The must read article about WordPress SEO

Wow that was very informative! Thanks for all the details!

Very nice and informative article. I really - as always - enjoy the way you get into detail on the various topics within SEO. Dank je wel :)

great article... very informative..

That is a really impressive list Joost. I've now installed the plugins that you suggested but I also see that some of it is aleady done with the "All-in-one-seo" plugin. Would it be possible to have you post a full list of the plugins that you suggest using (including non seo related plugins)?

Another thing is that I think your link to the Robot Meta Plugin is wrong. You're using http://yoast.com/wordpress/robots-meta/ instead of http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/ but I found the download button that I was looking for :)

Thanks,
Mikael

Hi there Joost,

First of all congrats on the new blog, looks perfectly fine!

Thank you for this great article, I will refer to this document on my own blog; it's a must-read.

About the article itself;

- 1.1 I stripped all categories from my blog. I would assume your comment about the 301 slug redirect is not necessary then? Are you implying you should always use the categories in the url's (and therefore on the complete blog)?

- 1.4 What is your opinion about the 'read more' (or your equivalent) option? I do not use this, but notice the downside; long articles that fill the complete mainpage. Do you reckon you should always try to use the 'read more' option?

- 2.1 You talk about the breadcrumbs. On any normal xhtml website I use this so visitors can navigate better. Since I do not use categories, breadcrumbs are perhaps not that great (every post will look like this: home > title). Since you mention an seo-aspect, I am wondering whether to start with categories anyways. On the other side I have a decent looking sitemap.xml and sitemap as a static page (dagon sitemap?). Isn't this the same for the spider? It can index the blog ok with the static sitemap? Or do I miss something here?

- 2.3 Of course using an external css goes for every website when looking at seo aspects. However, is it better to put all css in one long line? Or is this not that important? Right now I have a normal css, with the code vertical instead of horizontal. What's the impact when optimizing the blog?

- 2.5 Never thought of that, really something to think about. I will look into this, since I was already thinking about removing the sidebar at regular articles. Right now I want to have 2 sidebars, optimized for the specific pages. On the mainpage the usual stuff, on the article pages only a list with related posts and most popular posts. Great tip!

- 3.1 Can this robot meta plugin work next to the all in one seo plugin? I am wondering this since I am using the latter. I do not want them to interfere. In the all-in-one plugin I already nofollow almost everything exept for the actual posts.

- 4.3 I am using the related post plugin, but there's no option to nofollow the posts. Should I want to nofollow these posts, especially the not-so-related posts. Often the plugin also shows less related posts, like the contact page, or the about me page. This is perhaps due to a lack of real related posts, but since there are followed, they still are indexed through the related posts.

- 6.2 What is your opinion about the little community builders on a weblog? Like the gravatars, or other icons etc. I really like the gravatars, since your blog instantly gets a more personal touch (of course especially when your commentors really use them gravatars :D).

- 7.3 You mention blogsearch. I am using my own trick since Google launched their 'Alert-service'. Simply subscribe to some excellent keywords, related to your blog subject. Use the setting 'From blogs only' when google alerts you of relevant articles. Now you'll receive a nice e-mail with all relevant discussions. I am using this for years now (one of my best kept secrets, although I am reading it more and more on the i-net :D), I also use this in broader terms to get inspiration to write about almost everything.

Anyways great article, hope you don't mind my remarks (I'm sure you don't when looking at chapter 6 :D).
I will link to it later today.

Cheers,

Ilya

Great article, best I've seen for a while. Nice to see you mentioning the importance of header tags which so many self proclaimed SEO experts fail to implement on their own blogs.

Very nice read Joost! I especially love the idea of changing the read more tag. But here's the thing, I'm using the all in one seo plugin. Now headspace does basically the same thing, so would you consider changing the plugin (even more that the all in one seo plugin has stopped development?). And how does the seo title tag compare in your opinion?
Great article, even better than the old one.

Hi Joost,
Nice artikel, gives me a lot of 'quick wins' to solve.
Speak to you soon.
Greetz.
Peter

Wow, thanks for all the time and knowledge! Going to use this for my v2.0 design!

Hey great article. One thing I notice was it was hard to find comments from the article itself. I was wondering if there is a way to add my feedburner email sign up feed link with aweber email sign up. So I could kill two birds with one stone?

Hi Joost,

excelent article, about some SEO plugins around, what is your opinion about these:

Add Meta Tags

Permalink Redirect

SEO Title Tag

thanks

Thanks Joost,

I really appreciate your humble yet highly professional way of communicating, with a good portion of "Hollandsche nuchterheid".

Keep up the great work!

Really great WP SEO article! Thank you so much Joost!!

Hey Joost, excellent work. Thank you for releasing this to the WordPress community. I have published an announcement featuring your SEO guide and plugins here:

http://www.dotsauce.com/2008/06/12/wordpress-seo-guide/

All the best,

Mark Fulton

The best article I have ever read about the WordPress SEO. Thanks for all plugins and articles

Thanks for the ebook. I followed it almost exactly as I set up a new blog. Also, I wanted to leave a comment here to see how your plugin redirect works.

Thanks again,
-Mike

Very nice article! Can you tell me why technorati is spidering the new blogs so fast?

Excellent post. Thank you Joost. I think it is "must read".

thanks for sharing useful informations.good work