How To Link Between Posts

The title attribute in your link tag (<a>) is a great place to throw in some keywords that can benefit your destination. When linking to different pages or categories, you should be using a great title attribute as well as great link text.

Bad Example:

check out my post on car parts by <a href=”http://www.pat-burt.com”>clicking here</a>

Good Example:

check out my <a href=”http://www.pat-burt.com” title=”car parts blog”>post about car parts</a>

The good example uses the title attribute effectively and has great link text. It is EASY to do this. It isn’t hard. When adding a link using WordPress’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, go through the trouble and fill in the Title form field.

Use Great HTML Tags

I’ve written past articles on optimizing your HTML tags for Search Engines. Rather than reiterate each article, I’ll link to each of them:

Part 1 of Optimizing Your HTML Tags for Search Engines discusses your header (<h1>) and title (<title>) tags and
Part 2 discusses paragraph (<p>) and formatting tags (<em>,<strong>)

Another Way To Avoid Duplicate Content

I discussed avoiding duplicate content by using the_excerpt() function in WordPress, but I also noticed I have duplicate content somewhere else: my Archives.

When viewing my archives, these archive subpages (this applies to both yearly and monthly archives) contain the same excerpts as my category subpages, just arranged differently. If I want to truly stay away from Google’s algorithm that penalizes duplicate content, I should choose to keep one or the other.  We can still keep both of them, but naturally, we’d only want Search Engines to index the more optimized version. In this case, it would be the category pages as these have the category names (great keywords) in the page title and header.

How To Prevent Archives From Being Indexed 

It’s rather easy. If we have a look at the archives pages, the links all look like the following: http://www.pat-burt.com/2007/(month)/. If we don’t want this folder indexed, we can stop Search Engine spiders from indexing any content in the folders that start with 2007. We can do this by specifying the following in our robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /2009
Disallow: /2008
Disallow: /2007
Disallow: /2006

The first line names what spiders the following rules apply to. In this case, we want this to apply to all Search Engine spiders. The other lines specify what rules to apply to which directory structure.

If you’re new to the robots.txt file, the robots.txt file simply instructs what a Search Engine spider should do when arriving at your website. By default, they spider all the content they can get to. The robots.txt file is located on the root of your server and it doesn’t need to be present.

That’s all for now, if you’re looking for more information, you can look at what other articles about WordPress tips I have.

When readers stick to your blog, it may help build a reader base and RSS subscribers. This can never be a bad thing, even if, statistically, return readers are not ad clickers, it can always help with word-of-mouth and getting backlinks.

1 – Display Your Recent Articles

Whether it’s on your sidebar, or at the end of your article, this is always a great feature to have. Occasionally, a reader may get to an article you wrote and enjoy its content so much, they want to read more of your blog, but don’t quite know where to start. Give them direction.

How To Display Recent Articles

This is fairly easy. Once you get into your WordPress admin panel (typically www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/), select Presentation. Now select Widgets. Using the sidebar widgets editor, you can drag and drop the Recent Articles element into your sidebar. By hitting the graphic beside the name, you can configure settings such as the title and number of posts to show.

2 – Display Related Articles

Like displaying a list of recent articles, a first-time reader may like your content so much, they’d love to read up on similar subjects. Give it to them, make it easier for them. Don’t make them search through your archives or have to go through the trouble of typing keywords into your search dialog.

How To Display Related Articles

Unfortunately, this feature was not built into WordPress. Thanks to the wonderful world of plugins, the people at w-a-s-a-b-i.com made it happen. Their website has been down for sometime, so I rezipped the required files so you can have a Working Download for the Related Articles Plugin. By default, the plugin analyzes the titles of your articles, but there are ways to configure otherwise. I included the readme file because it can explain everything a lot easier then I can.

3 – Link Between Your Own Posts

It’s a fairly simple strategy. You shouldn’t feel guilty plugging your own content.

If you briefly mention Backlinks, for example, and you’ve written pages of articles about them, link to category page about Backlinks. It can only help, right? If they want to know more about the content, there’s a direct link to your own article for them to click on. It helps eliminate the risk of the reader returning to Google and typing in different keywords to find that same information, but from another website.

4 – Give The User Direction At The End Of Articles

After a reader goes through your well-written, long-winded article, give them direction. If not, they might end up hitting the Back Button or returning back to Google. Use this space to link to Recent Articles, Related Posts or articles you think they might find interesting. This is more important if your article extends beyond the direction given from the sidebar. You might even consider using this as a place to throw a Google Ad.

