Make Your WordPress Blog Search Engine Friendly

ADVERTISEMENTS

The following video is by Michael Gray from GrayWolf’s SEO blog explaining on how to optimize a WordPress blog to make it more Search Engine friendly.

Some things you can learn from this video are to put a post in only one category to prevent content duplication (Google and other search engines penalize sites that have duplicated content), make use of the ‘more’ feature to prevent content duplication in homepage, single post page, category pages, etc and use a robots.txt file.

To prevent duplicated content in category pages, tag pages, yearly archives or monthly archives make sure your theme uses post excerpts there. Also create a robots.txt file to tell search engine bots which pages on your web site should be crawled and indexed.

RSS Readers: If you can’t see this video click here

banner

Search JohnTP.com or view a random post

To receive this blogs articles for FREE on your email inbox, just enter your email address below and click 'Go':

Enter your email address: or .

Find out what I am doing currently by .

26 responses so far, Leave a comment

  1. 1

    jake

    April 14, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    wow this is very informative.

  2. 2

    Ashish Mohta

    April 15, 2007 at 9:28 am

    I had been using one category for every post but I am more confused on “How to use tag”….John can you make a post on that

  3. 3

    Vijay

    April 15, 2007 at 9:33 am

    I have some posts in 2 or so categories.. Should I change them to one category? Also, what can I do about tags. It would be nice if you could elaborate on usage of tags.

  4. 4

    Ashish Mohta

    April 15, 2007 at 9:35 am

    : Make them in individual categories. Dont make a post in 2 categories, this can result in duplication.

  5. 5

    Madhur Kapoor

    April 15, 2007 at 11:28 am

    I generally used between 1-2 category for posts , thanks for the eye opener .

  6. 6

    Vijay

    April 15, 2007 at 12:38 pm

    I’ve started filing 1 post in 1 category from now.. Now I get the reason why ashish has so many categories :D

  7. 7

    Ashish Mohta

    April 15, 2007 at 1:01 pm

    : lol Dont tell my secrets to everybody, J/k. I did this mistake before but as i started knowing more about SEO i realized what i was doing. I had to edit back everything long back.

  8. 8

    The Reviewer

    April 15, 2007 at 8:32 pm

    Man only 1 category, that seems so limiting. I will have to go through a lot of posts to fix that. I hope I can trim out the fat and do that. Do you feel that this change, will help a lot if I usually use multiple categories? What about tags? All my categories become tags too.

  9. 9

    The Reviewer

    April 15, 2007 at 8:35 pm

    Actually I was looking at my cat/tag/archive pages, and they are all excerpts, and when I click on them it takes me to the 1 page that exists for that entry. So wouldn’t that mean there is no dupe content?

  10. 10

    Mr.Byte

    April 15, 2007 at 10:44 pm

    I don’t think posting in more than 1 categories would be a problem if we have excerpts for categories page. Am I wrong on this?

  11. 11

    Ashish Mohta

    April 15, 2007 at 11:02 pm

    You have a point there.I guess John has to reply for it

  12. 12

    Stephane

    April 15, 2007 at 11:13 pm

    Interesting, but one could expect that providing a sitemap with each post referenced only once would handle this “duplication problem”… Wouldn’t it be a more elegant way to solve this ?

  13. 13

    Jauhari

    April 16, 2007 at 3:20 pm

    Really Usable informations.. Thanks

  14. 14

    JohnTP

    April 18, 2007 at 12:48 pm

    Even if you have excerpts in category and tag pages, posting in more than one category or tag will still result in content duplication.

    These days I just post in one category, so that problem is fixed.

    What troubles me is tags. I need to use multiple tags because I use a plugin that uses these tags as meta keywords for the post.

    I could use robots.txt file to ignore tag pages, but the problem is I get search engine traffic from tag pages too :(

  15. 15

    Ronald

    April 18, 2007 at 9:06 pm

    Thank’s for share this one John.

  16. 16

    Shane

    April 20, 2007 at 1:15 am

    Bending over backward to restructure your blog (or any website) for search engines almost always does more harm than good. Is it helpful to your readers to have things in only one category? If not, who do you care more about, your readers or the search engines? If you’re depending on the search engines to continually bring you lots of new traffic to replace those readers who find your site hard to use or otherwise unpleasant and end up not coming back, you’re going to regret it.

    Making the basic tweaks to your blog to make it search engine friendly is important, but you can quickly get to the point where you focus so much on search engines that you lose site of what’s best for your readers.

  17. 17

    Oz Poker

    April 20, 2007 at 11:27 am

    How many pages can your blog go without some duplaication ?

    Many of my content posts are tournament announcments and invitation.

    Obviously they have to have the same format and hence they prolly get tagged duplications.

    I am yet to see an effective way around this other than excluding them with my robots.txt file but that kinda defeats the purpose. People need to be able to find them using google seo.

  18. 18

    abhiroop bhattacharyya

    June 12, 2007 at 8:41 pm

    nice informations to keep in mind while posting

  19. 19

    PHP Developer

    July 15, 2007 at 11:30 am

    Yep, Duplicate content is a killer. I’ve read that Google gets down to a 2 sentence block! Scary!

  20. 20

    Webmaster Money

    July 16, 2007 at 9:41 pm

    Ve nice video. Once I found what is SEO I got finaly some results from SE.

  21. 21

    SEO Blog

    August 1, 2007 at 5:50 pm

    Ignoring pages by changing the .htaccess file is not what I’d go for, as John mentioned that the blog could be getting traffic from Tag and other pages. There has to be a good solution to this problem, because currently a lot of the duplicate content pages on my Blog end up in Supplemental Index!

  22. 22

    Panwar

    November 28, 2007 at 8:37 am

    Thanks for video.
    I didnt know what commands to put in it to stop search engines getting duplicate contents from my blog and also plz remember i am using %postname% permalink

  23. 23

    gadis

    April 25, 2008 at 9:17 am

    thanks for video, I start with my new blog

Have something to say?




Copyright ©2005-2008 JohnTP, All rights reserved.