Posts in category WordPress tips

Check Your WordPress SEO Traps



WordPress is by far the most popular blog software in use at present. Out of the box, most WordPress themes are terrible when it comes to SEO. So bad in fact it could actually be costing you when it comes to search result placings.

Many of the SEO problems associated with WordPress can be fixed. If you have obtained an SEO friendly theme then some of these problems should have been taken care of. SEO problems include:

Sidebar code appears before the content. This is double edged sword. As most pages use the same sidebars, every page will appear the same to the search engines until they reach the content. This is not such a problem if everything is working smoothly. If, however, there is one code glitch in the sidebar, the search engines will not actually get to read the content. No content, no page indexing.

Archive and Category pages showing duplicate content. This can be taken care of with a plugin. The alternative is to simply set each of these pages to display excerpts only. You can also set them to not index the meta tags.

H2 tags used in sidebars. H2 tags generally signify content of importance. Using H1 or H2 tags in the sidebars may send conflicting messages to the search engines spiders. Good effective coding in the CSS code can avoid the overuse of H1 or H2 tags. This can be a problem when comments use H1 or H2 and you have a lot of comments.

Title tags and HTML poorly set up. WordPress, out of the box has no SEO structure when saving pages/posts. You can set the permalinks to create good SEO titles and URL’s using the page title first. There are plugins that can help to create page titles.

With a little care and a little patience you can create an extremely friendly SEO WordPress site.

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WordPress Tip: Rethink Your Sidebar



WordPress is one of the most used blog programs around at present, yet it is one of the least understood. The fact that it is pretty much an ‘install and go’ program means few user really delve into the power behind the code.

Sidebars are a good example. Templates and blog designs come with no sidebars, one, two or even three sidebars. Some fancy templates go so far as to divide the sidebars so you may have a top sidebar followed by left and right (funny how the left and right can be all on the left or all on the right) followed by a bottom sidebar.

What appears in your sidebars will appear on the front page and on every other page including archives and static pages. This is not always optimal. Do you want your blogroll appearing on every page, or just the front page? Do you need archives or categories on every page?

There are many reasons for saying no to the above questions, particularly when it comes to SEO and controlling the ‘link juice’. Sometimes you want pages that have very little in the way of outbound links and what links you do have you want control of.

It is possible to change the sidebars for individual pages and for archive pages. The process is a little tedious and one that I will leave for another day. What you need to decide is what information you want displayed in your sidebars on single and archive pages. WordPress has more power than most people are aware of.  Rethinking your sidebars is just one possible change you could make.

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