There are many excellent posts on WordPress SEO. Plugins are one of the best ways of getting your WordPress SEO up to scratch and I will focus on the best plugins for SEO in this post. As I mentioned in my earlier post “Bristol SEO Experiment” I have used Joost de Valk’s article on WordPress SEO as a starting point for this site.
This has obviously worked, as I now rank at number two in Google for Bristol SEO, and I’m certain that I can target other keyword phrases, and not be hampered by my competition with Cole which forbids me from linking from other locations using appropriate anchor text.
Despite Joost’s excellent advice I have also gone my own way on a few things, as plugins have updated or I’ve seen new ones I like the look of, so following are seven plugins that everyone serious about SEO for WordPress should install.
1) Customize Your Community
2) Google XML Sitemaps
3) HeadSpace2
4) Lighter Menus
5) pageMash
6) Redirection
7) Robots Meta
I am also using the excellent Thesis theme that has been designed from the ground up to be the most SEO friendly theme for WordPress. It does have the unfortunate issue of not working in its newest release with some of these plugins, however I will explain how I have customised each of them to work for me.
1) Customize Your Community – Customise Your Community allows you to theme the login pages of your site, so when people go to post a comment on one of your posts, they are not stuck with seeing an incongruous login page that is the WordPress default, they see a login that matches your site’s carefully crafted theme. Whilst not an SEO benefit, it is a definite user experience plus. Currently this plugin does not work with Thesis so you can’t see it on my site, however as far as I am aware this is being worked on by the developers. For all other themes, full installation instructions are available from Rae by clicking the link above.
2) Google XML Sitemaps – As mentioned in earlier posts, I am trying to rank without getting any inbound links containing keyword rich anchor text. One of the only ways then to let search engines know I exist is by submitting a sitemap to them. Sitemaps are also best practice generally for SEO and this plugin really doesn’t need any customisation, simply create your sitemap and tell Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask.com as mentioned in my post on sitemaps for SEO so that your site is indexed, and your sitemap is kept up to date.
3) HeadSpace2 – Headspace allows you to change all the metadata on your site, setting up defaults, and overwriting these as you please. It is probably one of the plugins that can provide you with the most SEO benefit for your blog. Having activated Headspace, go into Settings > Headspace and you will see the page settings. I have set up my defaults as follows:
Archives
Page Title: Blog Archives %%page%% – [Blog Name}
Description: %%category_description%%
Categories
Page Title: %%category%% Archives %%page%% – [Blog Name}
Description: %%category_description%%
Posts & Pages
Page Title: %%title%% – [Blog Name}
Description: %%category_description%%
Tag Pages
Page Title: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% – [Blog Name}
Description: %%category_description%%
Under the Site Modules section of Headspace I only have one box ticked as Thesis provides me by default with many of the other options – including a place to add Google Analytics tracking code. This box is First Time Visitor, which shows people visiting my site for the first time a message welcoming them to the site and suggesting they subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up to date with posts.
4) Lighter Menus – Again not an SEO for WordPress plugin, but still very useful. If you have installed all of the plugins mentioned here, you’ll probably find the top of your admin section becoming rather crowded. Lighter Menus fixes this by adding nice dropdown menus to your admin area. Lighter Menus whilst a great plugin for WP 2.7 and below, is really not needed in WP 2.7+ and the author isn’t updating it until he’s had a good look at 2.7.
5) pageMash – If you have a lot of static pages on your site rather than just blog post you may want to move them around a bit and make pages children of other pages. pageMash allows you to do this in a very simple interface, simply drag the pages around to the position you want them to be in.
6) Redirection – If you decide to move your posts or pages around ever, then you need to make sure that anyone linking to these posts isn’t linking to dead space. Redirection will take care of this for you automatically. It looks for changes and sets up a 301 redirect for you in your .htaccess file. It also allows you to automatically strip off the www. part of the URL of your site, and remove index files like .php and .html. as an aside here, if you’re going to remove the www. from the URL, decide to do this and stick with it, don’t go changing from being www. to non-www. otherwise you’ll confuse search engines. I have decided to strip www. and index files as I think it looks neater, and I don’t anticipate setting up loads of subdomains of this site.
7) Robots Meta – Stop the loss of the magic green pagerank juice to places where it’s not needed by using this plugin by Joost. I have set mine up as follows:
Noindex the comments RSS feed
Prevent indexing of:
This site’s search results page
Login & register pages
All admin pages
Author archives
Date-based archives
Tag archives
Add noodp meta tag – forcing search engines to use my meta descriptions as search page snippets
Add noydir metatag – as above
Disable author archives
Disable date based archives
Redirect search results pages where referrer is external
Nofollow category listings on pages
Nofollow category listings on single posts
Nofollow the links to your tag pages
Nofollow login and registration links
Nofollow comments links
Replace the Meta Widget with a nofollowed one
I have also added in my verify meta values for Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal.
I have a further seven plugins that I use to improve my WordPress SEO, but as this post is already rather long, I will save them for another day in the very near future, as I’m sure that these few give people enough to be going on with.
Tags: Bristol SEO, SEO, Sitemaps, Thesis, Wordpress
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