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Tip No. 1: The Privacy Mode Trap

Suppose you just made a brand-new WordPress website, but after many weeks it’s still not indexed on Google. (Or worse, your old well-established WordPress website that was ranking well suddenly vanishes from Google.)

Don’t Panic!… yet.

First go into the WordPress control panel (aka Dashboard) and click Settings > Privacy and set it to make visible it to everyone (including search engines) See the picture below…

It turns out the default setting on some installations of WordPress is “private”, so if you do an install or reinstall of WordPress, be on guard! As a double check you can also view your HTML source code (In Firefox click: View>Page Source) and look for anything in the header section that looks suspiciously like: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />. See the picture below…

If you see a “noindex” then your privacy setting is set wrong. Also watch out, I had a case where there was both “index” and “noindex” in the header (Google picked the noindex), so look carefully!

But, but, but, my setting is already set to visible to everyone and there aren’t any “noindexes” in the header!! Ok, now you can panic.

Tip No. 2: The Page Title

When doing search engine optimization for a page, the first thing you want to get right is the page title. But what is the page title you ask? Well, if you look at a Google search results page it’s the heading for each page (see picture below). Google gives a lot of weight to the page title, so you want to have it well keyword optimized.

WordPress does a fairly good job of generating a page title, but it’s not very flexible. That’s why people have come up with a number of SEO plug-ins for WordPress, such as WordPress SEO by Yoast. For users who don’t have an “SEO ready” theme, these plug-ins are a lifesaver. However, for folks who are developing a theme or just like to dig into the theme code and do some “tweaking”, here’s the PHP code (in header.php) I like for optimizing the page title…

<?php
if (is_archive()) {
 $pgtitle = 'Blog Archive Page | YourSiteName.com';
} elseif (is_search()) {
 $pgtitle = 'Search Results Page | YourSiteName.com';
} elseif (is_404()) {
 $pgtitle = '404 Error - Not Found | YourSiteName.com';
} else {
 $val1=$post;
 if (is_home()) {
  $val1=get_page_by_title('Blog');
 }
 $pgtitle = get_the_title($val1->ID) . ' | YourSiteName.com' ; /* default page title */
 $temporary = get_post_meta($val1->ID, "pagetitle", TRUE);  /* custom page title  */ 
 if ($temporary) {
   $pgtitle = $temporary;
 }
}
?>
<title><?php echo($pgtitle); ?></title>

The key to the whole thing is the line highlighted in red. The code looks for a custom field (see picture below) in your post named “pagetitle”. If found, the code will use it for your page title instead of the default (which is your post title). This lets you fine tune the SEO to get the page title just right… or if not right, at least the way you want it.

Tip No. 2a: The Page Description

Well, technically this isn’t SEO. Google has announced that they don’t use the page description in their search engine rankings. The page description, in case you were wondering, is the description just under the page title on a Google search results page (see page title picture above). It’s only purpose is to try and “hook” the searcher and entice them to click on your link. The default installation of WordPress doesn’t support page descriptions, so people once again turn to plug-ins like “Yoast’s WordPress SEO”. As with the page title above, for those that want to “tweak” the theme code, here’s the PHP code (in header.php) I use…

<?php
 $temporary = get_post_meta($val1->ID, "desc", TRUE);
 if ($temporary) {
  echo('<meta name="description" content="'.$temporary.'" />');
 }
?>

You’ll notice two things, first, the page description uses a custom field (desc) just like the page title. Second, if you leave out the custom field no page description will be generated. in which case Google will pick “snippets” of text on your page to use as the description. Google does a pretty good job of doing this and some people recommend just letting Google generate the page description. You can decide for yourself. If you do decide to make a page description, make sure it contains the keywords people are searching with, otherwise Google will ignore your description and again just use snippets. For example:

The Keywords: Seattle Web Designer
Page Title: Seattle Web Designer | Website Design | Seattle Washington
Description: I’m the Best Web Designer in Seattle Ever!!! CLICK ME!!! Yada, Yada, Yada…

Tip No. 3: PermaLinks

What in the world is a permalink, you ask? Well, permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual web pages and blog posts. It’s what other folks will use to link to your articles. The key here is that it’s permanent. WordPress lets you pick what kind of style permalinks you want. Once you pick a style, don’t change it otherwise you will break all the links to your pages and confuse the Google search engine. Well technically, you might be able to bail yourself out with something called “301 redirects”, but in general: Don’t do this!

