The must read article about WordPress SEO
I've been working on this article about Wordpress SEO for quite some time, and I'm very proud to be able to release it to all of you now. I can say all sorts of things about it, but this is really the biggest, and probably best, article I've ever written. Go read it now:
If, after reading it, you feel you have something to add to it, or comment on, feel free to leave your comments here, I'd love to improve on this article even further!
Kieran June 10th, 2008 at 20:28
Great post Joost, a true comprehensive guide to Wordpress SEO that anyone and everything involved in CMS should read.
Anne Haynes June 10th, 2008 at 20:36
Wow that was very informative! Thanks for all the details!
IndieLab June 10th, 2008 at 20:56
Wow, amazing!
Thank you!
Remkus June 10th, 2008 at 21:35
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 :)
archshrk June 10th, 2008 at 21:48
I'm about to read it but one thing I noticed is that you used relative linking rather than absolute links. That is, your link is "/articles/worpress-seo/" instead of "http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/" Not usually a problem except when I tried to get to the link from RSS feed in Bloglines. Strangely enough, they don't have this article :)
Joost de Valk June 10th, 2008 at 21:50
@All: thx!
@archshrk: fixed, thx!
Simon June 10th, 2008 at 22:05
I've just scanned the whole thing, but I'm really looking forward to read it thoroughly tomorrow. Well done and a good way to start this blog accordingly!
Melvin June 11th, 2008 at 01:58
great article... very informative..
Israel June 11th, 2008 at 03:46
Some of this I know, some I dont. It's a good read for anyone interested in SEOing their wordpress blog. Cool stuff.
Mikael June 11th, 2008 at 07:13
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
edwin June 11th, 2008 at 09:04
Very thorough article about the technical seo possibilities for wordpress blogs.
Some remarks about commenters and do follow:
It is all about interacting, some articles, which contain general interests, on my blog have attracked several thousands of visitors. Almost nobody left a comment. Articles which are more niche related and written for a specified audience trigger more comments. Blogs which don't provide a backlink option for the commenter, it doesn't matter if they are tagged " nofollow" or not, have considerable less comments.
I do follow but only in a controlable environment : Akismet plugin installed and comment moderation on
Ilya June 11th, 2008 at 09:08
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
Chris June 11th, 2008 at 09:19
Good Morning Joost,
well - i thanked you about twitter also, but this post was so good, thanks again ;-)
Hope you got the next train, best regards Chris!
Duane June 11th, 2008 at 09:19
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.
Gerben June 11th, 2008 at 09:25
Thanks for the great post.
Surprisingly, you didn't mention sitemaps. They are, in my opinion, still very helpful. I'd recommend Dragon Design Sitemap Generator for HTML-sitemaps and Google XML Sitemaps for XML-sitemaps.
And what about:
- 404 notifier: RSS-feed with 404 errors
- SH-Autolink: which makes it possible to autolink keywords in posts to specific URLs, for example wordperss seo to your guide
Simon June 11th, 2008 at 10:30
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.
jan June 11th, 2008 at 14:43
really great article!
there are some things that were unknown to me. i also subscribed to your feed.
great blog. :)
Peter June 11th, 2008 at 16:03
Hi Joost,
Nice artikel, gives me a lot of 'quick wins' to solve.
Speak to you soon.
Greetz.
Peter
Juan Jose Zapico June 11th, 2008 at 16:05
Great article. I'm just started blogging and doing SEO. This article is a very valuable resource for all of us. Thanks a lot for sharing your expertise on the subject.
Laurens June 11th, 2008 at 16:25
Wow, thanks for all the time and knowledge! Going to use this for my v2.0 design!
leaked google doc June 11th, 2008 at 18:00
digged, stumbpled, del.icio.us tagged for AWESOME CONTENT. Thank you!
Rob June 11th, 2008 at 20:54
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?
Jaan Kanellis June 11th, 2008 at 21:58
What a great post fro anyone that is just starting a WP blog. I will be bookmarking it as reference for all those that ask how to get started in SEOing a blog.
Gustavo Leig June 12th, 2008 at 02:30
Hi Joost,
excelent article, about some SEO plugins around, what is your opinion about these:
Add Meta Tags
Permalink Redirect
SEO Title Tag
thanks
Navin Poeran June 12th, 2008 at 02:45
Truly a nice article :)
jan [ipears] June 12th, 2008 at 10:50
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!
Dave June 12th, 2008 at 15:59
WordPress is completely disgusting PHP code.
MhawSayar June 12th, 2008 at 16:21
Really great WP SEO article! Thank you so much Joost!!
Ranked Hard June 12th, 2008 at 17:21
Excellent article, Joost. The Ranked Hard team enjoyed it.
Mark Fulton June 12th, 2008 at 23:37
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
Mark June 13th, 2008 at 12:30
As always, thank you, thank you. Looking forward to hearing you at the a4u Expo.
Ted Liptak June 14th, 2008 at 11:48
The best article I have ever read about the Wordpress SEO. Thanks for all plugins and articles
Joris Toonders June 14th, 2008 at 15:08
Excellent work Joost. Great article!
Mike June 15th, 2008 at 07:29
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
Joost de Valk June 16th, 2008 at 13:21
Thx all, it's tough to keep up with all of it, but I really want to thank you all for the amazing positive feedback!
Joost de Valk June 16th, 2008 at 13:24
@Ilya: your list of questions deserves an answer from me, and then a paycheck for me ;)
Ilya June 23rd, 2008 at 15:21
I understand :D
But perhaps 1 simple question. After I installed the meta robot plugin, it seems for some reason people cannot comment to pages anymore. I cannot find a setting to allow people to reply on pages (although I understand why I wouldn't want that).
Do you perhaps know if it has something to do with that plugin?
Renzo July 19th, 2008 at 20:16
Very nice article! Can you tell me why technorati is spidering the new blogs so fast?
Joost de Valk July 21st, 2008 at 16:37
@Ilya: hmm could you point me to a URL showing the problem?