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When you’re setting up your WordPress site for SEO, or search engine optimization, there are a few plugins you will want to install.  One of them is going to be either the All in One SEO Pack, or the Platinum SEO Pack.  For quite some time, we were installing the All in One SEO Pack, but then found several advantages to the Platinum SEO Pack that made us switch over.

Both plugins are relatively easy to install – the usual click of a button with most WordPress plugins.  However, both require some SEO knowledge before you start clicking on all of the endless settings.  Let’s go through some of those:

For the All in One SEO Pack, you start by configuring what you want your homepage tags to have.  It will become the defacto tags throughout the site if you don’t modify them on your individual pages and posts, or set the option to “rewrite titles,” which is generally set to %post_title% | %blog_title%.  All of this is nearly exactly the same for the Platinum SEO Pack, except for one thing: the option to “automatically do 301 redirects for permalink changes”.  This is a HUGE deal because most site owners are going in and changing page names (i.e. URL’s) and fail to realize they created a bunch of duplicate content by having multiple versions of the same page indexed in Google.

Both the All in One SEO Pack and the Platinum SEO Pack have the canonical URL option, which allows you to tell the search engine what your preferred version of the URL should be.  While rel=canonical works well, you still want to “noindex” a lot of the duplicate pages WordPress will produce from a single post.  For example, if you create a single post with one tag that is only assigned to this post, and in one category that is only assigned to this post, you will inadvertently create several duplicate pages:

www.site.com/blog/the-example-post/

www.site.com/blog/the-tag-you-used-for-the-post/

www.site.com/blog/the-category-you-used-for-the-post/

plus the comments and RSS feed pages that could also spawn off of this one post.  What the Platinum SEO Pack offers in terms of options to thwart this kind of activity are much more controls for noindexing that will be useful to the 95% of websites who don’t post often, or categorize and tag properly.  For instance, I can easily no index categories (unless you have an SEO strategy for these pages), date based archives, tags, comment pages, RSS feed pages, search results pages, sub pages and author archives.  All In One SEO Pack only lets me noindex tags, archives and categories.

Also, have you ever wondered where Google is getting the meta description or title tag for your website, and it’s not one you’ve written, or you changed it?  Sometimes Google pulls those from the ODP (Open Directory Project, or DMOZ), or from the Yahoo Directory.  In the Platinum SEO Pack, I can choose to add a “noodp” or “noydir” meta tag, which tells Google not to get my meta data from there, and to use what’s on the site instead (note however, Google still may override you and create their own meta description tag if they don’t like yours – I can’t do this in the All in One SEO Pack.

The rest of the options are generally the same, but keep in mind you can’t have both of these plugins installed because they will not work properly.  You will have to uninstall one of them.

3 Comments »Tags: all in one seo pack, duplicate content, platinum seo pack, wordpress

WordPress, out of the box, unfortunately is not that SEO friendly.  With the help of some plugins and proper configuration, you can make it probably the most SEO-friendly “CMS” out there.  So we wanted to point out a couple very common issues in WordPress that could wreck your prospects of SEO domination.

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4 Comments »Tags: duplicate content, SEO, wordpress

I am a big fan of WordPress, primarily for it’s search engine performance. I have been ranked to #1 or #2 for some select search terms relatively quickly (less than 1 month), and I can usually find a new blog post indexed within a couple of hours. Here are my favorite WordPress plugins, and feel free to vote for your favorite at the end:

1. All in One SEO Pack – this is a great plugin that will help manage all of your SEO automatically. Each time you post a new blog it will attach a title tag, meta description and keywords per the settings that you determine.

2. Google XML Sitemaps – this is a nice way to keep Google automatically informed of any updates you make to the site. XML is the protocol Google prefers to get updates, and you can monitor your sitemaps using Webmaster Central. While this won’t directly affect your search results, it will give the crawlers an efficient way to gather information from your site.

