wordpress seo - presented at smx sydney 2011

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WordPress SEO by Rob Kerry (@robkerry) Head of Search / Co-founder Ayima

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Page 1: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress SEO

by

Rob Kerry (@robkerry)Head of Search / Co-founder

Ayima

Page 2: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – Background

• Two forms of WordPress blog– WordPress.org – Download the PHP source code and self-host– WordPress.com – Let Automattic (WordPress) host it for you

• WordPress.com hosts over 18 million blogs– 395 new posts are published every minute– Over 300 comments are posted every minute

• Better than the rest?– Blogger.com is the biggest competitor, but very restrictive– Movable Type is one of the oldest blog platforms, but very clunky

Page 3: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – Not just a boring blog

Page 4: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

Potential Uses – An easy to use CMS

Page 5: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

Potential Uses – An e-commerce platform

Icon Dock uses WP e-Commerce to add a shop to their WordPress site.Plug-in: http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

Page 6: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

Potential Uses – A Q&A support platform

I created a Q&A platform at SearchMarketingTalk.com using Gravity Forms and WordPress! AnswersPlug-ins: http://gravityforms.com/ and http://www.anieto2k.com/

Page 7: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – It won’t get jealous

• WordPress does not have to run your entire site

• Can sit happily in a subfolder or on a subdomaini.e. http://www.example.com/blog/ or http://blog.example.com/

• Works on both Windows and Linux platformsDon’t believe your IT Department if they say it won’t work ;o)

• Ayima recommends choosing a subfolder set-up– Subfolders inherit the authority and trust of the root domain– Google often treats subdomains as new and untrusted websites

Page 8: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – It’s good news for Google News

• An easy platform to roll-out for Google News inclusion

• Change all references/links/URLs of “blog” to “news”

• Rotate news articles under 3+ WordPress usernames

• Many WP themes have an “Authors Page” which can be handy for proving that you have multiple authors

• Use Google News friendly Permalinks in WordPress:

Page 9: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

• “Wordpress SEO” by Yoast is currently the best plugin for optimising WordPress– Live-edit your Page Title and Meta Description for each post– Implement the Canonical Link Tag properly across your site– Manage your robots.txt file– Clean up your <head> tag– Generate XML Sitemaps– Download from: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Page 10: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WP Minify Plugin

• “WP Minify” is a fantastic plugin for SEO– Strips out all whitespace, comments and unnecessary code– Compresses HTML on-the-fly, speeding up your page loading times– Merges local JavaScript and CSS files, reducing number of file requests– Cleans out self-promotional plugin author comments from your code– Download from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-minify/

Page 11: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – Designers aren’t SEOs

• Designers are not SEOs, even if they claim to make “SEO friendly” WordPress themes

• Make sure that the <h1> tag is used on the homepage for a descriptive title and not for the logo

• Remove multiple instances of <h1> tags and the unnecessary usage of <h2> tags in the theme

Page 12: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – Canonical fun times

• A common SEO mistake with WordPress involves the Canonical <link> tag…e.g. <link rel=“canonical” href=“http://www.ayima.com/” />

• Some SEO plugins leave off the trailing slash in URLs, which many web servers then 301 redirect to the “/” URLe.g. <link rel=“canonical” href=“http://www.ayima.com” />

• Others just respond with whatever URL is in the browser

• Test yours by adding /?test=123 to the end of your homepage URLe.g. http://www.ayima.com/?test=123

Page 13: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – Let me count the ways…

• Category Hell and the spawn of Satan's Archives

– Do you need an Archive for every month of the year?

– Do individual Authors need a 5 page index of their previous posts?

– I know that it came with the theme, but who actually needs a Print Version of your “Florida Plastic Mouldings Guild” blog?

• Most blogs/sites only need one set of Categories, so remove the useless extra filters and boost the authority of important pages on your site

Page 14: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – I didn’t say that… did I?

• Have you been drunk-blogging again?

• Deleted posts can stick around for a while, even after using the Google Webmaster Tools removal tool

• Do yourself a favour (and help other search engines) by serving a 410 HTTP Status code on the deleted post’s URL via your htaccess file

• Open up your .htaccess file and add:Redirect 410 /news/your-momma-is-so-fat.html(or whatever the deleted post’s URL was)

Page 15: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – The infinite website

• By default, the internal search result pages on WordPress are indexable

• Competitors can negatively harm your site by posting links to these search pages using comment spame.g. http://searchengineland.com/?s=<keyword>

• Adding hundreds of thousands of new pages to your site makes it hard for Google to index properly

• Protect yourself by adding Disallow: /*?s= into your robots.txt file

Page 16: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – Naughty SEOs create bad plugins

• WordPress isn’t Nirvana – Don’t trust everyone

• SEOs build themes and plugins that secretly inject links into your site, risking penalties

• Wannabe SEOs create crappy “SEO Plugins”– Can actually end up breaking your site– Unintentionally harm your site’s SEO

• You’re usually safe with the masses – check reviews

Page 17: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – Security

• Stop search engines from indexing sensitive files

• Add an extra password challenge to your admin folder:http://smt.im/wp-password

• Remove WordPress references from your HTML:http://smt.im/wp-adminsecure

• Remove the “admin” user and don’t use “wp_” as your MySQL table prefix

Page 18: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

WordPress – Hosting

• Don’t use cheap hosting if you value your website/blog

• Some shared hosting accounts can be compromised

• Blackhat SEOs can embed links into your old blog posts

• Make sure that your web host’s server is completely locked down

• I recommend:– http://page.ly/ - A US based specialist secure Wordpress host– http://www.tsohost.co.uk/ - A UK based clustered hosting platform

Page 19: Wordpress SEO - Presented at SMX Sydney 2011

Thanks for listening!

Rob Kerry

[email protected]

http://www.ayima.com/

Twitter: @robkerry