Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress

We do not always know, the theme chosen as far as the use of plugins has a role in SEO on a site powered by Wordpress.

The theme

The default themes are not optimized for search engines, because they have the following defects:

• Using the H1 tag for the site name, the <H2> tag for the title page and in general, using fancy heading tags whose natural role is to give its exact purpose to each part of the page. This deceives the engines on the topic of the article.
• Presence of the same slogan on every page: this can be interpreted as stuffing keywords.
• Using <H3> tags for formatting in the side panel, which enlightens even less about the purpose of the article.
• Presence of a number of links unrelated to the page content, including the tag-cloud, calendar, archives, etc. ... This prevents the transmission of PageRank.

The theme of a optimized site should be clean and respect rules of optimal organization.

Site optimization

It starts by a configuration step, and ends with the installation of plugins, which is discussed further.

Check if the site is visible to robots

By default, Wordpress block the site to crawlers! After installing Wordpress, look at the source code. The presence of a <meta name = "robots.... tag means the site will not be indexed.
To correct this anomaly, go to Administration -> Settings -> Privacy and check "I want my blog to be visible to all, etc. ..."

The header

To avoid repetition of the name and slogan on each page, delete them in the header.php file, and replace them with a logo in an image.
The procedure is explained about the installation of the Cryonie theme.

URLs

Relevant URLs are actually preferable to item numbers used by the default configuration. The easiest and best way is to configure them as follows:

Custom structure: %postname%

So the URL will consist of keywords that appear in links from other sites to your site / blog.

Robots.txt

Example of the robots.txt file based on the codex, which agrees with significant URLs as configured above:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache

Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */feed
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Of course, replace example.com by the name of your site.

You must not block access to JavaScript and to your theme because Google will penalyze your site.

Optimizing a page

In his guide for webmasters, Google provides a "Design and content guidelines" section. They applies first to the organization of the page.

Hierarchical structure

The page title is in a <H1> tag, the subtitles in <H2> tags and so on.

Links

All links in a page should be relevant, closely related to the content. The links should not be too numerous, because as pointed out in the article What we need to know about PageRank, popularity of a site page is transmitted to other pages through links.

The archives, tag cloud etc.. are very useful for accessing content, but should rather stay on the homepage or a page dedicated to that.

The list of recent articles is not necessarily relevant to the content, it should be removed or limited to 3 links, but a list of related articles should be provided for visitors and engines. Plugins can create it automatically.

Images

When you insert images, fill in the ALT field. This is for engines and is the textual representation of the image.

Nofollow

Do not worry about the nofollow attribute to your links, whatever anyone says. This does nothing and Wordpress by default adds it to comments to discourage spam: it is the only place where they are useful.
(Ref: PageRank and Nofollow.)

Plugins useful for SEO

Essential plugins:

• Google XML Sitemaps.
  It will help Google better index your pages and reflect the changes.
  In my experience, a site having a sitemap gives very good results for pages often updated.
• All-in-One SEO pack.
  Not very flexible, it can nonetheless control the indexing and fill meta-tags. To index each tag would be more harmful than useful. Given the all or nothing, select nothing.
• Simple tags.
  Generate a list of related articles and place it at the end of the post, that is perfect.

Other plugins:

• Wordtwit.
  Promotional tool, it helps to let know every new page on Twitter.
• Cookies pour comments.
  Help to protect comments from spam bots.

Conclusion

Creating a blog is easy. Creating a successful site is more difficult. Wordpress is not configured by default to be successful, but it will become after we have spent a little time to optimize it. This involves choosing a SEO-Friendly theme and some plugins.
Steps needed before we can focus on the content ...

Documentation

• Webmaster guideline, by Google.
• Installing Wordpress locally, for tests.