WordPress Optimization

Try to avoid using the date based option (as seen above) that is typically used. This tends to bury the posts and make them seem out dated.

Try keeping the directory structure of the blog flat. For example, try to have less forward slashes in the url such as the following
http:// www.sevenbarfoundation.org /ourblog/news/microfinace/kiva-post

So you are looking to avoid having any dates in the urls, and focus on having keywords relating to your post in the url. Simple, direct, and keyword-rich URLs are better.

Configuring Permalinks
To configure your Permalinks to show hyphenated post titles, first log into your WordPress admin interface. Typically that’s located at:
http://www.example.com/wp-admin /
…or…
http://www.example.com/blog/wp- admin/

…depending on if your blog is located in your root directory or in a subdirectory on your site.

The first page you’ll see when you log in is your WordPress Dashboard. Just click the Options tab in your Dashboard and then click Permalinks.

In the box labeled Custom structure, paste the following code:
/%postname%/

Click the Update Permalink Structure button and you’re all set.

These WordPress help files have more detailed information on using pretty permalinks:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Usin g_Permalinks
http://codex.wordpress.org/Intr oduction_to_Blogging#Pretty_Permalinks

Optimizing Your Blog Titles
If you want to have your blog name in the title tag, place it at the end so you can focus on having your keywords at the beginning and the main focus.

Example: Lingerie Fashion Show Events Benefiting Microfinance: Seven Bar Foundation

Sometimes the author of the theme you’re using will have already fixed this problem, but if not you’ll need to do a little minor code hacking to get WordPress to display your titles the way you want them.

>From your Dashboard click over to the Presentation tab, then click the Theme Editor tab below that. On the right hand side will be your various theme files. Click the Header link in the right sidebar. This will allow you to edit the code for that part of your template in the displayed text editor.

The source code you’ll see here is shared by all the pages on your blog.

Look for this piece of code:

<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Looks complicated if you don’t know PHP, but it’s actually pretty basic. You can see the code is wrapped in a pair of title tags. That tells you that this code determines what gets displayed in your titles. Here’s what it breaks down to:

<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>

That code fetches the name of the blog, which you provide when you originally set the blog up.

<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?>

That code says when any single blog post page is being displayed, add » Blog Archive to the title. An utterly pointless and useless feature from an SEO perspective (see what we mean about the WordPress default not being good for SEO?)

<?php wp_title(); ?>

This is the actual title of your post. This is the only thing you’ll want to leave in if you want optimized title tags for your blog posts. The easiest way would be to edit the code so it looks like this:

<title><?php wp_title(); ?></title>

You’d be all set, except for one thing: You still want your blog title (as well as your description or tag line) to show up on your blog’s homepage. So you’ll need to edit the code to make an exception for the homepage. Here’s the final version, which you should use to replace the default WordPress title tag:

<title><?php if ( is_home() ) { bloginfo(‘name’); echo(‘ &#8212; ‘); bloginfo(‘description’); } else wp_title(”,true); ?></title>

Now WordPress will check to see if the page is the homepage, and if so will use your blog name and description as the title (separated by a long dash). Otherwise, it will just use the title of the post.

If you really want your blog name in your page titles for branding purposes, then go with:

<title><?php if ( is_home() ) { bloginfo(‘name’); echo(‘ &#8212; ‘); bloginfo(‘description’); } else { wp_title(”,true); echo(‘ &#8212; ‘); bloginfo(‘name’); } ?></title>

Note also that some themes (like Cutline) have already fixed the code for you, so you won’t need to make most of these changes.

Another issue to keep in mind is that titles that appeal to readers aren’t always the most optimized for search engines. You want the titles your readers see to be interesting, funny, witty or otherwise entertaining, whereas you want search engines to see titles that prioritize your most important keywords.

Ideally you’ll have both, but it can be tough to appeal to both audiences. WordPress by default places your post title in your title tag, which can make it difficult to create pages that are both search optimized and appeal to your target audience.

Optional Plugin for Title Tag

Fortunately, there’s a WordPress plugin that allows you to separate your post title from your title tag. It’s called the SEO Title Tag 2.0 WordPress plugin (http://www.netconcepts.com/s eo-title-tag-plugin/), and it allows you to customize just about any title tag on your site. It’s enormously valuable for optimizing your page titles while keeping your post titles readable—and we recommended it highly.

