SEO is one of the best ways to get a constant stream of traffic to your website. See, viral content can get you a blast of visitors to your website, but that traffic will decline quickly over time. What is truly important is the traffic that you generate after the viral peak.
That’s where SEO comes in. But the thing is, it only works if you are doing SEO the right way on your blog…including getting all of the essential WordPress settings correct.
This handy guide will walk you through what settings you need to pay attention to, and what you need to do on your WordPress blog to get more search engine traffic.
Setting the site title and meta description
Everything starts with a keyword-rich title and meta description for your blog.
A good formula for creating a title tag is picking something short, keyword rich, and catchy. So a blog targeting stock market investors might use the title tag “The Million Dollar Portfolio – Daily Stock Picks”
In the example above you’ll notice that the first part is very enticing, the second part is more keyword rich than the first half, and the overall title tag is short.
The same is true for the description. It should be catchy, keyword rich, and short…but not as short as the title tag. A good rule of thumb is that if your meta description has 20 words or so, you’re fine.
The Motley Fool site description promises to give you the latest investing information that is easy to find:
The only issue with their description though, is that it doesn’t contain enough keywords and it is too short.
Now that you understand titles and descriptions, lets get into how you can set them up. Because you are running a WordPress blog, the easiest approach is going to be for you to install the SEO for WordPress plugin by Yoast.
With this plugin you can easily setup a title tag and meta description on your blog. And as for your blog posts pages, the title and description will automatically be set based on the title of your blog post and the content within the first paragraph. You can manually edit these settings, but there really isn’t much need.
If your title tag isn’t showing up correctly, it’s probably because it is conflicting with your blog theme. If this is the case, EvolvingSEO provided a good tutorial on how to fix some common problems between a blog theme and the SEO WordPress plugin.
Creating the best permalink structure
Next, let’s decide how your links are going to actual look. The permalink describes the structure of your URL. While there are tons of variations in which you should choose, it really comes down to just three choices:
- yourdomain.com/post-name/
- yourdomain.com/2012/6/26/post-name/
- yourdomain.com/post-name/POSTID
Some people argue that the first example is the best choice. The reasons are:
- Words are separated by a hyphen and not underscore.
- Allows you to tweak the “post-name” to include keywords for SEO purposes, which is actually true for all of them.
- Removing the date allows you to present your content as if it was fresh. In other words, if you wrote a post a year ago and somebody landed on it today, they would get the sense that it was new and relevant.
- Turns long post titles into easily memorized and shared links. Important from a social share standpoint.
Sites that use this permalink structure for this very reason include Copyblogger and Social Triggers.
Some choose a variation on the above theme, but include the PostID and the entire post title. This is what Search Engine Land does. For example:
http://searchengineland.com/the-domino-effect-of-links-relationships-125270
Why do they do it this way? Two reasons. The first is that the longer URL allows for more keyword opportunities. There is no penalty for your URL being long as long as it is separated by hyphens.
The other reason is that one of the technical requirements to have a multi-author blog indexed in Google News is for it to have a unique number. You can use a Google News site map to get around this, however.
This is why if you searched for that particular Search Engine Land article you would see this in your search:
The long URL with the number is rendered as a link. Plus it’s showing up in the “News” versus normal searches.
Now, if you are looking for sheer performance, then in my experience /%post_id% is the permalink to go with. But as you can see, that’s not the least bit SEO friendly.
If you want to change your permalink structure, it’s easy to do. Just go to “Tools > Permalinks”:
The “Custom Structure” will have to be used to get the post name and ID structure.
By the way, WordPress will do the work of redirecting via 301 from the old to new URLS. Warning: this may mess up your search engine traffic for a bit.
Eliminating duplicate URLs
The Panda Update woke a lot of people up in some pretty obvious ways. All that shallow content was suddenly not as good at getting top rankings.
