June 2010

I was trying to answer some questions about SEO the other day on Twitter or more specifically “noindex” for categories in 140 characters or less and found it to be pretty much impossible so I decided to write this post on WordPress SEO best practices.

This isn’t part of my multi part series of articles on business blogging but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be, I just didn’t plan it this way. You can read part one Creating Designing and Structuring a WordPress Blog for Your Business and part two The Use Of Color In Design after your done with this one of course:)

Initially I thought I would write a quick little tutorial and howto and be done with it. As I sat here thinking about what I was going to write and started working on an outline I started thinking how my answers can impact the SEO and subsequently traffic to anyone who takes my advice. If there’s one thing that’s been proven to me over and over is that what might work for me may not necessarily work for you, so with that in mind I decided to do some research and confirm what I knew. I still thought I was going to write a quick but good post and be done by lunch. The more I researched the more it became evident that quick was not going to happen. I began delving deeper and deeper into different aspects of SEO and even though I started with the dreaded “noindex” or “index” question I started moving off into different directions researching different SEO principals and practices. By about 5:00pm or for you worldly types 17:00 I realized that what I was going to do was write a detailed WordPress SEO Guide and that it was going to take me some time to do. So with all that nonsense out of the way, lets get to it.

General SEO Principals

First of all lets all understand that there are no hard rules, nothing is set in stone. Like I said earlier what might work for me may not necessarily work for you. There are a number of factors that determine your sites SEO and whether it’s good or bad. Also please keep in mind that this post and everything I talk about here refers to SEO as it pertains to WordPress based sites. Yes some things are universal to any site but for our purposes the discussion here is WordPress SEO.

Permalinks

After installing WordPress this is the very first setting you should decide on. You can pretty much have any kind of permalink structure you want but the most common are;

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ and /%postname%/

Either one can work for you. The overall thinking behind just using post name is that it’s the shortest and therefore believed to be the most search engine friendly and also the most easy to remember. But keep in mind that your decision will have a direct impact on the decision to index or noindex your categories (more on this later). For a long time I used post name only with good results but it can be a negative because it doesn’t give any reference to time. I have read a number of posts on different blogs that just used post name and didn’t publish the date the article was written making it difficult for me to decide whether the information I was reading was current and relevant. This is something you have to decide on your own, but if you write about current events or technology or anything that is relevant at a given point in time you might want to consider using at least one date parameter or at the very least publishing the date of your posts. On this blog I decided to try year/month/name to see how it performs.

Canonical URL’s

I’m not going to go into details on this one except to say that canonical URL’s tell Google which URL should be indexed for a given page. A lot of themes have this functionality built in but if your doesn’t you can get Joost de Valk’s excellent canonical url plugin from WordPress.org. You can also read more about it on Yoast.com.

The Dreaded “noindex” “nofollow”

What to do, what to do? This single setting is the one of the most disagreed on aspect of WordPress SEO and probably the most misunderstood as well. The answer to the question, “Should I “noindex” my categories?” is…It depends:)

It depends on how you set your permalinks. If you use category based permalinks then you shout NOT noindex, in other words, so we’re clear here, yes you want to index your categories. If on the other hand you don’t use category based permalinks then you can noindex your categories. After reading hours upon hours about this subject I came to a couple conclusions. One, is that it doesn’t matter so much anymore because Google is getting pretty good at understanding WordPress blogs and their structure and, two, it’s not entirely clear on whether indexing your categories will produce duplicate content. Different people have gotten different results with this setting so it behooves you to try and test things and see how it goes. Also, if your category page displays the full post instead of the excerpt then you also want to noindex categories and you’re better off having excerpts on your archive pages also.

Lets look a bit deeper. Your posts live in 3 different places (Again, depending on your permalinks structure). When you first publish your post it’s on the home page and presumably gets indexed within minutes, depending on the frequency with which you publish new posts. It also lives in your chosen category and in your archive. When Google indexes your post upon publication the URL that Google will have for your post is yoursite.com/post or whatever your permalink structure is. Theoretically if your permalink structure is /date/postname Google will follow your post link and it will  see it as yoursite.com/date/postname and if you do index your categories it will see the same post as yoursite.com/category/postname in theory having the same post with two different URL’s hence duplicate content. Whether this is factual and true is debatable but this is why you would want to noindex your categories and archives. If you are using a date based permalink structure you would probably want to index your daily archives.

