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This is the second part of the essential SEO tips for WordPress blogs covering the topics of Google Sitemaps plugins, pings and ping servers, valid (X)HTML, importance of a layout that puts post content ahead of sidebars and navigation, and displaying post excerpts and teaser text on the home page.
You should also check out other articles relevant to the SEO for blogs: How to Make a WordPress Blog Duplicate Content Safe and SEO for WordPress Part 1
To keep the quality of the web search high Google spiders constantly crawl the Internet searching for new or updated content. The main way Google discovers a new page is following links that point to it. Some pages don’t have enough incoming links to be quickly discovered by Google, and it may take weeks for them to appear in the index.
To speed up the indexing process Google allows webmasters to upload a specially formatted XML file called ‘sitemap’ containing links to all the pages in a given website and the frequency of their updates. This not just increases the chances of a new or updated page to be picked up quickly, but also optimizes the indexing job, as instead of random crawl spiders now can be sent directly to the new content.Although I can say that from my experience WordPress blogs are usually indexed without much problem, it is still can be useful to create a Google account and upload a sitemap file for your blog. There is a handy plugin for WordPress that allows you to create sitemaps with little or now knowledge of PHP and XML. Check it out:
Each time you publish or update a post your WordPress engine attempts to notify ping servers about the new content on your site. Ping servers provide lists of recently updated blogs to blog search engines and aggregators helping them to show the most recent content to their users. You can manage the list of servers to ping in Options -> Writing section. The more servers you ping the better, but be aware that as your blog notifies a long list of ping servers this an extra load on your webserver making you wait every time you publish updates. The best solution is to choose a few popular ping servers that can guarantee that all the major blog search engines and aggregators will be notified about your new post. Here is the list of recommended ping servers:
A comprehensive list of active ping servers you can find on Wikipedia
Only a small percentage of pages in the Web fully confirm the standards of W3C, and even some big websites allow having their web documents not validating against the W3C rules. The modern major browsers are capable to display such pages regardless the errors in HTML and search engine crawlers are mostly able to index them. But sometimes structure (X)HTML errors may prevent your pages to be indexed correctly. To make sure that your pages are valid use the W3C validation service or one of the plugins for your browser, such as for example, this one based on Tidy.
Your blog navigation and the content of your sidebar are repeated across the blog while the content of your posts is mostly unique. It would be a wise decision to put your posts above the navigation so that to get advantage of the content prominence (one of the factors used to judge the relevance of a page).
To see how the content and sidebar navigation are arranged in your pages use a text-only browser like Lynx, or temporarily disable CSS in your browser options. Or better yet, install Web Developer plugin for Firefox that allows you to enable and disable CSS in one click. Once you disabled CSS you can see you blog just as search engines crawlers see it.
The designers of WordPress themes place post content above navigation and sidebar by editing CSS file associated with the theme. The most popular blog layout – posts to the left, sidebar to the right – doesn’t require any special adjustments as sidebar appears after the post content. But when you want to use a three column layout or a layout with a left sidebar – you have to make sure that the theme you are going to use puts posts above the navigation and sidebars in the CSS disabled view.
If you prefer to write long posts you should think about showing only a part of them on your page. The reasons for that are:
Simply put tag after the first or second paragraph of your post and make sure that the first lines displayed on the home page are capable to capture the attention of your readers motivating them to read the entire post. Copyblogger gives excellent tips on writing captivating teaser text.
The importance of Title Tags in Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - SEO
This article is largely based on SEO für WordPress – die besten Tipps – Teil 2 by Michael Wöhrer with some new input by me.
WordPress is without question the most popular stand-alone blog platform. It is flexible and customizable; there are lots of useful plugins providing any functionality a blogger can think of. However, a fresh installation of a WordPress blogs leaves a lot for improvement. For instance, search engine optimization and duplicate content proofing.
Below is a rundown of useful tips that can help improving your blog’s position in search engines as well as providing some additional benefits to your readers.
By default URLs to WordPress posts look like this: http://yourblog.com/?p=321. This URL calls the PHP engine to show a post or a page identified by its number, in this case 321.