Naturally the advice was to write high-quality content. If you were already doing that, then Panda probably didn’t spank you to bad. However, some people were slapped and had a hard time figuring out why.
In some cases it came down to dropdown menus in the navigation links. Google was indexing these dropdown menus, assigning menu parameters in the URL, which lead to duplicate content. In fact, almost every page could be duplicated, so a site with 300 pages would now have 600.
If that has happened to you, here is how to fix it in two steps:
- Replace all the dropdown menus with links. Quick and easy fix.
- Add canonical tags – Your canonical pages are those pages that you want to appear at the top of the searches above necessary duplicate pages (like category or date archive). The canonical tag tells Google which ones you want to appear. You might use canonical tags for other reasons:
- When you create printer-friendly pages, these will have a different URL.
- When you have employed dynamic pages or query strings in the URL to establish what is the original one.
- Someone steals your content.
- Products are displayed on one page in alphabetical order while on another page they are listed by price.
You can use a few free tools to check for duplicate content:
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Screaming Frog
- Google Queries
Here are the Google queries you’ll want to use (as suggested by EvolvingSEO):
- site:mydomain.com/blog – check for blog indexation
- site:mydomain.com/category – check for category indexation (unless you’ve stripped from folder structure)
- site:mydomain.com/tag – check to see what tags are indexed
- site:mydomain.com/author – check to see if author archives are indexed
- site:mydomain.com/2012 – check to see what dated achieves from 2012
- site:mydomain.com/ inrul:page – check for subpages being indexed
No-indexing duplicate pages
For the most part, if you have duplicate pages in your blog because of author, date-driven, category, tag or monthly archive pages, Google’s guidelines says not to worry about it. They’ll be able to tell when duplicate pages are the best ones to show in the search engines.
However, I recommend no-indexing them anyway. You are better safe than sorry when it comes to serving up the correct page for a search results page.
- Use the Meta Robots plugin in from Yoast – You can no-index duplicates pretty quick and have them out of the index in about three weeks.
- Use Webmaster Tools to speed up the process of getting the pages stuck in the index out. In Webmaster Tools, click on “Optimization > Remove URLs” and just enter the URLs you want removed.
- Fetch URLs that aren’t shifting with “fetch as google.” Submit it to index once it is found so Google can crawl it again and erase it from the index.
What, why and how to nofollow attribute
If you are new to the world of SEO, the nofollow attribute is a command to search engines to not crawl particular pages. It originally blocked bots to crawl links going away from a particular page and looked like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
In other words, it was a page-level attribute.
To give webmasters more control over specific links that use the nofollow attribute, the rel attribute was created. Here’s an example:
<a href=”Subscribe.php” rel=”nofollow”>Subscribe</a>
Google drops these links from their web map, even though those pages will still appear in their index (given the fact that other external sites are linking link to that page). They can also show up in the index if they are on your sitemap.
- How to use nofollow – Use nofollow on content you don’t trust like user comments, paid inks or prioritizing which links should be crawled. Since search bots can’t subscribe to your email newsletter or RSS feed, you would nofollow these links.
- Pay attention to site architecture – It’s important to remember that creating SEO friendly URLs and easy navigation to begin with will be far more effective than going on a nofollow witch hunt.
Speeding up your blog
There is an inverse correlation between how fast your blog loads and how much traffic you are going to get. The faster your blog loads, the more search engine traffic you will get. The slower it loads, the less search engine traffic you will get.
There are two main ways to speed up your blog:
- The first is to get a good host. The better your web host, the more likely things will load fast.
- The second way to speed up your blog is through the W3 Total Cache plugin. Once you install it, it will automatically fine-tune your blog code so that it loads faster.
If you want your blog to load faster, you shouldn’t just pick one of the options above. You should do both of them.
SEO for WordPress Plugin
As I mentioned above the SEO for WordPress plugin will help solve your meta tag and title tag needs. But what I didn’t talk about is all of the other things it does.
