Search Engine Optimization for WordPress - Part 3

In Part 1 of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for WordPress, I discussed content and directory structures. In Part 2 of the series, I discussed how to avoid duplicate content. In this edition, I will be discussing a broad range of topics.

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.

Related Posts

• Optimizing Your HTML Tags for Search Engines - Part 2
• Search Engine Optimization for WordPress - Part 2
• Search Engine Optimization for WordPress - Part 1