WordPress is the most popular website and blogging platform in the world with massive users such as CNN, Sony Playstation and may other big hitters too. With is custom and friendly frame work, and the ability to use it for almost any website purpose as well as the ability to extend via the use of plugins for any desired add-on – WordPress has become the choice of many Web Designers, developers and agencies too.
SEO
WordPress in itself is fairly SEO friendly by itself, with the most basic of tweaks including the permalinks to be /%POST_NAME%/ is a usual choice for most users, however there are many more tweaks which can increase the SEO of a WordPress blog.
Pinging
Difficulty: Easy
One of my most favourite things is pinging. For those of you who don’t know what it is. Basically WordPress comes with pinging on, and when you post a new blog post – it will go off and tell your favourite sources such as google, technorati etc, that you have posted something new, and basically indexes that content immediately. Because people are looking for the most recent news and articles these days – you can pop right in there at the top.
By default a few pinging resources are included, but here are more you can add.
Do It:
1. Login to your WordPress Admin Panel.
2. On the left hand side menu, find ‘Settings’ and in that find ‘Writing’
3. At the bottom of that page, find ‘Update Services’
4. Paste in this list of update services:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.twingly.com/ http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2 http://www.bloglines.com/ping http://ping.feedburner.com/ http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://www.wasalive.com/ping/ http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
Simply by adding more places to ping, the more places you can appear, quickly, and in turn the more traffic you can get. You can also pick up more link backs from some of the sites which rely on these services to index more content on their auto generated traffic websites.
All in One SEO Plugin
Difficulty: Easy / Moderate
Although like we’ve said, there are lots of friendly things about WordPress’s SEO, but this plugin does fill in some of the gaps. Although content is king, duplicate content does more harm than good, and WordPress does have some trouble with duplicate content, which we’ll start to address with this particular plugin. I say easy / moderate in difficulty but its probably closer to the easy side. It just depends on if you know how to install a plugin, for the purpose of this tutorial I will assume you know how to install a plugin on WordPress.
Do It!
1. Go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ download it
2. Install the Plugin
3. In your wordpress admin panel on the left in ‘Settings’, find ‘All in One SEO’.
4. Firstly at the top, activate the plugin
5. Give a nice Home Page descriptive Title which describes your website and what you do in roughly 200 characters
6. Give a longer description, roughly 250 characters, phrased differently, describing the site
7. Unless you specifically have time to write every post / page, enable ‘Rewrite Titles’.
8. Tick ‘Use categories for META Keywords
9. Tick ‘dynamically generate keywords for post pages’
10. Tick for these, use ‘noindex’ on Categories, Archives, Tag Archives.
11. Tick to autogenerate descriptions
12 Finished
By doing this, we stop some of the duplicate content for indexed tags. For example, if you tagged an article ‘blah’, then the tag could/would be indexed for ‘websitename.com/blah/’ which would show the same content for another tag of the same, or category. Resulting in duplicate content 101!
Solving Comment Paging Issue
Difficulty: Medium
This is something I discovered recently. When receiving comments on blog posts – these could be indexed as ‘websitename.com/blah/comments=true/’ or ‘websitename.com/blah/comment-1/comments=true’. After more research, and seeing the horror of all the duplicate content it caused – I found out that its because of comment paging which is enabled by wordpress automatically but most themes don’t support it, thus the problem. I think for safety it should be disabled, so here is how.
Do it
1. Login to you wordpress admin panel
2. On the left, go to ‘settings’.
3. Go to ‘discussion’.
4. Find ‘break comments into pages with…..’ and un-tick it
5. Finished
What that will do is stop the problem. Although there is more to do.
Google Webmaster Tools For SEO
Ok so google have updated there Webmaster tools not so long ago, and actually started to make it handy again. Namely one of the best things they have added is the ability to exclude parameters like the ‘comments’ one – as well as others.
1. Get a webmaster tools account at http://google.com/webmasters/
2. Get your website added on, and follow the verification process, use a html or meta tag to authorize it.
3. Once in, and you got some stats, may take a few days, or may be instant.
4. On the left, find ‘Diagnostics’ then ‘HTML Suggestions’.
5. Once in there, you can find ‘Duplicate Meta Descriptions’ as well as the other sections.
Here is an example:
Page:
26 emails behind, yay im catching up!
/26-emails-behind-yay-im-catching-up?comments=true
/26-emails-behind-yay-im-catching-up?nomobile
As you can see, there are 2 duplicate pages of the original – and the 2 parameters that need to be ignored are:2.
1. ‘comments’
2. ‘nomobile’
There may be others you can find. Ok now to ignore them, lets tell google:
1. In webmaster tools in google go to ‘site configuration’
2. Go to ‘Settings’
3. Go to ‘Parameter Handling’ section
4. Do this!
Your done!
Permalink WordPress Error
Difficulty: Easy
This is an error I found recently. For those of you who are using the permalink structure including the category name i.e /%category_name%/%post_name%/ there is a terrible issue with wordpress and can cause a lot of issues.
Here is the issue:
Address 1#: http://websitename.com/food/post-name-1/
AND
Address 2#: http://websitename.com/restaurant/post-name-1/
PROBLEM: Address 2# will work for the same real link as Address 1#. Basically anything will work that you put in the category space. It means if you have a post with multiple categories ticked OR NOT, it will resolve to different categories. Also for those of you wondering, the category with the highest wordpress database ID takes priority when there are multiple categories tagged.
Solution:
Do it!
1. Download this wordpress plugin: http://scott.yang.id.au/code/permalink-redirect/
2. Install the plugin!
3. Done!
