the robots.txt file that you have uploaded to your site to be listed by default in the Google Web search engine index. Apparently, the WordPress Collective really would like to see every bit of their WordPress garbage to be duplicated all over the globe in Google?
On the positive side, it is so easy to search engine optimize your blog, that you could easily do it all by yourself. All it takes is some planning and the correct implementation of several things.
- Choice of the Static Page Reading Option
- Choice / Design of an SEO Theme
- Customized Permalink Structure
- Use of a robots.txt file that blocks certain areas of your blog from Google
- Customization of the Header PHP template of your theme
- Correct use of 301 redirects to manage all URL changes.
How to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) Your Blog
Most people find using a general purpose SEO plugin, like All in One SEO, convenient. That is the only SEO plugin being used on this blog. It is easy to use, and will save you time. But, it is really only doing a couple of things for you.
- It automatically creates 3 custom fields in both your pages and posts.
- It customizes the Header module of your theme.
To avoid duplicate content issues, you basically want each post to appear in Google only once. That means that you must use post excerpts on your home page, or what is often called the index pages, on your categories, and on your archives. Your original content should be indexed in Google as single posts and pages. In other words, your blog is still offering the features of a blog to your visitors. But, most of your blogs features should not be submitted to Google.
Search engine optimization (SEO) changes to your blog, or changing your blogs URLs require 301 post and page redirections. Failing to use 301 redirects can easily result in duplicate content issues with Google. That means using WordPress version 2.2+ for its redirection feature, access to your web server, or the use of a redirection plugin.
You must implement a custom permalink structure for your blog. This basically means using /post/%postname%/ for the names of your posts which insures good keyword anchoring of your post links and selecting/category, or perhaps /cat, to identify your categories. You are not writing a movie script here, but rather search engine optimizing your blog. There is absolutely no reason to be creative, or different, with your permalink structure.
You should study the robots.txt file that I am using on this blog. Archives are identified by year, as in \2007, etc.. All categories start with\category. Your robots.txt file should be blocking what you do not want indexed. My robots.txt implementation validates and uses the correct method for blocking subdirectories. In the case of robots.txt files, validation is a good idea since you want to know for sure whether your file is going to function as intended. There are only a few rules, but the fine points for robots.txt files are rather tricky to get right.
If you are using a Google sitemap then you should make sure that the URLs listed in that file actual includes only what you want indexed. Quite a few sitemap plugins, will ignore the robots.txt file. Most ignore dynamically generated meta robots tags. If your Google sitemap is being automatically generated by a plugin or some other program, then you should verify that it does not conflict with what you actually want indexed.
You can further enhance the SEO of your WordPress blog by editing theheader template of your theme by adding conditional PHP coding that are similar to the following red colored code that would be complementary to the All in One SEO plugin, just after the display of your page title PHP code, as follows. In fact, by making this elseif code a whole lot more complicated you could avoid using entirely the theme customization features of the All in One SEO plugin.
<title><?php bloginfo(‘nam"e’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>
<!–Controls Which Pages Are Indexed By Search Engines–>
<?php if (is_page(‘frontpage’)) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, noodp" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif (is_search()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif (is_404()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif (is_page()) { ?>
<?php } elseif (is_single()) { ?>
<?php } elseif (is_archive()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif (is_category()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif (is_author()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif (is_date()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif (is_year()) { ?>
<?php } elseif (is_month()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif ( is_day()) { ?>
<?php } elseif (is_time()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif (is_feed()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } elseif (is_trackback()) { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />’; ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive, nosnippet" />’; ?>
<?php } ?>
Search Engine Optimize Your Home Page
Obviously, the home page of your blog has to be in the Google search engine. So, do your index pages or listing of posts. The problem is that a big source of duplicate content for a WordPress blog are its index pages. Therefore, all SEO WordPress blogs must be using the static page reading option or post excerpts.