3. Redirection – this plugin will take care of all your 404 issues and properly redirect them to existing pages. This can happen if you go back and change your slug on a a page or blog post. Google Webmaster Central also has a utility to detect your 404′s. This one will only work for WP 2.7.

4. Tweet This – one of my favorite plugins, where it will include a Tweet This, Ping This, Digg This or Plurk This button (various styles) at the bottom of your post. Not sure why they chose Plurk over Stumble, but the new release has nice Apple-ish buttons and more control over where you want the buttons shown.

5. WPtouch – my new favorite plugin which re-draws your blog layout fit for an iTouch or iPhone. I love the simple layout and ease of navigation. Really simple to install.

6. AddToAny – this plugin will incorporate a dropdown of all social media links. Works similar to Share This, but the button itself has more recognizeable bookmarks that folks are familiar with.

7. Math Comment Spam – an additional filter to Akismet, this plugin will add a field to submit a comment that will be “2 + 4 = ” and the person submitting will simply need to enter the answer. This plus Akismet, and I have gotten zero spam so far.

Based on these plugins, which one is your favorite?

No Comments »Tags: SEO, wordpress

I’ve sort of been on this WordPress kick lately, telling anyone and everyone that they need to move their site over to the WordPress platform.  The search engine optimization (SEO) benefits exceed what I have found on other content management systems, including Joomla, Drupal and Xaraya, and are much easier to install yourself.

First of all, there are hundreds, if not thousands of free templates you can get your hands on.  Here is one I came across that has 100 of the top free templates.  Not only that, but there are 3,990 free plugins as of today.  Plugins are kind of like Firefox extensions, if you use that browser.

So what are the SEO benefits?

1. You own the domain

I’ve had a few friends who had their blogs on Blogger or Typepad.  These are perfectly fine platforms; however, I see two main limitations: a) you are going to be pigeonholed into a typical blog format, so forget about adding any other pages to the site – with WordPress, you can add lots of other pages to your site; b) your blog content won’t be on your domain.  You can set up redirects, but Typepad or Blogger will be housing your content, so you won’t be getting any SEO credit for your site.  We had a friend who moved their blog content onto their main site, and within a couple of months, they began to rank for many more search terms.

2.  Clean URL’s

A prominent factor in your SEO plan is to ensure you have clean URL’s.  An example would be www.mywebsite.com/wordpress-is-great, versus www.mywebsite.com/index.php?id=32.  The clean URL has keywords in the title that can be beneficial to your SEO.  You can easily turn on the clean URL’s inside of WordPress by going to Settings / Permalinks, and changing it to your desired structure.

I use a custom structure:   /%Year%/%Postname%/

3.  All In One SEO Pack

This is arguably one of the best plugins WordPress has to offer.  It takes about 5 minutes to install, and will automate your title tags, meta descriptions and meta keywords for every blog posting.  You can still customize your individual page SEO tags as well, simply by overriding the fields on each page.  This plugin has been downloaded nearly 1,000,000 times, so it’s a must on your WordPress site for optimal SEO.

4.  Google XML Sitemaps

Having an XML sitemap for SEO ensures that when the search engine bots crawl your site that they pick up and index everything you have.  This plugin will create a Google-compliant XML sitemap which is automatically updated every time you post something new to your website.  All major search engines are notified about the update.  I have seen new blog posts indexed in as little as 3 hours after posting.

5.  Redirect Handling

When you change your “slug” in WordPress (or the permalink for your post URL) and then you go back and change it, the search engine may be indexing both versions of the page.  The search engine now sees that you have the exact same content on two different URL’s, and they have been known to devalue domains that look like have duplicate content.  For optimal SEO, you want to properly redirect these older page versions to the newer ones.  For this, we install the plugin called Redirection (only works for WordPress version 2.7 or higher).  This plugin also monitors any 404 errors (missing pages) that you might have.  You can even customize your redirects to another website if you need to.

There you have it!  The Top 5 reasons why I recommend WordPress as a part of my SEO solution.  What other plugins do you use?

1 Comment »Tags: SEO, wordpress