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 

All in One SEO Pack

• 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.

Download

Google-Sitemap-Generator

• 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.

Download

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

• 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.

Download

Psychic Search

• 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.

Download

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

SEO Automatic Links

• 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.

Download

SEO Post Link

• Prevents extremely long urls when you have long titles by ensuring that all the useless words are cut-out of the permalink.

Download

Simple Tags

• 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 

Download

Smart 404

• If a page cannot be found, it will search your posts, pages, tags, categories for related posts and show them instead.

Download

Stumble for Wordpress

• 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.

Download

Enforce WWW Preference

• 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.

Download

 

Google-Analyticator

• 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.

Download

WP-GreetBox

• 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.

Download

WP-PDA

• 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.

Download

Global Translator

• 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.

Download

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.

 

Filed Under: Wordpress Plugins • Wordpress Tips

Tags: 404 error, google, MaxBlogPress, pagerank, pennybutler, ping, seo, wordpress, Wordpress Plugin