Justin Harrison

For those of you using Wordpress, you will know that it is one of the quickest and easiest blog programs available. But like all generic off the shelf software, it does come with a major down side when it comes to search engine optimisation.

That said Wordpress remains my blog software of choice, and over time I have discovered some cunning tricks to rework and hack Wordpress into a more SEO friendly environment.

Making Wordpress SEO Friendly:

The following hacks, and plug-ins, will boost your search engine rakings and make your Wordpress blog a whole bunch easier on the eyes.

Problem #1 – Wordpress Title Tags are not SEO friendly, the Blog name gets put ahead of the post name, and even if you do use a plug-in like [optimal tag] to reverse this you land up with your blog name in all of the post title tags which dilutes the value of your keywords in your title tag.

The solution is to use a plug-in called [SEO title Tag] which allows you to specify a title for your blog index, and then only to include your article heading in the posts – which is EXACTLY THE WAY you should do it for optimal SEO.

Problem #2 – Almost all Wordpress templates, including the default template makes the incorrect use of h tags such as H1, H2 etc. For some reason the H1 tags are often assigned to headings on the sidebar, which in turn devalues the use of your keywords in other headings.

The solution is to edit your template and assign a heading style to all headings other than ones where you want to place your h tags. For example you article heading will always be h1 and subsequent heading might me h2 h3 etc within your posts. By defining your sidebar headings in their own style other than the h tag, you increase the on page optimisation for your post headings.

Problem # 3 – Wordpress does not include any logical page naming such as /thispost.html but rather works on dynamic naming such as /index.php?652$#. Additionally the permalink structure which allows you to assign a rewrite such as /%category%/%postname%/ is also ineffective since each post will show up in your site map as idirectorty rather than a page, for example blog/shoes/blue-shoes/.

The solution is to use the permalink structure, but to drop the trailing slash after the post name and to assign a page extension such as .htm, .html .php etc. [/%category%/%postname%.php] which would rewrite the URL to /example blog/shoes/blue-shoes.php

Problem #4 Wordpress generates duplicate content pages, which as I know first hand will eventually land you in the supplemental index.

This is a sure way to a sudden online death. If you have an archive link, category link and post slugs with a date, the search engines see 1 post on 3 pages (because this is dynamic content) as a result, 3 pages at your site with the same content is seen as duplicate content.

The solution is to make use of your robots.txt file to exclude the duplicate pages form the search engine index, which is the same as posting a [nofollow noindex] tag behind each link, only faster and easier. The robot.txt values I use are:

Disallow: /blog/category/
Disallow: /blog/wp-register.php
Disallow: /blog/wp-login.php
Disallow: /blog/200

If you run a sitemap tool such as [XML Sitemaps] you will soon able to see how the bots crawl your site and which pages show up under the duplicate content.

There are obviously many other little tweaks than can and need to be made, and I will cover these over the next while.

Until then, Good Luck and Happy Marketing.