This part is pure speculation and my opinion and should be read as such. Google is master of the search, I’m pretty sure most would agree with that. Their mathematical calculations are way beyond my comprehension but it’s fair to say that it’s very sophisticated. With the huge number of WordPress blogs published every single day and new ones created on a daily basis I have to believe that they are well aware of how WordPress handles content. Google’s main points of contention are webmasters who try to skew results into their favor with artificially inflated content amounts and sites that promise content but don’t deliver. I myself have seen blogs with a large number of tags, categories and pages that lead to the same content. To a user that’s frustrating and not helpful whatsoever. This is what Google is trying to minimize. (more of my opinion later, I don’t want to get sidetracked here:)

nofollow is a lot easier to explain but I think people have a misconception as to what it really means. When you use the “nofollow” attribute it’s like saying “I don’t want this link to get any link juice (or pagerank) from me”. If you’re linking to a resource you published in the first place why wouldn’t you want to pass on some pagerank? If that is not your intention then you should use the nofollow attribute on a link by link basis. But the biggest thing most people don’t get is that nofollow was created by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen in an effort to curb spam comments and spam in general. That’s what it’s for, period. It’s not meant to be used to stop Google from indexing or giving pagerank to anyone. Consequently it has no effect on your SEO but can have an effect on the page you are linking to. By default WordPress uses nofollow in all readers comments. If you would like to explore nofollow some more you can do so at Wikipedia.

WWW or no WWW?

This is one of the most common offenders of duplicate content. Most people don’t realize that you can get to a domain regardless of how you type the URL into the address bar of your browser. Whether you type www.site.com or site.com your still going to get where you want. The problem is that Google sees this is 2 different addresses and therefore treats content the same way. So if you have a post called “Flying Choppers” and don’t have your site set up properly, Google will index www.yoursite.com/flying-shoppers/ as well as yoursite.com/flying-choppers/ giving you duplicate content where in reality no duplicate content exists since it is the same article.

To fix this issue is pretty simple. All you have to do is a 301 permanent redirect to either a www domain name variant or non www, it’s up to you. To keep things as simple as possible you can use a redirection plugin for WordPress that you can download from WordPress.org. There is another more technical way of doing it by editing your htaccess file and if you’re inclined to do that you can follow this tutorial.

Internal Linking

Proper internal linking is an integral part of any SEO strategy. Google likes when the information on your site has an orderly flow to it and is easy to navigate. Aside from Google it also makes it easy on your visitors when you link information in a logical manner. There are a couple of ways to put this into practice.

First, you can simply link from the latest post to the previous post to the post before that and so on with additional links to important and pillar content. In theory you should be able to navigate to every single post you’ve ever written starting from your latest one without using the nav menu.

Two, there is some belief that you should link posts in the same category only creating a kind of silo structure. When I first read about it I was a bit skeptical but upon further research found there might be merit to this. The idea is that you link within the same category only creating a “theme” for your information. This actually makes good sense to me. So lets say you have a blog dedicated to cats. You might have a category for cat health and you might create sub-categories like cat diabetes or cat cancer and so on. Then you might have a category for cat diet with sub categories like cat food or cat snacks and so on. So now Google will see that your main theme is cats and your sub themes also all relate to cats therefore giving you the benefit of related keyword search results. So lets say you’ve been optimizing for cat care and cats as pets for your keywords. But now when someone does a search for best cat snack or feline care you should be in the search results, in theory, and of course based on the quality and relevance of your content. Like I said before, this is a theory and I haven’t been able to come up with any statistics but I feel strongly enough to tell you about it.

I’m not saying that you should restructure your site, please don’t, but consider it for your next project. In the meantime I’m going to continue researching this and will post any results or statistics I find. I have seen a couple different WordPress plugins that are supposed to create the silo structure for you without changing anything to your theme or design. I’m not going to link to them because I don’t know if they work and they are expensive. One is $57 and the other is $97 neither has any statistics or results posted to back up their claims.

As a last word on internal linking make sure that you link all your posts to other posts paying close attention to related content. The more you can link to related content the more Google and your visitors will love you. Make sure your best content, stuff your really proud of, is linked to regularly.

Titles and Descriptions

This should be self explanatory so I won’t spend a lot of time on this. All of your titles should contain the keywords that you want to rank for. You should do keyword research to find out what the best keywords are for the article you’re about to write. I have seen a lot of folks just wing this and wonder why they aren’t ranking for their “chosen” keyword. Example – Steve the blogger writes an article about diabetes but names his article “Steak is Yummy” and doesn’t do a good job of using the right keywords in the article. You can guess the outcome.

