Your PageRank can DIE with WordPress – 17 Ways to Optimize SEO
Recently I’ve been looking back into SEO for WordPress since converting all my static sites into WordPress blogs, and finding that my pagerank decreased and in some cases disappeared completely. I totally expected the opposite to happen. I had made some huge mistakes and unfortunately I did it to all my sites at once. The default settings in WordPress was not only blocking search engines but even if they weren’t blocked, they were very poorly SEO optimised. Time to rectify! I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.. this is what I’ve found so far, and if you have any suggestions or additions to add to this list, please share so that we can all benefit :)
WordPress SEO Plugins
- Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
- 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.
- Automatically creates an XML sitemap of your blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.
- This one is also less troublesome than the other sitemap generators that I’ve tried.
- After creating, I suggest you submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
- Prevents you from accidentally spamming all the sites that you ping
- Prevents you from being banned and therefore, leaving more links in tact to your site.
- Won’t ping sites if you just "edit" a post
- Provides a timer so that if you post a bunch of posts at once, it doesn’t automatically ping everyone and make you look like a spammer.
- Shows you what people are searching for on your site so that you can create articles that match your visitors interests.
- Shows you exactly what search engine they came from and whether your blog showed any "related posts" for their search terms..
- You can also configure customized messages for them.
StatsPress Reloaded
- Visually shows you how your traffic is going
- What terms were typed in the search engine to find your blog
- What page they landed on
- What browsers they were using, IP, etc.
- It’s a great light-weight plugin.
Download
- Searches your post for keywords that match tags of other posts, in order to link to itself to encourage people to find relevant posts.
- Different than the "related posts" type of plugins, this just links keywords and is configurable depending on the type of site you have.
- Prevents extremely long urls when you have long titles by ensuring that all the useless words are cut-out of the permalink.
- Can automatically tag your non-tagged posts
- Find Related tags, and display related posts
- Allows you to mass-edit tags to get combine or remove
- Automatically generates meta-tags
- Related Posts in RSS
- Automatically finds related tags from sites
- If a page cannot be found, it will search your posts, pages, tags, categories for related posts and show them instead.
- Gives another link to a relative article, but mostly it keeps people at your site longer if they click to related posts and therefore looks ‘better’ in the search engines eyes rather than people closing their page a minute or so after visiting.
- You can replace the image with one of your own or use text in its place.
- The more people linking to you, the better your efforts in the search engines..and if search engines are indexing different versions of the same page, it may effect your SEO.
- By allowing people & robots to only see one "version" of you page www.pennybutler.com or pennybutler.com, it will make your search engine listings more uniform.
- I like this one better than Ultimate Google Analytics and Google Analytics for WordPress because Google Analyticator is tinier, the others – I tend to have to remove on occasion for memory leaks and I just haven’t had any problems with this one and it seems to do the trick, although most of the themes I’ve been using lately seems to already support google analytics.
- Depending on where the visitor comes from.. shows a message to remind them to do something
- If the visitor comes from Delicious, it will remind them to bookmark your page
- If they come from Google.. reminds them to subscribe to your feed.
- From Stumble.. to give your post a thumbs up
- Digg.. to Digg.. Twitter.. Yahoo.. Technorati.. and any custom domain you wish to add.
- That little reminder may be the reason your site gets "dugg" or "stumbled" more than others, etc.
- I have a post coming up that talks about customizing this, but am yet to implement it in my sites first to test.. stay tuned.
- Google cares if your site has PDA support, so do those browsing by PDA.
- This awesome plugin automatically converts your site into a PDA readable format
- I’ve only checked my sites in an iPhone, but it worked flawlessly, then I checked Google’s webmaster tools for their PDA checker and it worked in there as well.
- Converts all your site content into multi-languages, making sure that your site can be found by non-English browsers.
- It will also show all their results in the country’s search engine results. I have heaps of traffic coming from Japan on one of my blogs.
Add to header.php
- I found this somewhere.. (don’t know where, it’s in a text file in my "must do" folder, and I will obey)..
<?php if(is_single() || is_page() || is_home()) { ?>
<meta name="googlebot" content="index,noarchive,follow,noodp" />
<meta name="robots" content="all,index,follow" />
<meta name="msnbot" content="all,index,follow" />
<?php } else { ?>
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,noarchive,follow,noodp" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<meta name="msnbot" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php }?>
This is my Robots.txt file..
