Last week I did a webinar with SEO Braintrust, which was incredibly fun. So much fun in fact that I have asked Andrea Warner, who hosted that webinar, to help me with setting up a paid webinar series around WordPress SEO, going into the subject matter even more deeply. More news on that will be…
Why some WordPress Themes hurt your SEO.
Once again, I want to tell you to not blindly trust theme authors when they say their theme is SEO friendly. “SEO friendly” is just a label they put on their theme and since most of their customers don’t know what to look for to see if it’s actually true, yet know that it’s important,…
WordPress robots.txt Example
Robots.txt is a way to tell a search engine which pages it’s allowed to spider, to “see”, and which pages it cannot “see”. Because of that, robots.txt differs from meta name=”robots” tags, which tell search engines on those individual pages, whether they can include them in their index or not. The difference is subtle, but…
WordPress SEO Plugin Theme Integration Guide
Theme authors come in two different shapes and sizes: those who integrate SEO “functionality” into their themes and those who don’t. If you’re in the camp of integrating SEO functionality into your theme, you’ve got yet another choice to make: do you “yield” for site owners that have an SEO plugin installed, disabling your own…
How to change your WordPress Permalink Structure
Quite often I give people the advice to change their WordPress permalink structure, this post details the why and, more importantly: how to make such a change without losing the traffic that you already have. It includes a new tool built by yours truly to help you create the necessary redirects. Keep on reading! Why…
rel=”next” & rel=”prev” for paginated archives
Google is once again showing why standards compliant building might be very beneficial for SEO. They have started to use rel=”next” and rel=”prev”, both part of HTML4 and HTML5, to recognize archives and paged articles. Just yesterday I was having a discussion with Nathan Rice, on of the developers of Genesis over how one should deal…
WordPress SEO Theme Compatibility Survey
Quite often now, I get the question which themes work well with my WordPress SEO plugin. The honest answer is that I know only a few by heart because I haven’t tried them all. Now I know I have a quite active user base for my WordPress SEO plugin and therefor, I’ve decided to try…
Meta Keywords: why I don’t use them
There is one question about SEO which seems to be coming up time and time again, so let me answer it now and be done with it. Meta Keywords are useless. No search engine uses them for any real rankings. That is why by default, there is no meta keywords input field in my WordPress…
Author Highlighting in Search with WordPress
Amidst all the news about Google+ and Google social interaction tracking (and yes I will work on & post about that too), Google released some other news today. They said they’re going to be highlighting authors in the search results. I think this is an awesome feature. It means that you’ll see a picture / avatar…
Optimising the Facebook Open Graph Protocol
A small note from Joost first: I’m working on a project with Alex Moss from Pleer. He knows an awful lot about the Facebook Open Graph protocol, in fact he did a couple of pretty good plugins for Facebook comments and buttons etc. I asked him to do a guest post about Open Graph here,…