Descriptions are just as important as your title. The description should be no more than 160 characters and should clearly explain what the article is about. Remember that the description is what the searcher sees when your result is shown in the serps so you want it to be an attention grabber.

Content is the Key

You can do all of the above perfectly but if your content sucks then it won’t make a bit of difference. As a matter of fact the simple truth is that you shouldn’t worry so much about all that other stuff but instead just concentrate on your content and everything else will fall in place.

Before you write a single word you should do your research so you know what keywords you should write for. However, with that said you should write for your readers first and worry about keywords last. It’s a lot harder to write naturally when you’re concentrating on a set of target keywords trying to figure out ways to fit them in. As a rule of thumb I use my keywords two to three times in the first paragraph, once or twice in the middle paragraphs and again once or twice towards the end (Based on a 500 word article).

When you write about something you care about or know a lot about it’s very easy to write good naturally well written content. When you care about your subject it always comes out in your writing and your readers can tell. I write my articles in full first and then edit them to include the keywords that I want. That way I know my articles come from the heart first and even after doing some editing they should still be good.

I don’t know what else to say about this, I just want to impress upon you that your content is what will get you the backlinks you want and need to raise your pagerank. No one wants to link to poorly written stuff, there’s no reason to.

A quick word about images. If you use images in your posts remember to optimize them also, something that a lot of bloggers fail to do. Make sure to rename them from img001.jpg to something just a bit more descriptive. Use alt text and create a caption. Do this with every single image you use and you’ll see improved pagerank and traffic. To be honest I don’t always to this either but it does have it’s benefits.

Plugins Sitemaps and Final Thoughts

I don’t promote using a whole lot of plugins but there are just a few that can help you in your SEO efforts and make things a lot easier.

There are two SEO plugins that I recommend. All In One SEO is probably the most used SEO plugin and very easy to set up. For most blogs the default settings are good enough but make sure they jive with your permalinks settings like I mentioned earlier.

Greg’s High Performance SEO plugin is an excellent alternative and gives you a whole lot of control over every single aspect of SEO. There are over 100 settings you can tweak to get the most out of your SEO efforts. It may be a bit too much for some but if you have patience and want fine grained control and are willing to read the FAQ or do other research then I highly recommend this excellent plugin. It’s also coded very well and actually very light weight.

Robots.txt is indispensable. One way that you can help Google index the things you want is by using a robots.txt file to point them in the right direction. You can also keep spam robots out if you know what to put into your robots.txt file. To find this information you can use Clickability an excellent tool to create your own robots.txt files. Keep in mind too that if you make it easier for Google to find your most relevant stuff and stop them from crawling useless pages, like your login page, they will more than likely reward your efforts.

Finally you should submit a sitemap to Google and the Google XML Sitemaps Generator plugin is the easiest way to do it. The nice thing about the plugin is that it will update your sitemap as needed.

Some good themes have a lot of the above functionality built in to them. Thesis for example is the best theme for SEO and you don’t need to add any special plugins. Make sure your theme isn’t hurting your efforts.

WordPress SEO is a lot more than just a few settings. It is strategy that needs to be implemented and tweaked over time. WordPress SEO should not become a burden or your focus. The most important part of any SEO strategy is your content. The best way to grow your pagerank is to get backlinks and that should be your focus. Find blogs in your niche and start working them by leaving good relevant comments. When your write pillar content make sure you get the word out, the more people read it the better chances of picking up some good backlinks.

Test your noindex settings. Set your categories and archives to noindex wait few hours after publishing a new post, copy a sentence from within your post and put it through Google search. If you see it in the results you are good to go. Check again for posts that are a few days or weeks old.

Optimize your images, link your posts, especially the good pillar type content and research your keywords before writing anything.

But most importantly have fun. What’s the point of having a blog and writing about your favorite subject if you get all wrapped up in the technical SEO stuff and lose focus of what’s really important?

If you disagree with anything I said please let me know, if you found this helpful please let me know, post a comment, tweet it and share it:)

Resources and Additional Reading

Google Webmasters Blog

Matt Cutts On WordCampTV

Google Webmaster Central

seomoz.org

SEOBook

SEOChat Forums

SEOForums

And of course SEO services is just one of the services I provide. If you need help or get stuck just drop a support ticket at our help desk.