SEO for WordPress Sites

There’s no denying that WordPress is a platform that makes it easier for companies and individuals to publish, update and manage blogs and sites. However, for all its advantages, there are a few points that count against WordPress, when it is interpreted by search engines. In this post, I pinpoint some of these issues, and how to address them:

Potential Duplicate Content

One of the great things about WordPress blogs is that they make it dead-simple for a visitor to find the post that he/she is interested in. The visitor can select articles to read according to category, keywords (tags) and authors. Unfortunately, this means that all posts that are organized by those criteria end up being duplicated in one way or another. For example, let’s suppose that Jane writes an insightful article about Ferraris, and chooses to file that post under the “Italian Imports” category, as well as using the tags “Ferrari” and “Testarossa”, right before filing it under her own author name – “Jane”. Consequently, that article will be found not just in one page, but anytime someone chooses to view posts within the “Italian Imports” category, the “Ferrari” or  “Testarossa” tags, or that were written by Jane. Hence you have the issue of several pages containing duplicate text – a “no-no” in Google’s eyes, since it views duplicate content as an illegal attempt by Webmasters to inflate a site’s search engine rankings. These sites often end up with a lower position among search results.

One way to avoid this common problem is to ensure that there’s a large distinction between your tag and category archives. So, as an example, you don’t want to have both a category AND a tag to be called “Italian Imports”. A good rule of thumb is to assign larger subjects and topics as categories, and leave tags for nuances of those topics. So in our example above, we could choose “Italian Imports” and “Ferrari” to be categories, while setting “Testarossa” and “Pininfarina” as tags.

Optimized Description and Keyword Tags

When you publish your WordPress blog right “out of the box”, description and keywords meta tags are not automatically included in your posts. That’s not a bad thing, though. Although keyword tags are not as useful in search engine optimization as they once were, description tags are still used by search engines to decide on how they describe your pages in search engine results. As such, an effective description plays an important effect on whether someone will click on your link among many other search engine listings. You definitely want your words to be compelling and separate your listing from the rest of the pack. Each page on your site should have a unique description tag since, optimally, everyone of your Web pages should be distinct from others. How do you work around this WordPress shortcoming? You need to resort to a WordPress SEO plugin.

Two main plugins that facilitate the optimization of a WordPress site are “Headspace 2” and “All in One SEO“. They both have their own advantages. “All in One SEO” makes it easier to formulate title and description tags for a site, but since the description and title tags that it composes are somewhat automated, this plugin does not grant you as much control on the text on those tags as you might like.

If you’re more of an SEO control-freak like me, and want to be picky about how your page descriptions show up in search results, then “Headspace 2″ may be a better fit. That is because this plugin doesn’t automatically compose meta title and meta description tags – so you can enter copy and keywords that you know are bound to generate the most clicks for you.

Google XML Sitemaps

WordPress sites allow for new content to be added, easily and painlessly. However, as far as Google is concerned, if it is not aware that you have new content on your site, then it’s all for naught. You want to notify Google that there’s new material on your WordPress blog, and one of the easiest ways to do so is by installing a plugin that will automatically generate an XML Google Sitemap for your blog as new content is developed. Some  of the many plugins available are:

Plugin by Arne Brachhold

Plugin by Denis de Bernardy

This is another major step in optimizing your WordPress site which will make it that much easier for Google to take notice of your blog.

PageRank Dilution

Links pointing to someone else’s site from within your own blog dilute your own PageRank. For that reason, you will want to be very specific and strategic about where in your site an outbound link can be counted as an endorsement from your blog (hence helping the landing site’s PageRank) or, in contrast, which areas of your site carry no PageRank value for links posted there. A helpful hint is to add the “nofollow” attribute to any links to which you do not want to give any “PageRank power”.

Because of their social nature, blogs can have a plethora of outbound links. One way to manage how much PageRank juice you want to giveaway from your blog is by installing a “nofollow” plugin, which will enable you to dictate which of your site sections have “nofollow” or “dofollow” tags in their links. As an example, you can choose for all links in your post pages to have a “nofollow” attribute attached to them, while all links in tag archives would receive the “dofollow” accreditation.  This plays a part at conserving your PageRank, since you’re communicating to the Google Crawler that outbound links on specific pages are not to be countered as endorsements (which dilutes that page’s PageRank).

For a list of nofollow plugins, check out this link.

SEO-Friendly Permalink Settings

A permalink (an abbreviation of “permanent links”) is the URL that WordPress designates to a blog post, and which is then used by other sites to link back to that article. It’s also the link that you’d email to a friend, or that you’d bookmark, if you desire to access that post a later date.

By default, permalinks assigned by WordPress are neither “human” or “SEO” friendly. Typically, a permalink looks like this:

http://www.yourwordpressbloghere.com/?p=22

Try saying that, three times, fast! Good luck. In addition, an article will be much more conducive to success in search engines if its permalink resembles more my example below:

http://www.yourwordpressbloghere.com/2009/06/why-ferrari-testarossa-rocks

The process to change your posts’ URLs to a better permalink varies depending on the WordPress version that you’re using. It may be as easy as installing a plugin and making any changes through that tool, or it may require some modifications to be made on a server level. Either way, it’s worth the trouble.

These are merely some of measures that can be implemented to optimize WordPress sites. They should be employed in tandem with other basic SEO measures.

I hope this helps you in some measure. Of course, your comments and questions are welcome. Is there a topic that you’d like us to discuss here on the Magnify Digital blog? Send it our way!

‘Til next time,

Guacira Naves
Online Marketing Strategist
@OnlineStrategy

Tags: WordPress, WordPress plugins