From cleaning up your messy code to creating XML sitemaps for the search engines, it takes care of all the house keeping you normally would have to do manually.
Here is a quick run down of the features in the plugin:
- Post titles and meta descriptions
- Robots Meta configuration
- Canonical
- Breadcrumbs
- Permalink clean up
- XML Sitemaps
- RSS enhancements
- Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
- Clean up head section code
Conclusion
WordPress is a great tool for bloggers and website managers. While there are some great alternatives to WordPress, it is still the most common and reliable one out there. So it’s important that you get the SEO settings right.
Take some time to evaluate your settings to make sure you are maximizing their potential for both you and your clients. If you’re not, then you are leaving some traffic…and money…on the table.
How else could you optimize your WordPress blog?
This amazing course will teach you, step by step, how to double if not triple your traffic over the next 30 days.
This is a nice guide for SEO. I’ve tried using WordPress and it has a lot of great positive aspects, but I like to have complete control over the design of my sites to change things with a few lines of code or a few clicks.
Plus I’ve read somewhere that a custom site might be better than using WordPress themes for SEO because it leaves some type of footprint and in a way Google sees it as not original since there could be hundreds of others using the same theme. Is that a myth or could it be somewhat true?
I’d appreciate an answer to this question too.
Hey Amir,
That is not true.
@amir. If your question was true, then every website should be banned for using HTML.
After the recent panda update my rankings went down considerably and now I am hoping to get my previous rankings back. The above mentioned plugin looks promising and hopefully as you mentioned will definitely help in SEO.
It should, let me know if it works out for you.
Best of luck.
Neil, very good post. I sent this on to several people to read. Simple overview of some of the most basic SEO features that are easily setup using wordpress. Overall I still like wordpress compared to other platforms because the simplicity it offers for customization and seo.
Awesome, thanks for the support!
Yep, I use wordpress and I too find it to be the best for me.
Excellente information Neil!
All wordpress plugins and themes are not good, It is better to do a research before use any plugin o any theme.
Thanks!
Thanks Rafael,
Yep, it is always smart to do research before you implement something.
Ain’t nobody got time for that!
LOL, thanks for reading
Nice list, I’d add WP Super Cache does the job as well for speeding up a site. One can also add Better WordPress Minify to minify CSS and JS files improving further on speed.
Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate you sharing them with everyone.
Not sure how helpful it is, but I recorded myself setting up a website on WP, sped it up and added some tunes. The video starts with me actually setting up email and the hosting as well.
It’s about 30 minutes in length and includes just about everything I would have done at the time of the recording to impact SEO.
Here’s the URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM6_cjaTwDU&hd=1
Hope it’s helpful. Keep up the great work Neil!
Cool, thanks for helping out.
A great post, as always – have been debating which permalink setting to use for a while!
Thanks,
Happy to have been able to help.
You asked “How else could you optimize your WordPress blog?”
My blog homepage lists the most 10 recent articles, and all had individual social sharing counts and buttons. When I removed them (so the media buttons only showed on the post page), the homepage load time dramatically decreased! All those Javascripts calls were slowing things way down. And the faster the site loads, the better from both a SEO and user experience perspective.
Neil – Where do you host your WordPress blog?
I host it at rackspace.
Great list of plugins – but a couple I am getting more and more “turned on” by are
WP Customer Reviews
(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-customer-reviews/)
And one you have here – Hello Bar (hellobar.com)
Thanks Dustin,
I appreciate you sharing what you like best.
Neil,
We actually setup a client so that based on the Category the URL was appended with unique ID number for the reason you suggest, inclusion in Google News. This leaves the rest of his URLs much more human friendly and shorter.
You state, “Two reasons. The first is that the longer URL allows for more keyword opportunities. ” The proposition seems to be to extend the length of the URL by adding a unique ID.
First that adds no keywords. So, no SEO benefit there.
Second the author can edit each permalink to remove stop words, add keywords or make it more relevant than the post title in some other way.
