Wordpress SEO tips

[sahilcoolsmart]

Hi, I have been blogging on self hosted wordpress blogs from over a year now. Over the time i have learnt some important seo tips especially for wordpress blogs:

I'll go fast over these tips and won't be giving all the links coz you can always search for resources on Google.

Plugins:

1. Google Sitemap Creator
2. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator http://www.dagondesign.com/
3. Related Entries plugin
4. Popularity contest plugin
5. Optimal Title plugin
6. Enforce www. Preference plugin
7. KB Robots.txt http://adambrown.info/b/widgets/kb-robots-txt/

Design SEO:

1. On your single post pages instead of showing the blog's title in <h1></h1> tags, display the post title itself in those tags. You will need to do some code fixing for that. Ask me if you get any problem in it.

2. Show large number of posts on the front page. But never forget to embed <!-- more --> tag inside your posts. Show only 1 and a half para of each post after that put the <!-- more --> tag.

3. On most of the themes the header has two consecutive links to the home page. One where the title is shown and the other in the navigation menu under the title. Try to remove one of those links. Or what you can do is make Blog Title a simple text in <h1></h1> tags and change the anchor text of the link "Home" in the navigation menu to "blogtitle".

4. When you are choosing a two column theme then always choose right sidebar'ed theme. And when you are choosing a three columns theme, always look into the source code, the code main content (post bodies) should come before either of the two sidebars.
http://webgazette.co.uk/web-design/w...p-multiflex-3/ is a good example of three columns theme.

Miscellaneous SEO Tips:

1. Before posting always do some keyword research on wordtracker or iwebtools keyword research tool. Try to embed highly searched related terms into the post title and post body smartly.

2. If you have some rival's in your niche then use their popular posts listings to know whats hot.


Alright, so i could recall only these SEO tips, though i thought the number would be more. If you think you too have some WP SEO tips to share please post that into this thread.

[Fisker]

Great post. Couldnt have done it better.

[Teunel]

Thanks, I might look at this!

[Anghus]

Remember also to change the infrastructure on the template.

1. Block the links to comment. Because you get one link to the post, and then one link to the comments. < -Duplicate content

2. Work with reordering the archeive pages. No need for showing your latest post on the front page and then the same post in the archeives. <- duplicate content.

3. Block the Rss feed.

4. Use the <more> tag in posts, to avoid different rss sites to take all your content.

[vtop100]

Thanks
for the seo for wordpress I need to do something with my wp blog. This mite help to get some traffic.

[nks]

Popularity Contest Plugin?
How does this plugin helps in SEO?

[2mk_atspace]

Great Tips

[sahilcoolsmart]

Originally Posted by nks

Popularity Contest Plugin?
How does this plugin helps in SEO?

I was expecting this question.
When new posts come the old posts leave the front page and also they are not shown in Recent Posts after a certain number of posts. So, as soon as a post leaves that Recent Posts place it looses direct internal links from all the pages, which leads that post to drop in SERPs. So, your popular posts should always be directly linked from all your pages.
And that's what Popularity Contest Plugin do..

[WengChun]

great tips, thanx for sharing

[sguler]

what about rss blocking? why is that a seo thing?

[abstroose]

Some nice posts for beginners there.

[dynn]

nice post...thank you

[bikeman]

Thanks much. I am new to wordpress and blogging. This post could help a bunch.

[mye-corporation]

[QUOTE=Anghus;4106985]Remember also to change the infrastructure on the template.

1. Block the links to comment. Because you get one link to the post, and then one link to the comments. < -Duplicate content
QUOTE]

How do I block the links to comments ?

[sahilcoolsmart]

Originally Posted by mye-corporation

Remember also to change the infrastructure on the template.

1. Block the links to comment. Because you get one link to the post, and then one link to the comments. < -Duplicate content
----------------------------------------------

How do I block the links to comments ?

This can be done with KB Robots.txt Plugin
Google around for some sample wordpress robots.txt
Here is one sample:

User-agent: *
# disallow all files in these directories
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /2007/*





# But allow /blog/index.php and /sitemap.xml
Allow: /index.php
Allow: /sitemap.xml

# allow google image bot to search all images
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /*

[ThreeGuineaWatch]

Also, adjust your permalinks to %postname%-%post_id%

[sahilcoolsmart]

Originally Posted by ThreeGuineaWatch

Also, adjust your permalinks to %postname%-%post_id%

That's a good one and i must say important one.
By the way only %postname% will do

[mye-corporation]

Originally Posted by sahilcoolsmart

This can be done with KB Robots.txt Plugin
Google around for some sample wordpress robots.txt
Here is one sample:

The sample that you are quoting, is the same that you use ?. In other words, Would you recommend using only these disallow lines for the average wordpress blog ?

A second question regarding the permalinks URLs, could you be more specific on how I change the permalink this way?, because the last time I followed someone elses instructions to do it, I did it wrong.

Thanks everyone for your help.

[mye-corporation]

One last comment on this thread. I took a look at two popular blogs that I always read, and these are their robots.txt. I will copy the Daily Blog's robots, because I think it's the more simple, avoiding any unnecessary disallow lines.

Daily Blog Tips
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/robots.txt

John Chow
http://www.johnchow.com/robots.txt

[sahilcoolsmart]

Originally Posted by mye-corporation

The sample that you are quoting, is the same that you use ?. In other words, Would you recommend using only these disallow lines for the average wordpress blog ?

A second question regarding the permalinks URLs, could you be more specific on how I change the permalink this way?, because the last time I followed someone elses instructions to do it, I did it wrong.

Thanks everyone for your help.

Yes i use that sample robots.txt Recommended!!!
In your admin panel
Options -> Permalinks
Check 'Custom' radio button and put /%postname%/ in the text box.

Don't do this for an old blog, you'll lose all your traffic. This should be done only when you are starting the blog, right before your first post.