Feed your WordPress Demons!
One of the shortcomings of Wordpress is the fact that it comes SEO-unfriendly in the box. When you install a Wordpress system, you are basically left with default options that are not very SE-friendly. As you know, the title of each and every post is your greatest opportunity to rank on Google and receive free traffic. SEO Title Tag SEO Wordpress Plugin is one of the best in allowing you to manage your title tags.
SEO Title tags wordpress plugin allows you to modify your title tags for each and every page on your blog. You can also modify the title for your category pages, your tag pages, and your 404 and archives pages. You can also put in customized title tags for each post when you are writing them. I personally prefer this approach to the automated one as you get to customize for the keywords that you really want. The plugin is free of course, and you can download it here. Don’t forget to make sure that you have only one title plugin active. There are people who have multiple active plugins that do the same thing. You don’t want to do that when you are doing SEO for your Wordpress blog. That’s if you want to show up high up on Google.
Getting your Wordpress SEO right is probably the most important part of running your SEO blog. It’s true you can drive to your website with PPC, Article marketing, or various other ways, but it is essential to use SEO to your advantage to keep your costs down. After all, who doesn’t like getting free traffic.
One of the issues that many wordpress bloggers have to deal with is the issue of content duplication. The template that you use, and they way Wordpress is designed in general can get you in trouble with search engines. For instance, in most blogs, domain.com/cat1/cat2 story and domain.com/cat1/story return the same page which could be counted as duplicate content on major search engines. So you want to make sure you address potential duplicate content issues with your Wordpress blog as soon as possible.
The issue of link weight is also important towards for your SEO efforts, so you want to make sure you are not leaking pagerank by linking out to unrelated sites (either through comments or links on your pages). Well you can address this issue by adding the META Robots tag as below:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>
If you are familiar with HTML, you know that the above meta robots tags, when added to your pages, instructs search engines to follow the links on the page and index them as well. Now if you have 200 pages, you simply cannot customize your robots tag per page easily. That’s just not how Wordpress is designed right now. But that’s where META Robots plugin comes in.
META Robots Wordpress plugin allows you to apply the above tag to all your pages. In addition, the box below shows up under each and every post, allowing you to override the settings for each post. This plugin allows to avoid indexing your META pages and other useless pages as well, which can only help your SEO efforts.
Now here is what you should know before using this plugin:
But give this a try. It’s simply an amazing simple but powerful Wordpress plugin and it’s free too!
I am sure you are familiar with the concept of breadcrumbs. These are those little handy links that show up at the top or bottom of pages and help you navigate through websites. Breadcrumbs are highly recommended for SEO, but they are not necessarily easy to generate for Wordpress blogs. Now I say that as it is possible to implement a customized Breadcrumb system for your Wordpress plug if you know PHP inside and out. But if you are just a blogger who want to take advantage of breadcrumbs to make your site easier to use, then you should check out Breadcrumb NavXT.
NavXT allows you to create highly customizable crumbs for your Wordpress blog without too much fuss. Now some Wordpress themes may not quite work easily with this plug-in but most of them do. Basically, all you need to do is to add the following code to your header.php file:
The administration panel for this plugin is very easy to use and allows you to customize all pages such as archives, author pages, and even static front pages. You get to define what you want to see on your breadcrumb here.
Now if you are an advanced user, I highly recommend activating the Core version of this plugin instead of the administration version. The reason is that you can make this plugin perform faster without the administration panel. But you will need the following code to make it work:
The breadcrumbs are often used to boost search engine rankings. The search engine robots love these, and you should definitely consider having them if your theme fits one of these. This plug-in is for free and you can download it right here.
I don’t know if you have heard of the concept of creating silos for your webpages instead of just creating sitemaps. Silos are arguably more search-engine friendly, and at the end of the day, they give search engine robots pathways to go through your pages more easily. In case you don’t know what a Silo look like, please take a look at below:
As you may know, search engine robots discover relevance based on numerous factors such as keywords, anchor texts, LSI (related terms that you can figure out using Adwords Keyword tool), and other factors. By only having one link in and one link out, you can not only pass PR effectively through your pages, you can also pass relevance more effectively. Bleeding PR has been one of my biggest headaches and that’s why I started reading on the concept of Silos. Silos are in essence one level below Blackholes (no we are not talking about astronomy here). But before you get to the Blackhole level, you want to make sure you implement the Silos technique to pass rank through your pages.
If you have a thousand pages, then changing your structure to make Silo happen is time consuming and next to impossible. That’s why I am grateful to the creator of Virtual Silo. The plugin is so easy to use, and it works right out of the box. Best of all, no programming is required to implement the Silo structure for your Wordpress blog in a second.
Virtual Silo comes with many options, but you can see from above that you don’t have to do any programming whatsoever. You check a set of radiobuttons, and you are on your way. Keep in mind that the above values are what I use for my blog and may have to be different for you blog. My Wordpress blog was a mess so I had to change the default values to account for a few problems.
Virtual Wordpress Silo is one of the best and worthy SEO plugins that I have found on the web. The goal here is not to smash atoms, but to do a simple process for a huge blogs. And Virtual Silo accomplishes that brilliantly. You can also get Silo for Joomla but that’s outside the scope of this blog…
Search engine optimization is one of the issues that folks who are new to Wordpress grapple with in their early days of experiencing the Wordpress platform. I can’t tell you how many times I have read in forums about how folks are looking for a simple way to change the title of their home page. It’s not really that hard, but I am going to show you an easy way to do it without having to program at all: SEO Title Tags Wordpress Plug-in.
SEO Title tags is an amazingly simple yet powerful plug-in that allows you to change the title tag of your pages, your posts, everything else. Once you install and activate SEO Title tags, then you can go to your settings page in your Dashboard and define a title tag for your home page + you can optimize the description tag as well.
You can also customize your titles for each and every post using the title tag section that is added under each post once you activate the plug-in.
So as you see, you don’t need to be a PHP or HTML programmer to optimize your blog for organic search. For everything SEO, there is always a plug-in, thanks to the good folks behind the Wordpress Open source community.
P.S. this plug-in is a free plug-in.