So, the only SEO advantage I can see for adding a unique identifier is inclusion in Google News, which is good in itself, but the required change in permalink structure has no benefit beyond that, that I can see.
In addition, I think that FeedBurner is still a good SEO move and provide portability of RSS subscribers.
If you have a very large site, like a news site, most XML Site maps top out at 50,000 URLs, based on Google’s specifications. However there is a way out. us the BWP Google XML Sitemaps plugin. It breaks down larger sites and creates a site map of sitemaps. It also has a tab for configuring News Sitemaps – that’s powerful. Plus it is a very lightweight plugin, not overly demanding server resources.
And although not WordPress specific, a good CDN will address a boatload of page load speed issues for you in on feel swoop, in addition to security and spam protection benefits. See CloudFlare.com
Thanks Jim,
I appreciate the feedback as well as your additional input.
Hey, this comment alone has lots of golden nugget!
For speed performance, i also use CloudFlare and WPSmush.it wordpress plugin. What WPSmush.it does is to ‘smush’ your image, removing the unnecessary data from your image and making it smaller in size.
And yeah Neil, i also use WordPress SEO by Yoast! I think that plugin is the best SEO plugin ever. A lot better than All in one SEO pack or Platinum SEO. So i’m glad you mentioning it instead of other plugin.
Perhaps, you should make post about WordPress security. This is really important because nasty hacker can bring your site down from search result instantly if you don’t have proper security for your site.
Or do you already have post about that and somehow i missed it?
Actually neil is a marvelous energy blogs like us .he is kevvu keka
Thanks Subbareddy.
Hi Neil,
Just a curiosity to know, Which SEO plugin is you using?
This is one question where is curiously looked upon by many aspiring bloggers like us!
Non I do it all manually.
It’s a good list Neil,
I didn’t find anything I’m not doing but your list gave me a very useful validation that I’m on the right track at least!
many thanks,
Alan
Great, glad to hear you are heading in the right direction!
It should be noted that permalink customization is only possible on self-hosted WP sites, *not* available to WP.com sites.
Thanks for making that clear to everyone.
This will be especially helpful for business owners who manage their own website/blogs. I’ve seen too many sites with duplicate or no customized elements because they just update and forget the optimization.
Great, I hope so.
Thanks so much! I am running wordpress site now, so I will definitely take this info.
No problem, let me know how it goes.
Thank you, Neil. A generous and easily understood article on SEO. You’re right about your first point – quality content. I think Google’s updates to its algorithm are great in that they weed out sites that waste people’s time. Thanks again!
Thanks Dani, glad you enjoyed it.
not to forget the social buttons as they contribute to the SEO too.
Yep, they are important as well.
WP Super Cache and SEO Yoast are my two must have plugins for any site.
Great post
Thanks, I appreciate your recommendations.
Hi Neil,
Great post. I use Yoast SEO for wordpress which after trying a few SEO plug-ins I think is the best. For anyone new to WordPress and SEO it can be a bit of a minefield but your post explains it very well.
All the best
Roger
Thank you Roger, I appreciate the kind words.
Really great info Neil, Thanks. What would you suggest for Joomla websites? MOst of my sites are in Joomla and I’m using Acesef to help with SEF urls etc but it’s so hard in Joomla compared to WordPress. Any tips on Joomla websites?
I am sorry I wish I could help you out, but I don’t use Joomla.
Very useful information, Neil! This is a great way for WordPress site owners to get a boost (hopefully) in organic traffic. I will be sharing this with our followers right away.
Thanks Cleofe,
I appreciate you sharing this article with others!
Certainly wordpress has been grown very rapidly and doing SEO with the ways you have described above will certainly get the site to increase the traffic and its been really worthy content you have provided I was struggling at the start to know about yoast and from here learnt few new things about it.
Thanks for providing great knowledge!
