Ultimate WordPress SEO Tools and Plugins Resources from WordCampUK
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I love WordPress and today I’m here to present you with an ultimate list of WordPress SEO Tools and Resources that you’ll ever need to know. This is a must read presentation and transcript for any wordpress fan. It’s written by Nick Garner and presented at wordCampUK. I’m merely sharing the awesomeness of these resources.
WORDPRESS FOR SEO. HOW WORDPRESS CAN HELP YOU RANK WITH GOOGLE JULY 19TH 2009. NICK GARNER
WORDPRESS IS AWESOME WE LOVE IT!
PRESENTATION STRUCTURE. 1. Seo is complex, so follow a process and make it simple 2. Get wordpress set up for SEO > plugins / analytics / testing / webmaster central 3. Content, be useful & relevant. 4. Links…The vote of confidence for your site. 5. Tools and ways to see how you are moving ahead.
SEO IS COMPLEX WORDPRESS MAKES IT EASIER
WORDPRESS FOR SEO. THINK PROCESS Complex way: The easy way: 1. Use WordPress! And get the necessary plugins. 2. Decide who your audience Is. 3. Make the content very useful and persuasive. 4. Structure your content so its easy for engines… 5. Get analytics, see where you are going. 6. Work consistently for at least 6 months. 7. Socialise and get links into your site. 8. Conversion optimize and get rewards from your traffic.
PLUGINS FOR SEO (AND ANALYTICS) MY FAVOURITES THAT SAVES ME TIME AND HASSLE
PLUGIN FOR SEO GOOGLE XML SITEMAPS: GET INDEXED MORE EASILY 4* / 504 ratings | 1,416,701 downloads This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update. COMMENT: Unless you have a massive site or have indexing problems, then it’s a nice extra, but not so important.
PLUGIN FOR SEO REDIRECTION 4* / 68 ratings | 159,745 downloads Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. Simple interface to add a redirection This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation. A graphical interface to manage all your redirections COMMENT: If you are doing an upgrade from a different CMS, or the site has a history of disruptive changes, this plugin can be invaluable as a great way to mop up old links.
PLUGIN FOR SEO PERMALINK REDIRECT 5* rating / 14,132 downloads This plugin fixes all sorts of weird addons to your URL’s by automatically 301 redirecting to the permalink for that post, page, category or tag page. Only use this plugin if you’re 110% sure you know what you’re doing. That way, a URL like this: http://www.example.com/page1/?q=ek Will be automatically redirected to: http://www.example.com/page1/ COMMENT: It’s one of those ‘enable and go’ plugins that you just have on in the background. Obviously if you are using affiliate tracking links, then it’s a no no.
PLUGIN FOR SEO BAYESIAN RELATED LINKS 6* rating / 1,310 downloads First, we make a model of browsing behavior. Then we need to figure out the parameters for this model. Bayesian methods allow us to learn the parameters with few assumptions. See Additional Information for more about the mathematical theory. COMMENT: Interesting idea…I’ve always spoken about how important internal linking is, so this does it automatically and is great if you want the site to ‘find its own level’.
PLUGIN FOR SEO AUTOMATIC SEO LINKS 6* rating / 5,430 downloads Forget to put manually your links, just choose a word and a URL and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your blog. For each link, you can set: Title / Target / Rel Other features Also you can know every moment how many times a word has been changed. This plugin just changes the words in plain text, if it finds a word in a link, title, header.. it would not be replaced. In case the plugin finds more of once the same word in a post, it will only change the first one. This is to avoid black seo and inconveniences to the users. COMMENT: Nice idea, a bit spammy and uncontrollable. If you could switch on or off certain pages and posts, it would be very usable.
PLUGIN FOR SEO ALL IN ONE SEO 4* / 462 ratings | 2,429,459 downloads As you see from the screengrab, it does about everything automatically. All in One SEO Pack COMMENT: Its almost the default plugin for anyone who cares about SEO. Its really all you need to meta tag optimisation. You can even change tags on Individual pages and posts….nice.
PLUGIN FOR SEO PAGINATED COMMENTS 5* rating / 6 ratings | 4,938 downloads Paginated Comments is a WordPress Plugin ** developed with SEO in mind ** that gives you the ability to break your comments into a number of search engine optimized pages. You can create pages based on size of comments (so that no page of comments is greater than a certain file size) or you can create pages based on number of comments per page (100 for example). Some features include: •Titles for each page of comments. •Description and Keywords for each pages of comments. •Paginate by size of all comments. •Paginate by a number of comments. •Personalize your Pretty Permalinks URI’s. •Control page of comments post content. •Handle this and more features within your WordPress •Dashboard with a easily menu.
COMMENT: I once managed a blog that frequently got 500 plus comments per Post. This was the the best way to manage this massive flow of opinion. And after the plugin install, commenting rose again!
