This presentation by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts was probably my fave of the conference, simply because there were actionable ways I could go and change my WordPress site to make it more SEO friendly. I’ve outlined my “wow” moments below, but make sure you check out Stephan’s article Twelve SEO Mistakes that Most Bloggers Make site and his presentation notes too. (Graphics courtesy of Elliance SEO Services.)
Optimize your title tags!
This was probably the most eye-opening thing I learned here about my blog. I’ve always auto-generated the <title> tag based on the actual title I put in my post. I’ve done it before in Content Management Systems and WP does this too.
Stephan said that re-using the post title for your <title> tag is a bad practice because people don’t often search for it the way you wrote it. You can be as witty and cute and lyrical in your post title as you want, for the article’s sake, but make damn sure your title tag doesn’t read that way! The title tag should be wordy, keyword rich and full of information.
For example, the title of this post is “My WordCamp Notes: SEO for blogs”, but if you look at the title bar at the top of the browser my actual <title> tag is “Easy SEO tips and tricks for bloggers, a presentation by Stephan Spencer at WordCamp 2008″. Way more search friendly.
- Decouple the post name from the title page
- The first words in the title tag get the most rank
- Hand craft the title tag
- Do keyword research on plural vs signal
- For WP, install the SEO Title Tag plugin – mass edit titles and add Custom titles for each
- Use related post links at the end of the post
- B2B Lead Generation Blog
Sculpt your PageRank.
You only have so much PageRank “flow of link gain” on your page and you want to make sure you don’t spread it around needlessly. Reserve true links for the important information. On all the rest add rel=”nofollow” to the link to tell Google it’s not as important as the other content on your site:
- Use it on all print and email links.
- Use it on links, trackbacks and comments that you don’t want to give “flow” back to if you don’t want your precious PageRank to pass from your page to this link.
- Use it where the link would be reciprocal.
- Use rel=”nofollow” on any internal links to date-based pages. No one searches in google for “what christen said on June 6th, 2008!”
Minimize Duplicate Content
- Craft optional excerpts on everything but the permalink page itself.
- For each post, write unique content (ie paraphrase) for the excerpt – don’t just use the first couple paragraphs!!! Don’t use the “read more” insert for WP, this creates DUPLICATE content!
- Meta robots noindex & rel-nofollow are your friends – printer friendly
- Make sure that each tag or category page (that pulls aggregate posts) has it’s own “sticky” post that resides at the top and explains the tag or category. This unique chunk of text will allow this page to be indexed.
Optimize your Anchor Text
- Post title should be always be a link to the permalink page.
- Never link with the word “here”. Link text should equal the <title> tag of the post you’re linking to which is important for context.
