Optimizing Wordpress
Wordpress have done a great job trying to make there recent version fully seo friendly. As much as they tried to cover everything they have missed several key points when it comes to page titles and indexing. I can’t help but think they left out the important seo points for a reason, and personally that’s a good thing.
The whole point of blogging is to produce traffic to your site for a wide variety of keywords, one important seo factor that google still looks for is the page title. When you write a post in wordpress and publish it it uses your blog title as well as your post title as the page title, so for example:
”Webmaster Tips | Link Building”
”Webmaster Tips | Optimizing Wordpress”
Now this looks fine to the human eye and even looks fine to google but what you are doing is saturating your keywords. If you’re trying to optimize a page for the term “Link Building” then having other words in the title will saturate your optimization efforts. What you want to do is take out the “Webmaster Tips” part as those 2 words are contributing to your key term and making your page less optimized, if you know what I mean.
Wordpress has a huge following and someone created a nice tool called “all-in-one-seo”, unfortunately it doesn’t cover all the seo aspects as the name leads you to believe, but never the less this tool comes in very handy. You have to be careful when using seo plugins so they don’t conflict or cancel out each other, I recently used a second seo plugin which caused havoc on my site and took me a good few days to correct.
The “all-in-one-seo” plugin has a great feature which allows you to customise how you blog titles appear as well as categories and tag pages. This helps greatly in making you keywords more dominant to google.
Also with the new version of wordpress there are a couple of issues with duplicate content which I haven’t been able to find a permanent fix for but the seo plugin does help. One of the common issues with duplicate content is down to the url, google will see this two urls as different urls and assumes they point to different pages/content
domainname.com/postname/
domainname.com/postname/comment
Both urls lead to the same page/content but google thinks they are two different urls leading to two different pages which are displaying the same content and therefore penalising you.
Duplicate can be a very serious issue, it can prevent your posts from appearing in the search engine results and can damage the pagerank of your pages. When it comes to seo and trying to take the number one spot you need to be on top of every aspect of your website, there enough tools out there for you to be able to monitor your stats and check for duplicate content. If youcan’tt find any tools visit google’s webmaster tools section as they can provide detailed information on your site.