I have made two blogs, one under blogger and the other a wordpress blog. When I started my wordpress blog, I never thought I would encounter problems with duplicate contents and other stuffs which greatly affect my blog. So I decided to Google around and find some nice articles on setting up wordpress for ultimate SEO. I have found a lot of them which in most cases contradict each other. Well that is just normal since everyone one did benefit with the way they do SEO for their blogs. So I decided to compare them and test them myself. And after such comparison I ended up setting this blog into a combination of their strategies plus my personal point of view base on what Google Webmaster Tool showed me on my other blog.
Basic Optimization
WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and are far more better allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS. But there are few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.
Permalinks
The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.6, you’ll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=
After that, you may want to install the Redirection plugin, making sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, both URL Monitoring select boxes are set to “Modified posts”. Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO’d permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.
I also recommend installing the SEO Slugs plugin. This plugin will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won’t get those ugly long URL’s when you do a sentence style post title.
The next thing you can do is to download All In One SEO Pack.
Some features:
· Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
· Generates META tags automatically
· Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
· For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just Install.
· You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
· You can fine-tune everything
· Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
Duplicate Content
After doing all the basic stuffs, you’ll find that the rest of the problems points to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Wordpress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:
1. date based
2. category based
3. tag based
Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author/
Worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages outside of the single page where it should be available. Good news is, we’re going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed.
Download the robots meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all archive pages, like this:
Prevent Indexing of:
· The sites search result pages
· Login and register pages
· All admin pages
· Sub-pages of the homepage
· Author archives
· Date-based archives
· Category archives
· Tag archives
Setting it that way will make search engine follow all the links on these archive pages, but it won’t show those pages in the index. Not everybody will agree on this policy, and others will tell you to just show a snippet of each post on the archive page. That’ll also work, but in my opinion completely throwing them out is better.
Disable Unnecessary Archive
If your blog is a one author blog, use the robots-meta plugin to disable the author archives. Also, if you don’t think you need a date based archive: disable it. Even if you’re not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO.
That’s it. Happing blogging and I hope to see your blogs appearing on search results.
Wow great post. It is really helpful. I am planning to make a wordpress blog myself and I will surely use this info’s to set it up for ultimate seo