Hey Ayaz, WordPress was already seo friendly but now these days people are using this CMS for e commerce websites, Everybody want to make website in wordpress. UI experience is amazing. A non technical person can easily handle this website. No need to take maintenance service from web designing companies. And neil is doing fantastic job, Here is most useful plugin which are really helpful for webmasters.
Hi,
Can you please throw some light on CMS for e-commerce websites. What I know in wordpress is its simply amazing.
Thanks for your response, I appreciate you helping out.
Thanks Ayaz,
If you have any questions as you go let me know, hope these tips help.
Neil thankyou for this post. I have yoast installed and use it to change meta description and titles etc but a lot of the other tips you have give me give bit more insight on how to use it to its full potential. Cheers
Sure thing Simone, happy to hear you have found some useful tips here.
Here’s another “gotcha” lurking within WordPress – be very careful with how you structure your Adsense plugin within WordPress. If you allow the plug-in to run too much stuff above the fold, Google will slap you with a ranking penalty.
I walked into this trap on one of my other sites – a technical blog – where I was one of the first people to start posting solid material about a niche framework in Python. Google ranked several of the articles quite highly (top 10 SERPS, solely with on page SEO, since I did minimal off page work for that topic).
Added Adsense, 3 panels per page – thought I had done a good job of spacing it through the article…. and got slapped back to position 40 – 50 for the target searches. Turned the ads off & was restored to my former place within a few days.
It is a balancing act of course – gotta have a revenue source somewhere in the equation…but still, watch the Adsense settings…. Google was serious about that penalty…
Sorry to jump in like this and I know it’s a bit off topic but I am curious about ‘the three panels per page’ idea you mentioned in your comment. Does three panels mean three text/image ads only or does it count the adsense link unit ads too. I use three text/image ads and three link unit ads and also a little bit of chitika
. I know this is a bit wrong but will google penalize me for this? Should I only keep three ad panels in total (including adsense text, image ads, link units and chitika) or is it fine if I continue using it.
Once again sorry Neil & Hanging Hyena but it scared the ‘you know what’ out of me.
Thanks for sharing your personal experience with everyone. It is important to understand what you are being penalized for and to then go back and correct it. I agree, it is a balancing act.
Great stuff! Glad knowing those technicalities and subtleties of optimizing contents that are hosted on WordPress. Still wondering which one to go for.
yourdomain.com/post-name/
yourdomain.com/2012/6/26/post-name/
yourdomain.com/post-name/POSTID
What are the parameters on the basis of which we can determine which one is doing well. For example in my website http;//www.esmartwebinars.com I am using yourdomain.com/post-name/ this permalink. Is it worth it or I need to change it to the searchengineland way.
Hey Andrew,
You can keep it as it.
For those with ‘existing blogs’ – how does one prevent Facebook likes etc from disappearing from posts once they’ve updated their permalink structure?
Sh*t hits the fan when i suddenly add the %POST_ID% parameter.
There is no way to solve that from what I understand.
This was the first I’d heard about the drop down menu. My site got hit a bit by the last update, and I thought it was mainly because of the high bounce rate I had prior — which could still be true. But I redid the theme in hopes of improving that. Most of my high bounce did come from Google, though, so perhaps I might have other issues I haven’t discovered yet.
Still, this was a great read. It gives several great ideas for setting up your site so that you can have good rankings, which is a good thing
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks Grady, I am glad you enjoyed it. Best of luck on improving your site!
WordPress is one of the seo friendly platform and all the posts and meta tags, url can be easily done with wordpress plugins.
That is correct.
And just wanted to remind fellow readers that if you are stuck, don’t hesitate to ask for help instead of stressing yourself for hours trying to do something that could be done with in minutes.
I agree completely, if you have a question ask.
Great refreshing post Neil!
I’ll forward this checklist to my team!
Thanks buddy
Great, I hope these tips have been helpful.