So which permalink style to pick? The default style is called “Ugly”. Suspose you have a page with a nice URL like: http://example.com/wordpress-seo-tips, with “Ugly” it would look like:

http://example.com/?p=237

Which looks, well, ugly, which is why WordPress thoughtfully provides the Permalinks settings page (click Settings > Permalinks)

I use the setting “month and name” which makes the Permalink look like:

http://example.com/2011/01/wordpress-seo-tips

which not only looks a lot nicer, but Google can use it for keywords, helping with your search results page rankings. Actually to get the Permalinks working you need to add the following “permalink rewrite code” to your .htaccess file:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

There is some controversy regarding what is the best Permalink structure. Some very good SEOers (check the comments section) recommend using the “custom structure” field, setting it to:

/%category%/%postname%

However, the WordPress gurus (WordPress Codex) don’t recommend doing this:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields.

You can read the articles and decide for yourself. For me, “Here be dragons…”

Tip No. 4: Headings

This section was to be about Headings and why they’re so important for SEO, but after doing a little research, this section is now about Headings and why they’re so “unimportant” for SEO.

But what is a page heading? Headings are defined by HTML with H1 (largest) to H6 (smallest). You use them in the articles you write for article titles, section headings, subsection headings, and so forth. (see picture below)

There are any number of good SEOers who say headings are very important for search engine optimization. They will carefully explain why your article title needs to be H1 (and only one H1 per page!), sub headings must use H2 sub-sub headings with H3 and so on.

Also they tell us it’s very important for SEO that page structure be maintained by keeping the headings in the correct order and not skipping a level: Correct (in order): h1 h2 h3 h2 h2 h3 h4 h2
Incorrect (out of order): h3 h1 h5 h2 h2 h4 h3

On the other hand, there are a number of very good SEOers who will tell you this is a “load of dingo’s kidneys”, so to speak. For example, an excerpt from an interview with SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin about the “annual survey of SEO’s“…

We’ve also observed that while experts think H1, H2, H3 tags are important for SEO, it appears that only the H1 tag actually matters at all and even then, only slightly.

Actually there is an easy way to test this one. Simply choose a city, say for example Seattle, then search using Google for: “seo seattle” and see what the top SEOers in each city are doing with their pages. Checking out a few cities, I noticed that most SEOers don’t pay much attention to the order of their headings and interestingly a number of the top ranked SEOers had multiple H1′s on a page. Makes you wonder if they know something the “experts” don’t!

Whether they help that much with SEO or not, some designers feel that the H1 header intrudes on the design. One way to get around this problem is to combine the H1 header into the breadcrumb (see picture below) so that it’s not so intrusive:

As with PageTitle, a custom field can be used to tune your H1 header just the way you want it.

Tip No. 5: Duplicate Content

One of the problems with out-of-the-box WordPress is its annoying habit to generate duplicate content. What is duplicate content?

“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. — Google Webmaster

WordPress creates duplicate content because of its ability to display the same post in different ways, such as under monthly or daily archives, category pages, or search results. These will generate different URLs for the same post, and from Google’s viewpoint it looks like different pages all with the same content, hence “duplicated content”.

The problem is that on a Google search results page, Google will only display one of the pages. And given the chance of displaying your original blog post or some obscure archived version, Google seems to perversely prefer the archived version.

Fortunately there is an easy fix, simply add the following code to your header.php file.

<?php
 if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page()){
  echo ('<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />');
 } else {
  echo ('<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />');
 }
?>

It will cause your archived and search results versions to be ignored by Google, and voila! no more duplicate content!

So for now, that’s my five tips. I hope you find this article useful. Comments, criticisms or additional tips are always welcome!

