WordPress SEO by Rob Kerry (@robkerry) Head of Search / Co-founder Ayima
May 17, 2015
WordPress SEO
by
Rob Kerry (@robkerry)Head of Search / Co-founder
Ayima
WordPress – Background
• Two forms of WordPress blog– WordPress.org – Download the PHP source code and self-host– WordPress.com – Let Automattic (WordPress) host it for you
• WordPress.com hosts over 18 million blogs– 395 new posts are published every minute– Over 300 comments are posted every minute
• Better than the rest?– Blogger.com is the biggest competitor, but very restrictive– Movable Type is one of the oldest blog platforms, but very clunky
WordPress – Not just a boring blog
Potential Uses – An easy to use CMS
Potential Uses – An e-commerce platform
Icon Dock uses WP e-Commerce to add a shop to their WordPress site.Plug-in: http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/
Potential Uses – A Q&A support platform
I created a Q&A platform at SearchMarketingTalk.com using Gravity Forms and WordPress! AnswersPlug-ins: http://gravityforms.com/ and http://www.anieto2k.com/
WordPress – It won’t get jealous
• WordPress does not have to run your entire site
• Can sit happily in a subfolder or on a subdomaini.e. http://www.example.com/blog/ or http://blog.example.com/
• Works on both Windows and Linux platformsDon’t believe your IT Department if they say it won’t work ;o)
• Ayima recommends choosing a subfolder set-up– Subfolders inherit the authority and trust of the root domain– Google often treats subdomains as new and untrusted websites
WordPress – It’s good news for Google News
• An easy platform to roll-out for Google News inclusion
• Change all references/links/URLs of “blog” to “news”
• Rotate news articles under 3+ WordPress usernames
• Many WP themes have an “Authors Page” which can be handy for proving that you have multiple authors
• Use Google News friendly Permalinks in WordPress:
WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast
• “Wordpress SEO” by Yoast is currently the best plugin for optimising WordPress– Live-edit your Page Title and Meta Description for each post– Implement the Canonical Link Tag properly across your site– Manage your robots.txt file– Clean up your <head> tag– Generate XML Sitemaps– Download from: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
WP Minify Plugin
• “WP Minify” is a fantastic plugin for SEO– Strips out all whitespace, comments and unnecessary code– Compresses HTML on-the-fly, speeding up your page loading times– Merges local JavaScript and CSS files, reducing number of file requests– Cleans out self-promotional plugin author comments from your code– Download from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-minify/
WordPress – Designers aren’t SEOs
• Designers are not SEOs, even if they claim to make “SEO friendly” WordPress themes
• Make sure that the <h1> tag is used on the homepage for a descriptive title and not for the logo
• Remove multiple instances of <h1> tags and the unnecessary usage of <h2> tags in the theme
WordPress – Canonical fun times
• A common SEO mistake with WordPress involves the Canonical <link> tag…e.g. <link rel=“canonical” href=“http://www.ayima.com/” />
• Some SEO plugins leave off the trailing slash in URLs, which many web servers then 301 redirect to the “/” URLe.g. <link rel=“canonical” href=“http://www.ayima.com” />
• Others just respond with whatever URL is in the browser
• Test yours by adding /?test=123 to the end of your homepage URLe.g. http://www.ayima.com/?test=123
WordPress – Let me count the ways…
• Category Hell and the spawn of Satan's Archives
– Do you need an Archive for every month of the year?
– Do individual Authors need a 5 page index of their previous posts?
– I know that it came with the theme, but who actually needs a Print Version of your “Florida Plastic Mouldings Guild” blog?
• Most blogs/sites only need one set of Categories, so remove the useless extra filters and boost the authority of important pages on your site
WordPress – I didn’t say that… did I?
• Have you been drunk-blogging again?
• Deleted posts can stick around for a while, even after using the Google Webmaster Tools removal tool
• Do yourself a favour (and help other search engines) by serving a 410 HTTP Status code on the deleted post’s URL via your htaccess file
• Open up your .htaccess file and add:Redirect 410 /news/your-momma-is-so-fat.html(or whatever the deleted post’s URL was)
WordPress – The infinite website
• By default, the internal search result pages on WordPress are indexable
• Competitors can negatively harm your site by posting links to these search pages using comment spame.g. http://searchengineland.com/?s=<keyword>
• Adding hundreds of thousands of new pages to your site makes it hard for Google to index properly
• Protect yourself by adding Disallow: /*?s= into your robots.txt file
WordPress – Naughty SEOs create bad plugins
• WordPress isn’t Nirvana – Don’t trust everyone
• SEOs build themes and plugins that secretly inject links into your site, risking penalties
• Wannabe SEOs create crappy “SEO Plugins”– Can actually end up breaking your site– Unintentionally harm your site’s SEO
• You’re usually safe with the masses – check reviews
WordPress – Security
• Stop search engines from indexing sensitive files
• Add an extra password challenge to your admin folder:http://smt.im/wp-password
• Remove WordPress references from your HTML:http://smt.im/wp-adminsecure
• Remove the “admin” user and don’t use “wp_” as your MySQL table prefix
WordPress – Hosting
• Don’t use cheap hosting if you value your website/blog
• Some shared hosting accounts can be compromised
• Blackhat SEOs can embed links into your old blog posts
• Make sure that your web host’s server is completely locked down
• I recommend:– http://page.ly/ - A US based specialist secure Wordpress host– http://www.tsohost.co.uk/ - A UK based clustered hosting platform