WordPress – Improve SEO and user experience: 10 Useful Tips…

There are plenty of good blogging platforms available, but WordPress has been my blogging software of choice for quite some time now, and I have built up a list of things that I do when implementing a WordPress blog that I thought might be useful to anyone who is relatively new to WordPress and is wondering how to get better results from their blog.

When I say Wordpress I mean the self-hosted WordPress solution, which ensures that all the value I build up from inbound links and content generation is bound to my domain, if you are blogging for business I would strongly advise you do the same such that your blog address is www.mysite.com/blog or something similar. If your site does not have a blog, and you are wondering if it should, please feel free to contact me to discuss whether, and how, your site might benefit from having a blog.

Here are my tips for improving your WordPress blog once it’s installed:

1. Page Titles.

You used to need a plugin for this, but now you just need to tweak a little code. This is really important as it can make a big difference in your search engine results.

If you are using the default template you will need to open header.php and change this:
<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

to this:
<title><?php wp_title('&raquo;',TRUE,'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_home() ) { ?> &raquo; <?php bloginfo('description'); } ?></title>

2. Permalink structure.

Set up permalinks. I am a firm believer that these help with search engine results, and they also look better to humans! I use a simple permalink custom structure: /%category%/%postname%

3. Add description tags to posts.

Add meta tags to your blog posts plugin – this is an absolutely invaluable plugin which allows you to add keyword and description tags to blog posts. While keywords are of limited, if any, value, I find the description tag to be important, particularly for providing meaningful snippets in search engine results pages.

4. Caching.

If you happen to get a load of traffic to your blog, and it can happen unexpectadly trust me, you would be well advised to have either the wp-cache or the wp-super-cache plugin installed to keep your blog running smoothly and avoid the wrath of your hosting provider!

5. Highlight author comments.

I realised from reading blogs that often the conversation in the comments is as valuable as the post, and I like to be able to quickly identify author responses, so I always ensure author comments are highlighted on my blogs. Read this post by Max Cutts but be warned, I had to modify the code he gives to get it to work on my blog:

If you’re using the default template, open comments.php and replace this:
<li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

with this:<li <?php if( $comment->user_id == $post->post_author) { $oddcomment = "class='authcomment'"; } else {}; echo $oddcomment; ?> id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

You will also need to modify your css file to include a .authcomment class. In the default template, open style.css and add something like this:
.authcomment{background-color:#000000; color:#FFFFFF;}
Change the colours to suit – the above will make the background black and the text white.

6. Subscribe to comments.

Subscribe to comments plugin – when someone leaves a comment on your blog, this plugin allows them to choose to be alerted via email when someone else leaves a comment on that post.

I find this plugin brings people back and keeps conversation going in the comments, which in turn helps build a community around your blog, makes your blog more vibrant, and generates further content on your blog.

7. Feedburner & RSS prominence.

Feedburner & RSS prominence – it’s a good idea in your design to ensure you have a reasonably prominent link to your RSS feed, which both serves as a reminder to people to subscribe to your blog and provides a link to the RSS feed for them to do so. Feedburner allows you to keep an eye on your RSS stats, how many people have subscribed etc, and also provides links you can use for prominence.

8. Create an archives page.

Create an archives page. I don’t like to clutter my blog sidebars too much, and I don’t believe anyone browses blogs by date, so I hive off my archives into a page called archives. This also reduces the amount of internal links on each page of my blog.

With recent versions of WordPress this really couldn’t be simpler. Assuming you are using a fairly standard template you can create a new page (not post) and call it something like Archives, don’t insert any content into the page, then in the sidebar open the ‘Page templates’ box and select the Archives template. That’s it – once you save your archives will be inserted into that page. You can now delete the archives code from sidebar.php: <li><h2>Archives</h2><ul><?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?></ul></li>

9. Tackling comment spam.

There are two main ways you can tackle comment spam, I use Akismet which now comes with Wordpress, you just have to get a WordPress.com API key to enable it, so do this as soon as you get up and running.

The only drawback is that you can have false positives, which means that valid comments sometimes end up in the spam bin. The other option is to use something like a captcha to deter spam bots, but captchas can deter some users too, however I think captchas are becoming so prevalent it’s becoming less of a deterrent. If you would like to explore using a captcha on your blog, here is the best captcha plugin I have come across for WordPress.

10. Use single categories.

Not everyone agrees with me, but I belive quite strongly that you will get better search engine results if you categorise wisely in WordPress. Before you ever beging blogging try to create a fairly definitive list of categories you would use. I advise trying to limit yourself to in or around ten categories, but this is flexible, and of course you are not prevented from adding to your categories once experience has informed you further.

Once you have your list, add them to your blog – remember category links will only show up in your blog sidebar once they have some content. My strategy is to then assign each blog post a single category. This makes for a very clear information hierarchy both for your visitors and the search engines, which I have found to be beneficial in search engine results.

And just for the hell of it here are two more tips, for once you have built up your blog a little:

11. Recent comments.

Once you have built up traffic to your blog, and begun to have people comment on your blog I recommend highlighting recent comment activity – it can attract more visits to posts that have ongoing conversations, and it can encourage fresh comments. I like the Recent Comments Widget/Plugin for this.

12. Better paging navigation.

Once you have built up a body of content you may find you need better navigation between pages, I like this Paging plugin which uses a fairly standard format of paging, making it easy for visitors to navigate and spreading some internal link love while not adding a gazillion internal links to each page.

So that’s my list of WordPress tips…

I hope you find this list useful, particularly for newer bloggers, as there are so many plugins and approaches it sometimes helps to see what others are doing, and why they’re doing it to develop ones own approach.

If you are a seasoned WordPress user, what plugins and techniques do you use? Let me know in the comments!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.