- If you have any suggestions to improve it, please let me know :)
User-agent: *
# disallow all files in these directories
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /z/j/
Disallow: /z/c/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /dh_
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/backup
Disallow: /wp-content/wpau-backup
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/mbp-favicon
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/upgrade
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /wp-content/files
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: */trackback/
User-agent: Googlebot
# disallow all files ending with these extensions
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.gz$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$
Disallow: */trackback*
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /z/
Disallow: /wp-*
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: duggmirror
Allow: /
User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /
User-agent: ia_archiver-web.archive.org
Allow: /
Permalink Structure
Setup Permalink Structure (/%category%/%postname%) and Category/Tag base if required in Settings > Permalinks
Similar Posts Coming Up..
1. ) 404 Page Configuration
Coming soon, I’ll be writing a post on how to configure your 404 page to not lose visitors as soon as they come. The basic gist will be to add the Smart 404 plugin, a search form, related posts, category list, mailing list, comments form, etc.. so that you don’t lose that visitor.
2. ) My Ping List
I really want to get it right before posting, there are plenty of sites you can borrow from in the meantime that make a list of valid ping services, but I want to have the creme-de-la-creme instructions on exactly who you should ping, the extra steps you have to take for some of them to take notice of you, and for the list to be valid, etc. It’s an on-going work-in-progress.
3. ) WP-Greet Box Configuration
I’ll probably write this very soon, I’m testing it on one of my blogs at the moment to see if it helps build my social traffic, if I have good results, I’ll write a post on how you can customise it the same.
Category: Traffic, Wordpress Plugins, Wordpress Tips
About the Author
I help businesses get more leads via Internet Marketing and real-time marketing such as Social Media marketing (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress & other online Social Networking platforms). 
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Nice tips. Any cool updates for 2011?
Thanks!
Damn, yes, and I can see from the list that I don’t use hardly any of those anymore :)
I don’t have time to do a full update right now, I’m in the middle of a million different things.. maybe I can get one by 2012 ..
but here’s a quick reply based on the post.
All in One SEO Pack – I still use it, I’ve been trying different ones on different blogs but for quick setup and use, I generally use this on most of them still.
Google-Sitemap-Generator – Still use it, but I get it from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ now.
But I’ll also need to find the new one that I’m testing on one of my sites and update this post.
Also, I just did a search now to try and find it for you, and in the process found a whole bunch more that I wish to try out (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=xml+sitemap&sort=)
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – I don’t use this one anymore because it’s annoying to have to register my new sites on it, when there’s a free one that does the exact same thing that doesn’t make you jump through hoops to use it called “cbnet Ping Optimizer”
Psychic Search – after my initial praises for this plugin, I now jump up and down and am totally against the installation of it. After several months of using it, it slowed down all my sites due to the amount of data that it keeps in your database. Even if you uninstall the plugin, the database remains – you need to delete it on a cpanel level, so I’ll definitely have to create a new post for this to show what I had to do to totally remove this plugin. If you don’t get much traffic, it’s not a problem, but if you get a lot of traffic, omg.. it totally slows down your site.
StatsPress Reloaded – same as Psychic Search – it’s bloatware after a few months. They do have an option to not save so much data, but I don’t install this anymore. And as above, you have to delete it in SQL to really get rid of all the entries out of the database.
SEO Automatic Links – in an attempt to make my site go faster, this was one of the plugins I let go. I wasn’t using it on too many sites to begin with. It’s good because it automatically finds and links internally to posts, but I’ve made it a non-critical plugin now.
SEO Post Link – I now do this manually instead of using a plugin.
Simple Tags – I don’t install anymore.
Smart 404 – stopped being effective for some reason so I no longer install it on new blogs. Basically, it used to be really cool, when a 404 error was encountered, it would redirect to a related post and show that instead of the error page, but whenever I’ve tried it in the past 8 months, it doesn’t seem to do anything except show the 404 error. Not sure if the author is aware of it or not, must be related to a new wordpress update.
Stumble for WordPress – I dont use this anymore either, wow, this post really DOES need an update. I used to love this one, but alas, they haven’t updated it since 2009.
Enforce WWW Preference – I dont use this anymore, I do it at .htaccess level instead. Sounds like another blog post to me.
