I know about the various wordpress SEO plugins and how to use them, and I also know about fresh content, and using keywords in writing. But what are some other effective methods for wordpress SEO? Is submitting your blog to blog directories worth it? Will outgoing links to blog directories hurt rankings? (most blog directories require linkbacks) Are there other methods for wordpress SEO that are unique to the blogging format?
Just use google-xml-sitemap, it's very good. I don't need more than that plugin to get an excellent SERPS
I do use that plugin, and it IS great. One question, does the sitemap get updated automatically and is google notified automatically?
Well, the best option I can throw at you is how to correctly use a robots.txt file with wordpress to prevent duplicate content issues. Wordpress is notorious at creating duplicate content, you can usually find 5 different web pages and URL with the same content, which is a no-no to Google. This is also a good method for ANY blog since most blogs always make duplicate content with archives, catagories, etc. You'll want to disallow your archive, feeds (yes the feeds), comments, trackback, page, date, comments, etc. The main goal is to block all but one pure URL of your archive, I suggest letting the crawlers use your labels\catagories to index your articles, block everything else. Make sure to only use one catagory per post\article.
yeah submitting it to directories will help in increasing backlinks..as far as seo is concerned try using all in one seo pack plugin for wordpress change the permalink structure to something more meaningful..thats imp!!
Me,I use all-in-one-seo-pack,smart-update-pinger,gregarious-for SEO.You can see I am on first page on Google for name-site of my sig.I can help you with more plugins if you want (for free)!
Not quite. If you look on some of the pages, the /category/ path will still be present with the permalink structure. Category Base Killer removes that completely.
No it does not update automatically, you have to update your sitemap each time you add new pages to your site to get index those new pages.
One more method I have found to be working for SEO is description meta tag which is indexed by SEs. Days after implementing it on my site my rankings went up.
There's a new version of the Smart Update Pinger as Christian Daven has stopped developing this plugin - see SUP
Disallow comments? I never thought that was necessary as it doesn't create a duplicate page of just comments, but instead it's part of the whole article post so it uses the structure: #comment. Isn't that right ?
Posting regularly is really the best and most natural method to SEO a blog. As they say, Content is King.