Lengthy one but excellent too, Neil. Until now i did not use wordpress but i will definitely give a granular look by keeping this influential information in mind. Let me tell you that my site has been hitted by recent Google updates and i came to know one thing that whether the wordpress based websites have not been hitted by recent Google updates and this has created a doubt in my mind that the wordpress based websites are more lovable by Google. Is this true, Neil? Or Just a myth.
It doesn’t matter if you are on WP or not, getting hit depends on your content and links.
These are perhaps the best tips I have read. I never knew what canonical tags were. Thank you for this piece of information.
Thanks Shalu, appreciate it. Glad you were able to learn something new here.
Great article and very useful but…
I had the impression that you write mostly about intermediate level stuff with some expert tips that are harder to implement. This article is about fairly basic WP SEO, but very thorough and well writen.
It’s just that I have very high expectations from Quicksprout, don’t get me wrong
Actually my articles are mainly written for beginners. My tips are typically ment to be tailored towards beginners to intermediate.
I agree with not putting dates in the permalinks, you want that content looking as ever-green fresh as possible!
Yep, glad you agree.
thanks, i also use yoast to get short url for category and use google rich snipphet
Cool, thanks for sharing.
Great list for checking to see if you have dotted your I’s and crossed the T’s of SEO. I do have a question. If you run Thesis do you need to then use the SEO for WordPress plugin?
Cheers
Nope, it’s not really needed.
Nein, Can you please tell me if custom URL of my blog is good for SEO point of view ? here is the demo link:http://androidrays.com/206/which-smart-phones-will-get-jelly-bean-update-complete-list/
Your custom URL is fine.
Found great info and certainly this would help me as I am a newbie. Although I have 1 question. I did all the things I read but certainly am not able to leverage browser caching fully. I used pingdom to check my site and it looks pretty neat except few things but how can I cache my ads. Or, tell me if it is even something that I have to worry about or not?
And also am not including an id number at the end of my post. Is it necessary or can I do away with it?
Waiting for your reply.
I am not sure how to cache ads… especially ones that are served by a 3rd party.
You don’t need post ids unless you want to get into Google News.
Hey Neil, Have you any idea for optimizing photo blogs like my blog http://www.jokezone.in, in which there are the ratio of text and HTML is very less?
Hey Jokezone,
In your case you would try to optimize by boosting your link count. You can consider doing things like creating photo widgets to boost your back links.
I love yoast. I run a couple blogs on different Themes (mainly Thesis), and I think Yoast has the best set up for creating rock start title tags and meta descrips!
Great, happy to hear it is working out for you.
Hey Neil,
This is an awesome beginning guides for SEO. No duplicates, focus on CTR and also focus on content. Content will always be king! good read.
Thanks Valeriy, glad you liked it.
I have always been a post name type of SEO guy. It has always worked great for me. I guess there is no reason to fix something that isn’t broke. :]
That is true, if you have found something that works for you then stick to it.
Reading this article made me realize that I still had so many things to fine tune inside in order to optimize more my site. I guess its work work work again. Will be back later…
Yep, it is work all the time.
This is an extremely helpful guide. In particular, thank you for recommending the W3 Total Cache plugin, which has been very useful to some of our payment gateway clients and development partners.
Keep up the good work!
Kind regards,
The eWAY Team
Awesome, glad to here this post have been helpful to you.
hmm interesting, this would really helpmy wordpress blog, im going try this and see if it works for me:) thanks for the advice:)
i will post back here and tell u how i did
Great, let me know.
I think the Yoast plugin is not updated already. I am using it but the same descriptions does not show when I check the SERP.
Weird… it works fine for me.
Just started using SEO by yoast plugin on my wordpress blog. Will definitely setup the meta robots plugin. Thanks for the ‘permalink structure’ advice. I never knew you could do that with wordpress.
Sounds good, glad you were able to learn something new and useful from this post.