Google-Analyticator – I still use this but many of the themes I buy these days have an analytics section built-in anyway, so I only use it when the theme doesn’t already have it.
WP-GreetBox – I don’t use this one anymore either. I still think it’s cool though but I was trying to remove all the cool stuff in place of what I really need when my site got really slow. I think I might install it again, I still think it’s quite cool. I’m a plugin junkie though.
WP-PDA – I don’t use this one anymore – I recommend WPtouch instead – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/
Global Translator – Still like this one, but wish it wasn’t so heavy. I have removed it from a lot of sites to make them faster. Definitely works for getting a lot more pages indexed and a lot more people finding your content from other countries.
For Robots.txt, I use Robots Meta now – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/
Permalink Structure – I now use /%postname%/ on all sites except for the sites with a lot of different topics, like for this one, I still use /%category%/%postname%/
I definitely need to have a new update for new SEO type of plugins, but here’s other plugins I’m using on this blog, but I know I’m using some cool ones on my clients blogs now that I should collate and write about :)
I use:
1.) LinkWithin – to display related posts with thumbnails http://www.linkwithin.com/
2.) Nofollow Blogroll SEO – to add rel=”nofollow” attribute to non-homepage Blogroll Links (only on some sites that warrant it) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-blogroll-seo/
3.) SEO Booster PRO (Pro Version) http://www.mywordpress.com/
4.) SEO Super Comments http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-super-comments
5.) WordPress Database Backup – http://austinmatzko.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-db-backup/
6.) WP-PostViews http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
I’m very addicted to plugins, and every new wordpress install to me, is like a blank artist canvas, so it’s very hard for me to do a “must-install” plugin list when I fall in love everytime I create a new website lol, but I’ll do my very very best to create one in the next 2 months :)
Kind Regards,
Penny
What a great list of tools, a must have for a hosted WP
deden’s last blog post..Belajar Teknik SEO ala Ponari
well i should try all those plugin then
ayahshiva’s last blog post..Filosofi Cermin
This article’s so helpfull. Thank you. I’ll try all
Kampanye Damai Pemilu Indonesia 2009’s last blog post..Kampanye Damai Pemilu Indonesia 2009
[...] Your PageRank can DIE with WordPress – 17 Ways to Optimize SEO [...]
Wow! Great article! I’m mantaining a site about WordPress, and this article has some interesting tips!
About the ’404′ plugin, I’ve see it’s not compatible to WP 2.7
So I’ll try ‘Redirection’ plugin!
Bye,
Massimo
Massimo’s last blog post..Comment on Google xml sitemap plugin – fai conoscere il tuo blog a Google! by Webmaster tools di Google – diamo visibilita’ al blog! | Crea il tuo blog!
Wow, this is quite a list! Most I use, but some I haven’t heard of before.
Thanks, Penny!
Adam Kayce’s last blog post..Put The Power Of Ritual To Work For You
Great list of plugins, will try SEO Automatic Links and compare it to other Related Posts plugins.
Paul’s last blog post..HD Tweak
I wrote this post 9 days ago and optimised the plugins on the same day, I am yet to rename all my titles/posts (going to do a copywriting course first), but great news is the index page has now gone to pagerank 2.. not bad for 9 days.. stay tuned.. :)
Thanks Penny for this great list I have some of them installed but I went ahead installed a few here that I thought would be useful.
Dan
Everything Blogs’s last blog post..Super Bowl comes to Tampa
You are good in finding useful plugin.. Thanks for the list.. I will try wp greet box and Psychic Search..
Blogging Guide’s last blog post..Free Custom Minisite Design Template
Thank you for mentioning my plugin (WP Greet Box). This is indeed a great list with lots of detail. I will have to check out the other plugins on this list.
Thaya Kareeson’s last blog post..Project Honey Pot Http:BL is going back home
Thanks for writing this article.
I can see you are a true wordpress plugin master. All these plugins are useful and the methods are awesome. I think they are much more better than my “15 secrets to optimize blog for seo traffic” blog post. Informative and well explained! I ‘ll stumble this post!
Alex- The Blog Trafic Geek’s last blog post..Best Blog Traffic Strategies For NEW NICHES
I love posts like this, even though they make me realize that I still have a ton of work to do on my established blogs.
Pet Pics’s last blog post..Lucky the Rescue Cat – Picture 29
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