Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress SEO by Rob Kerry (@robkerry) Head of Search / Co-founder Ayima

WordPress– Background Two forms of WordPressblog WordPress.org– Download the PHP source code and self-host WordPress.com– Let Automattic(WordPress) host it for you WordPress.comhosts 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 WordPresssite.Plug-in: http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

Potential Uses – A Q&Asupport 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 WordPressdoes 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+ WordPressusernames 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” WordPressthemes 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 WordPressinvolves 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 WordPressare 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 WordPressisn’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

Thanks for listening! Rob Kerry rob@ayima.com http://www.ayima.com/ Twitter: @robkerry

Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

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Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011