Blog SEO Tips - Wordpress SEO

By Justin | Jun 5, 2008

I think every SEO blog covers this topic, but I thought I’d share my Wordpress SEO setup. I’m going to cover the plugins I use and the basic set up for each of my Wordpress blogs.

Wordpress SEO Theme

The theme used for your blog can impact your site’s SEO performance. Many of the free Wordpress themes have several SEO flaws. Not only are they coded poorly, some actually contain hidden links that will leak your juice.

If you can code, I’d suggest a custom designed theme or at least running through your free theme and cleaning it up. I suggest following the practices Court uses in his Keyword Sniping theme.

If you aren’t a good coder, check out Court’s SEO Themes. He has a large list of free themes he has cleaned and optimized for search engines.

Wordpress SEO Plugins

The part everyone was waiting for. The Wordpress SEO plugins.

Akismet - Not seen as a traditional SEO plugin, but this will help you deal with spammy comments that could flood your site with links to bad neighborhoods and nasty keywords.
All in One SEO Pack - This is an absolute must in my opinion. This does most of the SEO work required to optimize a Wordpress blog. It corrects titles and some duplicate content issues. It also makes it very easy to add meta tags to each post/page.
Brian’s Threaded Comments - Another non-traditional SEO plugin. Its seen more as a plugin to increase comments, than it is as an SEO plugin. Its important to understand that having active commenters is good SEO. When someone comments they give you free fresh content. You’ll get a boost due to the freshness factor of your page. Also, it’s free content and many times its keyword rich content. Never close your comments and suggest that people comment away, Google will love it.
Sitemap Generator - This is to generate a HTML sitemap of all the post/pages on your blog. This increases your blog’s crawlability. Google can easily follow the links on your sitemap to find every page on your site. This helps reduce the site depth problem large blogs can get.
Google Sitemap Generator - This is an XML sitemap generator. Unlike the last plugin mentioned, this sitemap isn’t intended for humans. It list all the posts/pages on your site for Google to read. The great thing about this plugin is that it pings multiple search engines every time you post. This plugin will improve the speed at which your posts get indexed and will help keep them indexed.
Related Post Plugin - Internal linking is an important SEO skills. This plugin helps with internal linking and site depth by interlinking related posts. The content snippets generated by this plugin can also provide auto generated content at the bottom of the post. This extra text can add keywords and help pull in searches from keyword phrases your didn’t originally target.
No-WWW - This helps set up a 301 redirect to define your prefered domain. URL canonicalization is an important SEO concept and this plugin takes care of the dirty work for you. Read Matt Cutts post to learn more about URL canonicalization.
Duplicate Content Cure - Duplicate content can lead to pretty nasty problems with search engines. Wordpress blogs are flawed by having lots of duplicate content (categories, tags, archives). This plugin in takes care of all the duplicate content issues for you.

Robots.txt

I suggest setting up a robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing useless pages or duplicate content. To create a robots.txt, simply save a txt file as robots.txt and upload it to the root folder of your domain. This is the robots.txt that I use:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /comments/

To learn more, check out Google Sitemaps Blog

Wordpress Settings

Ping List

You want to set up a good ping list to ping when you post. I don’t claim that my list is perfect or the best list, but here is the ping list I use on my blog.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

Permalinks

Don’t use the default link structure.

Go to: Settings > Permalinks

Select custom structure and input your desired tags. Any setup is good as long as you have your post name.

I suggest:

%category%/%postname%

Your URL’s now includes your keywords.

Conclusion

If you’re going to be using Wordpress as your blogging CMS, than these basic blog SEO tips should help. If you follow all this, your Wordpress blog will be optimized into an SEO machine. You’ll still want to follow standard SEO practices when you generate titles and content. Don’t forget to go get links though. A fine tuned blog with great content won’t get you ranked alone. You’ll need to go build links.

You can find more from Justin at his Nashville SEO blog.

13 Comments so far

New Feature: Threaded Comments | Market Urbanism June 5, 2008 9:27 pm

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Internet Marketing Company June 6, 2008 4:05 am

yeah I agree wordpress is good cms to use. Also you can use wordpress for trackback url when commenting to any other wordpress blog. Do you heard of the trackback url? You should try it out because it’s really effective
Chris Baggott June 6, 2008 8:42 am

This is a great and comprehensive list. WordPress is a great solution for many who have the time and resources to manage the IT and configuration of all this.

Keep in mind, there are SaaS blogging solutions designed for organizations and business that include all this as part of a turnkey hosted solution….the bloggers can focus on blogging vs. technology.

Best,

Chris Baggott
CEO
Compendium Blogware
http://www.compendiumblogware.com
Susan June 6, 2008 9:46 pm

I’ll have to check out that DuplicateCure plugin. Thanks!

Susans last blog post..Black Gloss
SEO Pune June 10, 2008 6:28 am

Great list for plugins..Thanks.
Rhys June 16, 2008 10:48 pm

Hi Eric!

Great post, selecting the right plugins can be a minefield.

I have INSTANTLY incorporated your tips into my Robots.txt files, thank you.

Rhyss last blog post..Maximize SEO like a ‘Pro’
Michael Nowak June 23, 2008 5:37 pm

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nickle young August 16, 2008 11:48 am

Great!Seo Administrator is an integrated suite of web promotion utilities that cover all aspects of website optimization and promotion.
Wordpress SEO Plugin September 12, 2008 5:47 am

Wordpress is a great blogging platform and getting it search engine optimized really isn’t a hard task. Using proper permalinks and robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content and a few other methods can really make a difference. The All in One SEO plugin is really the best bet.
drorkannotH October 20, 2008 11:45 pm

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Vsevolod November 6, 2008 12:13 am

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