This is a totally valid URL and search engines (at least the major ones: Google, Yahoo and MSN) no longer have problems with indexing dynamic content. However, a wise webmaster is aware that having keywords in URL is an advantage over meaningless parameter values. Keywords in URL are in fact one of the biggest factors determining the relevancy of a page to a specific search query.The permalinks feature of WordPress allows creating meaningful URLs easily. Just go to Options page of your blog’s control panel and click the menu item ‘permalinks’. Here you can choose, for example, date based permalinks, which include the title of your post, as well as the month and the day of posting. While definitely an improvement over the post-id based URL, it is still not perfect. What the use of these month-and-day? Let’s get rid of it and click the ‘Custom’ option and type /%postname%.html in. Now your URL will look like http://yourblog.com/post-title.html. You can further customize the post URL by providing a different ‘post slug’ when writing your posts. The post-slug option you can find in the right sidebar of your post editing page.
More info on customizing the permalinks structure.
Page title is another important factor influencing the relevancy score of a page in search engine index. Besides, title is what will be shown in a search engine results page as a link to your post. Again, the default WordPress setting for this feature is far from ideal. The fresh install of a WP blog shows page titles as The Name of Your Blog » Post Title. Considering that this structure is propagated to every page in your blog you might suffer from duplicate content penalty (see a more detailed description of duplicate problem here). This can be sorted out by editing the header file of your current WordPress theme. In fact, many theme authors are aware of this problem and publish their themes with this problem already fixed.
In your dashboard go to presentation page and click theme editor menu item. Then locate and click header link in the right sidebar. This will open the text editor with the upper part of the source code shared by all the posts and pages in your blog.
Take a look at this piece of code:
So let’s delete all but the last one:
No wait! What about the home page? This will leave it without the title! Change the code as follows:
Now this will check, if it is a home page and assign your blog name as its title, using the post title otherwise.
A clear headings structure is beneficial both for users, as it improves readability, and for search engines, as it describes the content of the page. Generally it is advised to have one h1 tag per page – at best containing your post title, a few h2 for subtopics of your post and a few h3 whenever necessary to emphasize or give a title to a paragraph in your subtopics. This is just guidelines; you are not required to create h2 and h3 headings in every post you write, for example in a one consisting of two paragraphs. But keep in mind that longer posts should be logically divided into subtopics to make users stop at headings while skimming the page (a common reading pattern in the Web).
Do not overuse headings! Once webmasters had realized the weight the keywords in headings had in relevancy scores, headings became often abused. Numerous headings sometimes disguised with CSS as text of normal height and weight were filled with target keywords to manipulate the relevancy algorithms of search engines. This practice, however, now is detectable by SEs, and you might get punished for using it.
Changing headings structure requires a little bit more advanced skills and some knowledge of PHP and CSS. Do always backup your current theme before editing it!
Whenever you insert an image into your post take your time and add a meaningful description of in as an alt tag. There are two basic advantages of doing so. First, there are a lot of your potential readers browsing the Net with images turned off. In this case, instead of an empty box, they will see the description. Or a visually impaired user can benefit from the description when his text-to-voice software recites it for him. Another advantage is that your page can be discovered by users doing image search by keywords you provided in the alt description.
Tags are a relatively new and powerful feature in website promotion. Not just page title and the content of headings determine the relevancy of content. To even greater degree it’s the job of links pointing to the page. Keywords in link anchor and URL are the most important factor that determines which pages will be shown to a given query.
Linked tags you place in your post have far less power than those ones linking to your page. But they still help search engine to determine to which topic your post belongs, thus increasing your topical score.
Here are some popular tagging plugins for WordPress:
This is one of the most powerful features for blog promotion. It helps users discover similar posts they’ve just read. This is much more convenient than browsing through archives or searching for a keyword. In fact, this is one of the factors that made YouTube so successful: links to similar videos made user stay at YouTube and spend in average 30 minutes a day there.
In SEO terms such links help building tight topical linking structures, again to the benefit of your blog.
This functionality can be added to your blog by installing this extension plugin to Jerome Keywords
Continued: SEO for WordPress Part II
Largely based on article SEO für WordPress – die besten Tipps – Teil 1 with some new input by me.
How much blog spam is produced in 5 minutes in a quiet Sunday evening? What is the ratio of spam blogs in the most popular blog services? To answer this question I present you the results of an experiment analyzing ping data and manually reviewing blogs.
The relative ease of creating and maintaining blogs makes them ideal tools for spamming search engines. Spam blogs or splogs serve two basic purposes: making money from advertising and affiliate programs, and participating in link farms. But making money from AdSense and providing nepotistic links are not what it takes to call a blog splog. Otherwise we would have to classify all blogs showing ads or promoting a business as spam; and there are thousands popular, quality blogs that would fall into this category. The distinctive feature of a splog, however, is that it has no use for its visitors. Should Google ban a splog from AdSense and prevent its links from passing on authority – such a splog would have no more value or purpose of existence. So my definition of a splog would be “a blog with the only purpose of showing contextual or affiliate ads, or boosting link popularity of certain target sites”.
