SEO for Wordpress users

(Update: I just received a link to a plugin that claims to solve all the issues below (except the suggestion on how to use your keywords within your posts of course).  I went to the developer’s website to take a look, and must admit, it looks like a winning wordpress plugin to me.  It’s called Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin.  I suggest you take a look at the developer’s website at: http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin. I plan on giving it a try and see how it works out - I’ll keep you posted.)

Robots.txt File Optimization For Wordpress

Your “robots.txt” file can make a huge difference on your WordPress blog search engine rank and resulting traffic. Using your robots.txt file can be a good thing to block unwanted robot traffic, but keep in mind that if you use your robots.txt file to block too much you could loose a huge portion of your search engine traffic as you may loose your ranking (or never get it in the first place).

One of the main reason you even have the robots.txt file is to keep the search engine robots from reaching the same content from different links (i.e. archives, pages, posts, etc.). It is said this could result in penalties as the search engine might construed this as “duplicate” content (although it’s really not duplicate).

If you were creating a “regular” website you would include meta tags in the header section stating what was to be followed, or not followed on each page. The issue with Wordpress is; your meta data is all located in your “Header.php” file, therefore that information is located on every page (your header is the same on every page as it’s a shared piece of information in Wordpress) so any “noindex,nofollow” rules would be applied site wide and you wouldn’t get indexed at all - and you DON’T want this.

A very sensible way of preventing the search engines from interpreting your content as being duplicate is by being more thoughful in the way that you structure your site in the first place. Michael Gray has some excellent advice in his video blog about making WordPress search engine friendly and to summarize that advice; only apply one category per post. This way your content isn’t being pointed to from multiple locations and is a great way of preventing perceived duplicate content.

After doing a ton of research, I found a great simplified robots.txt file optimized for Wordpress. I suggest you change all of your posts to only include one categor and use the following robots.txt file.
You can download the Wordpress optimized robots.txt file here. Place it in your root directory, i.e.: “www.yoursite.com/robots.txt”

.PHP Header SEO Trick

If you still want to have multiple categories assigned to your posts, the following header trick will help you not get penalized for duplicate content (still use the robots.txt file above though). Place the following in your wordpress themes “header.php file”. Then, if the page is a single, page, or if its the home page the robots will index and follow the links on it. Otherwise search engines will not index the pages but will still follow the links. This will help to only have your content indexed once (and that’s all you want).

<?php if(is_single() || is_page() || is_home()) { ?>
    <meta name=”googlebot” content=”index,noarchive,follow,noodp” />
    <meta name=”robots” content=”all,index,follow” />
  <meta name=”msnbot” content=”all,index,follow” />
<?php } else { ?>
    <meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex,noarchive,follow,noodp” />
    <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />
  <meta name=”msnbot” content=”noindex,follow” />
<?php }?>

Choosing your text and it’s formatting for optimum SEO results

Search engines look at the text on your page and it’s formatting to determine it’s importance, it’s “weight” as it’s put. Using keywords in heading sections can improve you rankings based on those keywords. So considder using the words you would like to rank well in in your heading (like I did in the main heading above; “SEO for Wordpress users”).

Another thing search engines look at is the anchor text in the inbound links coming to your site. So if you write a post about, say, “SEO tips and tricks for Wordpress users”, and you would like to rank well on the keywords “SEO for wordpress” you may want to use that exact text as the anchor text on links you place elsewhere pointing to that article. Like this: SEO for Wordpress.

Lastly, the search engines all look at occurrence and placement. You may want to place your keywords in the heading, a couple times (careful not to keyword spam by using them too much) through out your post, and at the end. This may help you rank better on these keywords.

That’s all for now - check back as I will be adding more posts on SEO for wordpress users once a week!

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