PLUGIN FOR SEO PAGED NAVIGATION 5* / 60 Ratings | 289,136 downloads Add paged navigation to your category pages COMMENT: It chunks down those very long category pages to makes them manageable for spiders and it allows content to not get buried too quickly as is the case with the normal ‘previous > next’ footer links.
PLUGIN FOR SEO ENFORCE WWW PREFERENCE 5* / 8 ratings | 10,934 downloads Enforce www. Preference enforces your yes-www or no-www preference as defined by your Blog URL setting in ‘Options – General.‘ If you have http://example.com/, people who visit any WordPress-served URL staring with http://www.example.com/ will be redirected to the no-www version. If you have http://www.example.com/, people who visit any WordPress-served URL staring with http://example.com/ will be redirected to the yes- www version. The plugin will also strip off any hanging redundant /index.php COMMENT: Easy way to avoid any possibility of content duplication through Spiders reading the www version and no-www versions of the site as separate sites
PLUGIN FOR SEO ROBOTS META CONFIGURATION 5* rating / 18 Ratings | 51,891 This plugin makes it possible (and very easy) to: • Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags. • Disallow indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages, to prevent duplicate content. • Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section. • Prevent indexing of just your comment feeds. • Disable author and date-based archives. • Nofollow your login, register and admin links, because they really don’t need PageRank. • Enforce a trailing slash on archives. • Edit your .htaccess and your robots.txt from within WordPress. • Assign robots meta tags to individual posts & pages. • Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer. • Add noarchive tags to your blog (Thanks to Henryk Gerlach). COMMENT: Great plugin and really helps ‘sculpt’ your site for search engines
PLUGIN FOR ANALYTICS ULTIMATE GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4.5* / 18 ratings | 52,274 downloads Plugin to add Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your weblog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also add tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mailto: links. COMMENT: When you are ready to dig into your numbers, this plugin will Help you dig right into the data and so make useful decisions. MORE READING
PLUGIN FOR SEO HEADSPACE META TAG MANAGER 4* 76 / Ratings HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. Visit the HeadSpace page for a video demonstration. COMMENT: Its all in one seo, just bigger and better (depending on your view) Its worth a download…
PLUGIN FOR SEO (AND ANALYTICS) BREADCRUMB NAVIGATION 4* rating / 4 ratings | 18,645 Downloads This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme. Why you should do this is outlined in my WordPress SEO article. They could for instance look like this. COMMENT: It helps add link hierarchy to your site and of course its good for usability.
PLUGINS FOR SEO SEO FRIENDLY PERMALINKS – I know, its not a plugin ;-) This is all open to debate…but for SEO, I prefer this URL structure: Mywebsite.com/category-name/post-name-postID.html Mywebsite.com/%category%/%post_name%-%post_id%.html The other big benefit is that the URL acts as a breadcrumb trail.
GOOD SEO HOUSEKEEPING DONT FORGET TO REGISTER ON GOOGLE WEBMASTER CENTRAL.
CONTENT REMEMBER, WRITE IT FOR HUMANS AND MAKE IT ON THEME
CONTENT THINK LIKE A LIBRARIAN. Google is the librarian who has to put your site somewhere on its index. So make it easier for them. Get it right and be the BIG book everyone can see.
CONTENT THE BEST STRUCTURE H1 for site name in header H1 tag for headlines H2 for sidebar titles Try not to do multiple categories for posts Use tagging for cross referencing Paginate categories and allow engines in. Paginate front page. Block off archives because of duplication of content Meta tags: -Title tags – Description tags – Keywords And check your site through with w3c http://validator.w3.org/ | http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
CONTENT STRUCURE As with breadcrumbs and link hierarchy, think about hierarchy of content. The most important and generic content at the top. The more granular going down the hierarchy.
Links HOW WORDPRESS CAN HELP YOU RANK WITH GOOGLE
LINKS A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE IN YOUR SITE Google value links as they represent a vote for your site. Some links matter more than others. Relevance to your site Really matters.
LINKS THE SAME MODEL APPLIES TO HUMANS So make your site useful and relevant. The more sociable interesting and useful you are, the greater your prominence. In search, that means links. And Google loves a nice link!
LINKS SOME HOMEWORK http://collinlahay.com/ Great for really practical tips on getting links. Sphinn is a social bookmarking site for SEO’ers. The most popular content Gets voted up. There is a category for link building: http://sphinn.com/upcoming/LinkBuilding/ This site search brings up some great stuff like: Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics For 2009 Link Building Worksheets – Organize Your Campaign The 7 Golden Rules of White Hat Link Building More here http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Asphinn.com+link+building
FINAL THOUGHTS WORDPRESS, YOU MADE THE RIGHT DECISION
THE MAN FROM GOOGLE – HE SAY YES! MATT CUTTS. HEAD OF GOOGLE WEBSPAM TEAM He said that WordPress is a “great choice” for SEO because it solves “80-90% of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”.
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