Minimize Duplicate Content

WordPress tends to store multiple copies of the post in different sections of the blog. There can be identical content in four places (the blog’s front page, the blog post itself, the category archive, and the monthly archive) places

WordPress can be configured to publish just a short snippet of the post on the homepage which, in turn, links to the complete blog post’s permanent location (the permalink). This will help fix the problem of duplicating content on the blog homepage and all the other possible post locations.

One way to do this is to take advantage of WordPress’s More… feature. First, write the first paragraph or so of your post. This is what will appear in the snippet. Once you’re there, follow these instructions from the WordPress docs (http://codex.wordpress.org/C ustomizing_the_Read_More ):

The quicktags are the little buttons found above the editing window in your Administration > Write > Post SubPanel. They include bold, italic, links, and others, and the famous more. Put your cursor where you want to end the excerpted content of your post and click the more quicktag button.

This will insert the <!–more–> tag into your post. Then continue writing your post as normal. Everything after the more tag will show up in the complete post, but not on your homepage or in your archived snippets. A link that says more… will be added to the end of each snippet which people can click to read the entire post.

The more tag allows you to specify exactly what will appear in your snippets. However, if you don’t want to bother with inserting a tag into your posts you can also simply specify that WordPress create the snippets automatically by going to:

Options -> Reading -> Syndication Feeds -> For each article, show: Summary

It doesn’t give you quite the same level of control, but it’s less work and has the same effect. The WordPress docs have more on customizing the more tag (http://codex.wordpress.org/C ustomizing_the_Read_More).

Preventing Feed Crawling

Search engines will crawl and index RSS feeds. This is not a good thing. Any user who clicks on those listings in the search results is going to get an unreadable mess of XML gibberish. And these pages have a tendency to go supplemental. Too many pages in the supplemental index can be a bad quality indicator, so it’s best to keep them to a minimum.

In order to do that, you’ll need to block those feeds from being indexed using your robots.txt file. Not hard to do, here’s the code you’ll need:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /rss
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$

That code should block just about all crawling of RSS feeds on your site, as well as keep the spiders from wasting their time crawling other pointless parts of your directory tree, such as /wp-admin and /cgi-bin.

Of course, if you put your blog in a blog subdirectory, then you’ll need to bump that all down a level, so use this instead:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/wp-admin
Disallow: /blog/wp-includes
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/cache
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/themes
Disallow: /blog/trackback
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /blog/feed
Disallow: /blog/rss
Disallow: /blog/comments/feed
Disallow: /blog/feed/$
Disallow: /blog/*/feed/$
Disallow: /blog/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /blog/*/trackback/$

With having the blogs in a subdirectory of the main site. If you decide later that you don’t want your blog to be the main focus of your site you don’t have to modify your entire site to change things.

WordPress Plugins

SEO Title Tag – lets you customize and optimize just about any title tag on your blog and lets you make your title tags different from your post titles.

http://www.netconcepts.com/se o-title-tag-plugin/

Add-Meta-Tags — Lets you add and customize the description and keyword meta tags for your blog posts and most of the other pages on your blog, such as homepage and category archives.

http://www.g-loaded.eu/2006/0 1/05/add-meta-tags-wordpress-plugin/

Slug Trimmer — Optimizes your URLs by removing unnecessary words. Automates the process of creating effective post slugs, although you can override its changes if you prefer to specify your own post slugs.

http://pietersz.co.uk/2006/07 /wordpress-slug-trimmer

Wasabi Related Entries — For every post you make, Wasabi automatically finds other related posts on your site and links to them from the bottom of your post. Helps increase the number of page views and time people spend on your site, since people will be more likely to read more of your posts if they see several related entries that interest them.

http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Rela ted%20Entries

XML (Google) Sitemaps Generator — Generates an XML Sitemap (more commonly known as a Google Sitemap) for your WordPress blog.

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/p rojects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

HTML Sitemap Generator — Generates a regular HTML sitemap for your blog. We always recommend you have both an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap.

http://www.dagondesign.com/ar ticles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/

Optimizing WordPress for SEO -  In Summary

That is really just the tip of the iceberg but I don’t want to overwhelm you.   However there are many free resources online and the wordpress codex itself is a tremendous resource.  Should you like help implementing any of the above, we charge $50 per hour for web design, development and SEO Consultation.  SEO Copyrighting is billed at $30 per hour, as is SEO link building and Press Release Development.