Good luck, hope that helps.

How To Avoid Duplicate Content

By default, your Categories and Archives pages display full articles. Unfortunately, Google may think that single article pages, where you’ve meticulously crafted your <h1> and <title> tags, are duplicates of your Categories/Archives page. This is because these pages contain identical content to each other.

There is a workaround. WordPress has the built-in option to post an excerpt of your article, instead of the full article. This avoids the duplicate content problem altogether. We can overcome the problem described earlier if you make your WordPress blog display excerpts in the Categories and Archives sections.

By default, your excerpt will be the first chunk of your article. An often overlooked feature on your Write Post page is a field to enter an Optional Excerpt. Note: It’s collapsed by default, so you’ll have to hit the (+) to expand the text field. This gives you an opportunity to create unique content as an excerpt, even a very keyword rich excerpt.

How To Post Excerpts On Your Category and Archives Pages

Go to your Admin section on WordPress. Under Presentation, select Theme Editor. Select the first Archives page on the right. Scroll to about halfway and look for:

<div class=”entry”>
<?php the_content() ?>
</div>

This is pretty straightforward, this part is repeated for every article that’s part of the archive. Replace it with:

<div class=”entry”>
<?php the_excerpt() ?>
<p><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”>View the Complete Article »</a></p>
</div>

This code repeats excerpts of the articles instead of the complete articles. This prevents some of the duplicate content that was happening with a fresh WordPress install.

When <?php the_content() ?> is replaced with <?php the_excerpt() ?>, it’s not intuitive where the user should click to view the rest of the article. The following line:

<p><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”>View the Complete Article »</a></p>

automatically adds a link displaying “View the Complete Article »” with a link to the full article. Of course, you can change this to whatever you like, such as “Read more” or “Banana Bread”.

I hope this helps. If you’re interested, you can read Part 1 of this series where I discuss optimizing your content and directory structure for Search Engines in WordPress. For other articles on WordPress, see the WordPress category.

Optimizing your Content for Search Engines

Content Volume. Search Engines hunger for more content. They could not give a damn about how many pictures you put of your dog or if your website looks like a spaceship. The more content, the more resources a Search Engine can gather about your website, and chances are, the more keywords you can reach.

Keyword Rich Content. Communicating with the language that Search Engine users use is definitely a plus. Your WordPress weblog title, your subtitle, your post headers and your posts themselves need to overflow with great keywords. These are your big sellers. For more information on properly optimizing your HTML tags (title tag and h1 tag), see Part 1 of Optimizing Your HTML Tags for Search Engines.

Targetted Wording. This goes with using Keyword Rich Content, but it’s slightly different. You would use the language of the average Search Engine user. To better explain this, I’ll use an example. I’m a Canadian, if you’re Canadian you’ll know that I misspelt “Optimization”, it is in fact “Optimisation”. I’m not unpatriotic, but when there are 10 times as many US residents as there are Canadian residents, you have to consider that. The same would apply to a blog about soda (or pop) or to a blog about the distances you run each day in your exercise routine.

Optimizing Your Directory Structure (Permalinks)

By default, your individual blog entries (permalinks) are stored in this fashion: http://www.pat-burt.com/?p=123. If we take a step back and look at this from a Search Engine’s point-of-view, why would we not use our URL resource to boost our ratings for keywords? We can. Thank you WordPress.

In your Admin Panel, select Options and then Permalinks. Let’s look at the options:

• http://www.pat-burt.com/?p=123
• http://www.pat-burt.com/2007/04/02/sample-post/
• http://www.pat-burt.com/archives/123/
• Custom

We already know the first one isn’t a good alternative. Let’s look at the second one. Why would a user searching for information care about what date it was posted on? You’re using a valuable resource (the URL) to display meaningless information (to your normal Google user). Next. The third option is a combination between the terrible first example and the mediocre example. Archives? 123? Not important.

Ahh, the Custom field, this is what we were looking for. If we wanted to use our URL’s to their best potential, we should fill them up with rich keywords. What better place to look then our keyword rich Entry names and Category names? Perfect.

Under Custom, specify below, I suggest that the best option is: /%category%/%postname%/. What this does is display the category followed by the post name in the URL structure. A great solution.

That’s all for now, you can find the rest of the articles on Search Engine Optimization for WordPress in the WordPress category.