Search Engine Optimization for WordPress - Part 2

Monday, August 27th, 2007

Categories: Search Engine Optimization SEO, Wordpress

This is a follow-up to Part 1 of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress where I discussed optimizing your content and your directory structure. In Part 2, I will discuss how you can avoid duplicate content which is a pretty straight-forward strategy to making sure Search Engines such as Google doesn’t interpret some of your content as being a duplicate of another internal page.

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:

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.