I stumbled on your site 15 minutes ago. Great stuff. You really seem to know what you are talking about. I heard about the W3 plugin but never got round to using it for some reason. Thanks for the reminder!
Great, I hope it helps.
Good tips and suggestion. The word press blog is really helpfull in SEO prospective. But I normally used joomla
hope we will get joomla SEO tips soon 
Hey Deven,
I wish I could help you out but I don’t use joomla.
Neil, this is a VERY clear outline of key optimisation techniques for the WP sites I build for my clients. I think I will forward copies of this blog post to those who argue and argue with me that ‘their way’ is far superior to the suggestions I give them.
Thanks!
Sounds good, thanks for sharing this post!
I do like your SEO tips for WP, i could just suggest a “All In One SEO” plugin, i think that is the best SEO plugin for WordPress on the web.
Thanks, appreciate the suggestion.
Am using All in one seo plugin and it is doing fine, although i messed up my permalink on a particular site and am still looking for the best way to change it without it affecting my ranking.
It seems there is no single wordpress plugin that does that now?
Most of these SEO wordpress plugins don’t mess with your url structure unless you select that option…
Thanks for these tips Neil – they have saved me a great deal of time as I’m a newbie on WordPress!
Best,
Rob
Awesome, happy I could save you some time.
Super useful. Seems like there are a million and one things to learn about SEO, then another million to learn about WordPress SEO. lol.
There is always something new or more to learn!
Thanks, Neil. To rank, one needs to focus on keywords and search phrases. I agree – a good formula for creating a title tag is picking something short, keyword rich, and catchy.
I was using All-in-One-SEO-Pack and after giving Yoast a try, I realized its possible to do a lot of SEO tweaks in one place and to get rid of some of the other related plugins at the same time.
Thanks for the cheat sheet (without cheating)!
Personally, I think this post about sums it all up pretty well. Google has never treated sites with Duplicate Content kindly and in that respect WordPress leaves a lot to be desired as just a straight forward blog on its own. Unfortunatly I’m finding that sometimes the free plugins out there can sometimes even add to the situation by exposing links that are not in the sitemap or theme of a WordPress powered blog so I’d have to say, be careful about what you use. Some things might seem like a really good idea but can burn you down the line if you don’t carefully monitor your WordPress Powered Sites performance.
That’s my two cents worth about SEO,
Rock On! Brian
Hi,
First of all thanks for posting such an article. I am a new comer to SEO field. and am just getting familiarized with the work and choices available in this field. Optimizing the search engine is a challenging job to do, but the information like that you have provided here, will help people to make it easy. The techniques for escaping from spam is also exciting. Thank you very much for sharing the information
Do a good job in a blog is not so easy is the need for a lot of aspects. Thank you for your articles.
I had a site it was getting 10k a day from google, then aug21st hit and i dropped to 5000 a day over night.. I thought perhaps it was unnatural links coming in. I spent the month cleaning site up a bit, removing links in that probably shouldnt be going in and added some nofollow on my affliate links out…. on sept 21 my site zipped up to 15k a day, was very happy, it lasted for 3 days then on the 4th it dropped down to 5k again and is holding steady… i miss my old traffic
I will implement these on my wordpress blog. Thanks for sharing all this SEO info.
Cool tips neil yeah…permalinks play a major role in getting you into google news..as per the new guidelines from matt cutts
Great tips neil , i always do the basic seo before starting a new site….but u have listed so many things here that i didn’t know thanks
Hey. I used your tips to optimize http://www.metal-head.org and it worked ! thanks a lot
I come here after implementing some of your tips! And what an improvement on my SEO. Thank you!
The tips you provided will be really helpful for a newbie blogger like me.
Could you tell me if it’s good to allow google to index my blogs tags & categories?
This article is really worthy for optimizing site … I also use WordPress seo plugin by yoast.
Thought that installing YOAST plug is enough and it will do things itself. But customized it after reading this article.
Many thanks for your helpful article Neil!
