SEO Techniques in WordPress
Seo, one of the hottest vocabulary words in 2009. With the market continue to plummet getting down to the lowest to the lowest point since the depression of 1929. With the dollar not going as far and there general not being as much money to spend people are looking for a better way to invest in their business, and in their advertising. For this type of market SEO (search engine optimization) make perfect sense. The internet is a global market and has the ability to advertise to anyone and everyone who stumbles upon your website, but seo makes sure more people do just that. In relative terms the money spent on seo is vastly less costly then what an average company might spend on advertising in a year.
Anyways, through development of my own site I’ve come up with a good list of plug-ins and information that could be useful when optimizing your own website.
1. SEO optimization plug-in for wordpress.
there are lots of plug-ins out there even in the seo field, I currently have been using the “ALL IN ONE SEO ” plug-in produced by semper fi web design . Highlights include
- automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
- For WordPress 2.7.1 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
- You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
- You can fine-tune everything
- Backward-Compatibility with many other plug-ins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
2. robots.txt
Your robots.txt file is important to your website and your seo optimization specifically with a wordpress site because it will disallow indexing duplicate content in your website or blog. Most people know that links back and forth in your site and to other sites help bring up your natural listings in search engines and they do but duplicate content can actually hurt you as well. With that being said wordpress has no static pages at all, all pages are generating from a header.php page. So if we only wanted to index the pages that don’t have duplicated content on it what do we index and what don’t we?
That is a very difficult question to answer, unless your extremely familiar with the inner workings of wordpress you may not know what’s what or where to disallow, so let me share my two cents and we will compare and contract with some of what others have said.
My robots.txt can be found here .
User-agent: * <-- * means everyone that would try to index my page all bots Disallow: /cgi-bin/ <-- our first disallow statement, removed this directory from being indexed by *(all)
There are many disallow statements in my robots.txt they all cover different folders or file extensions. But the real controversial ones would be something like this
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-*
That would completely disallow the indexing of all of your wordpress folders. wp-admin, wp-includes, and wp-content. wp-content being where your theme files are save I in my own opinion think that this area should be indexed and loaded along with some if not all of your plug-ins. My reason for believing this is because these pages are called with content attached to them when the page is generated originally. All of your files in the theme folder I consider to be as important to seo as any normal websites pages would be to it. Please someone enlighten me.
3. SEO friendly permalink structure
The wordpress default permalink structure looks something like this { http://www.yourwebsite.com/?p=123 ie:UGLY } when you publish a new page or post you get returned a string query for your post name. It’s well coded and it works but it’s
- not easy to remember
- not seo friendly
- on average makes several more calls to your database then required
permalink structures in wordpress are completely designable based on the criteria that your wanting to get across, for larger sites with lots of extra pages i would try and start your structure with a number like /%year% the numbers help wordpress distinguish between post URI and page URI and is mainly a performance consideration.
The second basic not to do is to have just /%postname%/ ie { http://www.yourwebsite.com /%postname%/ } in wordpress 2+ it can break some of the functionality and limit your websites ability to access some of the files on site.
I personally will be using this permalink structure. /%year % /%postname%/
more information about the wordpress permalink structure at their codex .
Tags: Design, Permalink, Plug-in, Robots.txt, SEO, Wordpress
