WordPress is, in Spotted Panda’s opinion, the best open source CMS out there not only for blogs but for content management sites in general.
Plugins are available, such as All in One SEO Pack, that can make on-site the optimising of you website a doddle (auto page titles & auto meta descriptions with easy manual changes, link rel canonical tag adding). WordPress also is very good at easing your duplicate content worries – when you name your site in settings it will take this as the homepage (if you include the www then this auto adds a 301 form the non www to the www, and also adds a 301 for the index.php to the domain root).
However – there are still some basics that you need to do in order to help the search engine crawl your sites content effectively. Robots files, Sitemaps and on-page linking are still the industry standard for passing information to the search engines. It is also more preferable to doing it in webmaster tools, as Yahoo and Bings webmaster tools are not as versatile as Google’s.
Robots Files in WordPress
Implementing an effective SEO robots.txt file for WordPress will help your blog to rank higher in Search Engines, receive higher paying relevant Ads, and increase your blog traffic. Using a robots.txt file gives you a search engine robots point of view… Sweet! Looking for the most updated robots.txt?
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler.
You can install a plugin to add robots files to WordPress sites (for the novice user) or you can do it the old fashioned way (preferred – lets keep the code on your site to a minimum to help with page speed) and simply create a file in notepad – call it “robots.txt” and upload it via FTP to your domain root.
Basic WordPress robots file to stop crawling of unnecessary files -
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-content/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /trackback/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Sitemap: http://www.ADD-YOUR-WEBSITE-SITEMAP-LOCATION.co.uk/sitemap.xml
Pages you block in this way may still be added to the Google index if other sites link to them. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other publicly available information can appear in Google search results. However, no content from your pages will be crawled, indexed, or displayed.
To entirely prevent a page from being added to the Google index even if other sites link to it, use a noindex meta tag in the page head (there are plugins that let you add a specific tag in the head of specific pages) , and ensure that the page does not appear in robots.txt. When Googlebot crawls the page, it will recognize the noindex meta tag and drop the URL from the index.
Sitemap XML File
Get your sitemap xml file setup and working. The easiest way is to create a dynamic one (so that when new pages and posts are created on your site you don’t have to add them to the sitemap). A very good plugin is available for this on the wordpress site called Google XML Sitemaps. If you have more than 50 pages or posts on your site you should use gzip on the sitemap (an option on the plugin).
Set the priorities and frequency of crawling to match the page and post importance and changes on your site. Blog posts with comments would be something like priority 0.6 with weekly or daily frequency, whilst a static product page may have 0.8 and monthly frequency.
Once your sitemap is created add this to Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center (If you have not set these up then do so – Google Webmaster Tools is a brilliant resource for monitoring the status of your website – easiest way to verify your site is to upload the verification file that they give you to the root of your domain, but you can add a plugin and that will add the meta code they give you, but again this is more code to you site – we recommend the file upload method).
On-Site Sitemap Page
Create a dynamic on-site sitemap page that has all the pages of your site on it with links to the pages. This helps users and Google recommends having it to help crawling. A very good plugin (when this article was wrote) is called “WP Archive Sitemap Generator” on the wordpress plugins site.
Internal Linking
The best way to get the spiders finding the pages on your site is to create a good internal linking structure. Get the pages and post links sorted on your menu – try and keep as many pages and posts that are not too “Deep Linked” in that they can be seen from the menu on the sidebar (or header, depending where your menu is) on every page on your website.
Remember if text links try and put a good “Title” description tag in about the page where the link is going to and also get the keywords of the destination page in the anchor text (the text of the link). If an image link then remember the “Alt” tags on the image to tell Google what the image is about.
Reduce that code!
Remember the more code on a webpage the more the search engine spider robots has to trawl through to find the content. Try and minify the code and keep the plugins to a minimum (on this site we have 9 plugins, which we are trying to reduce).
Good SEO (and good website code) is in XHTML – Get the headers with descriptive text about the paragraph section and get the keywords in the headers (user friendly – not stuffing) – <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <p> tags for your paragraphs, etc.
Tags: Wordpress SEO