References

• Search Engine Optimization for WordPress WordPress Codex
• WordPress SEO Video Joost de Valk
• WordPress SEO by Yoast plug-in
• All in One SEO Pack plug-in

G.A.S.P. looks like a good idea, but some folks have had mixed results: G.A.S.P.: WordPress anti-spam plugin. Good idea, but does it deliver?, though on the whole it seems to work pretty well. G.A.S.P uses javascript, so that if a commenter has javascript turned off they can’t post a comment. Since most everyone these days has javascript turned on this isn’t much of a problem, but just for fun I did a php version (no javascript needed) of G.A.S.P. for WordPress, it doesn’t use a plugin yet, so you have to “tweak” the php code and edit some files by hand, specifically:

• comments.php
• your style sheet
• And you need to make a new file called: “pgasp-comments-post.php”

Modifications and Additions of WordPress Files for PHP GASP

Comments.php

Modify this line (about line 78 in comments.php) and change the file name to: “pgasp-comments-post.php” like so…

<form action= "<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/pgasp-comments-post.php"  method="post" id="commentform">

Then, just before the submit button line in comments.php (around line 100 or so) add in this line:

<p><input type="checkbox" id="comchk1" name="comchk1" value="yes" /> <input type="checkbox" id="comchk2" name="comchk2" value="yes" /> Check this box if you're human. (Dofollow, CommentLuv) No bots or spam, please! </p>

Note that there are actually 2 checkboxes in the code. One of the checkboxes is hidden (using CSS) and will remain unchecked if a human is involved. However, SpamBots will typically fill in all items in a form, so if the hidden checkbox is checked, we know it’s spam.

CSS Stylesheet

To hide one of the checkboxes, you need to add the following to your stylesheet file (at the bottom of the file should be fine):

#comchk2 { display:none; }

pgasp-comments-post.php

You need to create a file named “pgasp-comments-post.php” with the following code. This is where the spam check takes place. If the comment passes the spam check it is then passed on to WordPress (wp-comments-post.php) Place this file (using ftp, or cpanel) in the top level directory (or whichever directory wp-comments-post.php is in)

<?php
/**
* php gasp
 */

/** Sets up the WordPress Environment. */
require( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-load.php' );

/* the next 6 lines is the spam checker... */
$comment_spamfilter = ( isset($_POST['comchk1']) ) ? trim($_POST['comchk1']) : null;
if ( 'yes'  != $comment_spamfilter )
  wp_die(__('Error: please check the box above the Submit button.'));
$comment_spamfilter2 = ( isset($_POST['comchk2']) ) ? trim($_POST['comchk2']) : null;
if ( 'yes'  == $comment_spamfilter2 )
  wp_die( __('Your Comment is waiting for moderation.')); // spam!

/* comment looks ok, so send on to wordpress... */
include ( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-comments-post.php');

?>

SpamBots, Mixing It Up

Of course, if enough people use GASP or PHP GASP, the SpamBotters will adapt their code, so you might want to mix it up a little. For example, make comchk1 the hidden checkbox, or add more hidden checkboxes (comchk3, comchk4, comchk5…) and so on.

Also GASP doesn’t stop human spammers, who fill up your moderation folder with comments like “Great post dude! Thanks for sharing.” (with a link to some spammy website) and the like, so you might need to try Akismet (which isn’t perfect either) or something. To be continued…

The design was done in conjunction with Wallace Creative.

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While a dark theme is more “dramatic” and shows off images better than a light theme, for some people it is harder to read white text on a dark background. So if you have a lot of text on your site a “light theme” (dark text on white background) is preferred over a “dark theme” (white/light text on dark background). If you have a lot of images or videos (such as an artist) then a dark theme may be better for you.

Switching themes is also a good time to experiment with some new HTML5 features and Cufon fonts.

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<object width=”320″ height=”265″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/H8v3UnMDC5M&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0″></param>
<param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param>
<param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param>
<param name=”wmode” value=”opaque”></param>
<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/H8v3UnMDC5M&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0″
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
allowscriptaccess=”always”
allowfullscreen=”true”
width=”320″
height=”265″
wmode=”opaque” >
</embed>
</object>

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