If you use Wordpress for your blog and want your blog to be found in Google, then you have to take certain steps to make your Wordpress blog Google friendly.  This article contains the step-by-step tasks we do to implement search engine optimization (SEO) on our Wordpress blogs. 

Wordpress is a very popular content management system (CMS) that is used for blogging and website creation.  Note: we at Pagecafe don't particularly like Wordpress because in our opinion it has an awkward user interface that is time consuming to update.  We update over 40 blogs per week so we need fast and efficient user interface for our blog workflow.  We love Joomla for blogging and overall website development.

But, this blog post is about SEO for Wordpress blogs.  We have about a half-dozen Wordpress blogs upon which we preform SEO.  Like most web development platforms, Wordpress needs to be "extended" to maximize SEO effectiveness.  This means you have to install several "plugins" into Wordpress to improve SEO.  Plus you have to make some setting and configuration changes to really optimize your blog for maximium SEO.

Below is a list of the one-time Wordpress setup SEO tasks we perform and plug-ins we install in all our Wordpress blogs.  Note: aggressive SEO is an on-going process which includes updating your blog on a regular basis with valuable content that is about your keywords.  This list is the "setup" tasks that prepare your Wordpress blog for aggressive SEO.

1. Backup the site
2. Upgrade to latest version of Wordpress.
3. Install plugin "All in One SEO Pack"
4. Install plugin "Wasabi Related Entries"
5. Install plugin "Sociable"
6. Intall plugin "SEO Smart Links"
7. Sitemaps - we recommend both XML and HTML site maps be placed in place site map in root directory
   • Install plugin XML (Google) Sitemaps Generator
   • Install plugin HTML Sitemap Generator
8. Install plugin "Google Analytics for WordPress"
9. Configure Wordpress to use the  "summary" option in reading settings
   
   • Located in wp-admin:  Settings > Reading> "For each article…"  check "Summary" 
10. Configure robots.txt to reduce duplicate content in Google (see below)

Duplicate content is a problem with Wordpress blogs, so we tell Google to not index parts of Wordpress so that Google does not find all the duplicate content that is built into Wordpress.  Below is the robots.txt code we use to block the search engines from indexing feeds and some directories where there is duplicate content in Wordpress.

•    User-agent: *
•    Disallow: /blog/wp-admin
•    Disallow: /blog/wp-includes
•    Disallow: /blog/wp-content/plugins
•    Disallow: /blog/wp-content/cache
•    Disallow: /blog/wp-content/themes
•    Disallow: /blog/trackback
•    Disallow: /cgi-bin
•    Disallow: /search
•    Disallow: /blog/feed
•    Disallow: /blog/rss
•    Disallow: /blog/comments/feed
•    Disallow: /blog/feed/$
•    Disallow: /blog/*/feed/$
•    Disallow: /blog/*/feed/rss/$
•    Disallow: /blog/*/trackback/

That's our list of search engine optimization (SEO) setup steps for Wordpress blogs.  Every few months we update Wordpress to the latest versions and check all the above plugins for updates.  We also keep an eye on the Wordpress Plugins Directory to keep up to date on new SEO plugins and tactics.

Photo by bjornb

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