In addition to your helpful advice, does optimizing post tags for SEO in Yoast help them get found better in search?
1. The SEO Title?
2. The SEO description?
3. Use post tag or always index?
4. Include in site map – auto detect or always include?
Please give me a steer – many thanks
Mike C
hey neil,
a very very remarkable post. these are great and valuable tips .
thank you for introducing us with the WordPress.
Thanks.
Matt
and to speed up your wp site follow this http://www.psdpakistan.com/webdesigning/wordpress-website-optimization/ this might help too..
You have shared very useful points, it will help me lot.Thank you for sharing great info.
Fantastic article, Neil! You really covered the topic thoroughly, and it was great to read about every aspect
Looking at your comment: “By the way, WordPress will do the work of redirecting via 301 from the old to new URLS. Warning: this may mess up your search engine traffic for a bit.” I’m wondering how long this lasts?
A client of mine saw the drop when the URLs were changed a couple of months ago, but has not seen it go back up yet. Also, the blog posts seem to have dropped off Google results completely and are invisible unless a site: search is conducted.
I will have to look into it a bit further and try to find out what’s going on. Thank you for your tips!
Wow, this article is fastidious, my sister is analyzing these things,
so I am going to let know her.
Thank you, Neil! This post is particularly helpful to me as I just recently added a blog to our site. You seem to be incredibly generous and happily willing to answer questions. I have a couple and will be immensely grateful if you can help me out.
We use All in One SEO Pack and I am considering changing to Yoast after reading what you have to say about it. Do you have any warnings for making that change? Will it effect the titles and descriptions I currently have in place? Anything to watch our for?
Thank you! I am looking forward to retreading this post and using it as a study guide.
One more question- I have been searching to no avail on this one– on my SEOMoz.com weekly report I am getting warnings that some of the blog pages are missing descriptions but I can’t figure out how to find those pages in order to add descriptions. They look like the date archives- Example: http://www.fateyes.com/2012/10 and also author pages like: http://www.fateyes.com/author/GinaFiedel/
I Really Don’t Know Is There Any more Way To Get Index Faster, But This Is Nice Post For Me…
WordPress was a good web builder and mostly now upgrading this service for a good quality blog posts.
Very nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and
wanted to say that I have truly enjoyed browsing your blog posts.
In any case I will be subscribing to your rss feed and I hope you write again
soon!
I was suggested this web site by my cousin. I am not sure whether this post is written by
him as no one else know such detailed about my problem.
You’re wonderful! Thanks!
Nope, written by me
i am using sitename.com/category/postname it will hurt my website or not?
It shouldn’t as long as everything else is in place.
I have been surfing on-line greater than three hours nowadays, yet I never found any attention-grabbing article like yours.
It is beautiful worth enough for me. Personally, if all website owners
and bloggers made excellent content material as you probably did,
the web shall be much more useful than ever before.
Glad I could help!
Many thanks for scripting this ideal post..Loved your articles. Make sure you do keep writing
Thanks for reading!
Hi, can you explain what this means on the archive pages? I don’t know what to fill into this section:
“The canonical link is shown on the archive page for this term.”
This is a field which shows up in the Yoast SEO settings under the category and tag edit panels.
What do I put into this section? I’m not even sure what exactly it is?!
Do you know?
Just to clarify, the area I am referring to is actually on the category edit page inside WordPress itself (it’s a box that Yoast SEO puts on that screen, when you edit an individual category in WordPress.) Scroll down and you’ll see it. The box says: “The canonical link is shown on the archive page for this term.†but doesn’t explain what it is or does, so I am not sure. Any idea what to put in there?
I am not 100% either. I had my developer set it up for me.
Hi are using WordPress for your site platform?
I’m new to the blog world but I’m trying to get started
and set up my own. Do you require any coding knowledge
to make your own blog? Any help would be really appreciated!
Colby, it is helpful but not essential. You can just use a great CMS that does all the work for you.