First off, I’ll point out all the things that aren’t search engine friendly about the default installation of wordpress, and then I’ll present different ways to deal with those problems.

Wordpress SEO Optimization Nightmares

1. Wordpress places the same content across many different pages (category pages, archive pages, etc…) which causes duplicate content issues.
2. It doesn’t have great support for having customizable titles.
3. It doesn’t generate any meta tags or descriptions, and older versions don’t allow you to customize them on a page by page basis.
4. There are inherent problems with the trailing slash at the end of urls that cause duplicate content issues. (ie: /page is the same as /page/)
5. The default url structure isn’t very search engine friendly.

Yes, that’s quite a laundry list of problems. But fear not loyal surfer, SEO Ninja will show you the way to seo wordpress enlightenment!

Ninja Wordpress SEO Fixes

Duplicate Content problems

1. In response to the duplicate content issue: I’ve seen many webmasters debate the first point on my list. Does having multiple pages with the same content on it really cause pages to be left out of the index? How does Google choose which page to list? And will G really penalize you for this? Some webmasters claim that their archive pages and category pages get listed right alongside their normal pages, sometimes giving them double listings for longtail keywords and increasing click through rates! While this may be true, I believe that the best solution is to prevent the spiders from crawling these pages for a number of reasons. Having multiple pages weakens the chance of increasing pagerank across those pages. Which page will a surfer who writes about your content choose to link to? Furthermore, it is likely that Google will not index all of your pages, in which case you have no control over which page they actually choose to include (ie: the archive page or the real page). I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer the surfer to land on my actual page. Matt Cutt’s has talked about this on his blog before. Actually, he quite often talks about “herding the bots”. Finally, take a look at the robots.txt of some other seo professionals and you’ll quite often see them doing something similar to what I’m suggesting here.

So lets get to it! Heres how I keep those pesky google bots from indexing the content that I don’t want them to see: I use a robots.txt file at the root of my domain telling the spiders what they can crawl. If you don’t feel comfortable using an FTP program or opening up the file in your terminal, then you can use a wordpress plugin to do the job for you, but there is more on that below.

If messing with a robots.txt file is far too much work for you then you can install the Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin.

Wordpress SEO Title Support

2. Out of the box, wordpress has terrible support for having customizable titles. The solution to this problem is fairly limited, you can either write the code into the module yourself, or use a plugin. Using plugins always requires caution because they may open up huge security holes that could allow for an attacker to compromise your box! Therefore, its best to use a plugin thats been tried and tested. I tried many different plugins for optimizing title tags but there are only two that I think deserve to be mentioned here.

SEO Title Tag Plugin - This is a very popular title tag plugin that has a lot of great features. Sadly, at the time of writing this post it isn’t working in the latest version of wordpress (2.5.1).

All In One SEO Pack - This is the ever so popular all in one seo pack. This is my favorite plugin for title customization, and it works in the latest version of wordpress.

Wordpress SEO Meta Tags

3. In the latest version of wordpress, it’s possible to add meta tags through the normal interface. It can be tedious, however, because it won’t generate any meta tags for you on the fly. If you’re looking for a minimalist setup, you’re better off skipping both of the plugins below. However, if you want something to make your life a little easier then I’d check these plugins out.

Head Meta Description - Automatically generates and adds meta tags based on the first lines from your post. This is fairly repetetive although it is better than nothing.

Add Meta Tags - This is very similar to Head Meta Description. At the time of writing this, it does not work in wordpress 2.5.1.

Autometa - This is a popular plugin that generates meta tags for you, but also does not work in the latest version of wordpress.

Wordpress Auto Tagger - Uses yahoo search suggestion to suggest tags. I’ve found this to be handy when im feeling lazy or incapable of coming up with meta tags on my own. It can run side by side with all in one seo pack without any issues and both are compatible with the latest version of wordpress. On a side note, it requires curl to be installed to work.

Trailing Slash Duplicate Content Problem

4. In older versions of wordpress, the server allows the spider to request “http://www.foo.com/bar” and “http://www.foo.com/bar/” and serves the same page for both. The spider sees these as two different pages, when in fact they are the same page. This causes duplicate content issues and weakens your page rank for this page across two seperate pages. In order to check if your wordpress installation is susceptible to this problem, use our free 301 redirect checker tool and perform a get request on one of your pages that doesn’t contain a trailing slash, if it 301 redirects you to the page with the slash then you don’t need any of the solutions below.

Wordpress Mod Rewrite Code - On this page you can find mod-rewrite code written by Lucia to do a 301 (permanent) redirect from the non-trailing slash version of the page to the one with the trailing slash.

Permalink Redirect Plugin - If dealing with mod-rewrite is too much for you, then grab this plugin which does the rewrite rule for you.

Search Engine Friendly URLS

5. This is actually the easiest and friendliest of them all and doesn’t require any plugins. All you have to do is go into your wordpress settings, enable permalinks, and add a little code to your .htaccess file. Then, simply go to the settings for Permalinks and choose the link style that you like best.

That’s it! Now you should be on your way to dominating the search engines like a true ninja.

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