How active are these splogs? This question calls for a little experiment; similar to one described by P. Kolari, A. Java and T. Finn in their paper “Characterizing the Splogosphere”. They did their experiment in early 2006, and I am going to repeat it at a smaller scale now, in the early 2007.
Every time a blog is updated it sends a ping to one of many ping servers in order to invite search engine crawlers to index the new post. I am going to use ping data provided by one of the most popular ping servers – Weblogs.com. Due to the limited scale of the experiment I will be using the smaller dataset covering the last 5 minutes of pings. It’s pretty big though: 8117 pings. I’ve written a simple Java application to parse the XML file and extract URLs and names of the blogs in the dataset. Also some of the blogs were classified by blog platform: Blogspot (Blogger), MySpace, Spaces.Live.com etc. I have discovered a number of popular blog services, that I haven’t come across yet, such as a popular Taiwanese site Wretch.cc, or Italian Libero.it and Splinder.com. I was surprised to see how few pings came from some other popular blog services; Livejournal for instance had only 6 pings! Obviously LJ doesn’t rely much on Weblogs.com, but LJ has little to do with my experiment, as it is known to have very small percentage of splogs.
So below is a break down of blogs by platform, according to a ping dataset retrieved on a Sunday evening, Feb. 11. Do not mix blogs under Wordpress.com category with blogs using WP as a blog engine. Only those blogs hosted by Wordpress.com are included into this category.
Fig. 1 Popular Blog Services in the Sunday Weblogs Dataset
The huge ‘Rest’ category consists of standalone blogs and blogs hosted by minor blog services.
A few words on the blogs in the dataset: a lot of blogs were not in English, I think as much as 70% of them. For instance, all Wretch.cc blogs and many Spaces.Live.com ones are in Chinese, there are also a lot of blogs in Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and German.
Once dataset was downloaded and processed I started manually reviewing the blogs and discovering spam. Of course I couldn’t visit all the 8117 blogs, so I randomly selected 20 blogs from each category.
How did I classify spam blogs? While blogs with automatically generated content or dictionary dumps are easily classified as spam, those with plagiarized content or in foreign languages required a bit more of effort. Nepotistic links with keyword stuffed anchors were a good indicator of spam. Copyscape.com helped much discovering plagiarized posts. And finally, affiliate and contextual ads were the final complement in the spam classification problem. It has to be noted that very few blogs in languages other than English were classified as spam. I can be sure about my judgment of German and Russian blogs, since I know these languages, but when dealing with others I relied only on excessive advertising and nepotistic links as spam indicators. I skipped Wretch.cc and Explog.jp samples as I was totally unable to judge Chinese and Japanese blogs. In total of 177 reviewed blogs 36 were classified as spam.
Below you can see two charts, one indicating a ratio of spam within a sample, and another showing how much each blog platform contributes to the total amount of spam.
Fig 2. Percentage of Spam Blogs in 20-blogs Samples
Fig 3. Contribution of Each Category to the Total Blog Spam
With the notable exception of Blogspot, the majority of blogs hosted by popular blog services are spam free. Of course one can question their quality, as many of them are of little value to others. But let’s not forget that most of those blogs are private diaries or personal playgrounds never intended to have big audiences; and as long as they have value to the author and his/her close circle of friends we can’t call them spam.
Thus, according to my reviews blogs hosted by beon.ru, Libero.it, Spaces.Live.com, Livejournal.com, splinder.com, and typepad.com showed no instances of blog spam in 20 blogs samples. Among 20 MySpace blogs I have discovered 1 splog, and Wordpress.com sample contained 2. The popular Google’s service Blogspot has confirmed its unofficial name of Splogspot with 50% spam ratio. ‘The Rest’ category comprised by standalone blogs and blogs attached to commercial sites showed even bigger proportion of blog spam: 23 blogs of 27 reviewed were classified as spam. The relatively low number of splogs hosted by public services can be explained by anti-spam actions taken by the administration of such services. The standalone splogs, however, are not subject to such moderation, which allows them to thrive producing tons of junk content for SE crawlers and overloading ping servers with spam pings.
As you might have noticed I used the same style of charts introduced by the famous blog ModernLifeIsRubbish.co.uk, which has an excellent tutorial on how to create pretty pie charts in Adobe Illustrator. Highly recommended!
If anybody is interested, here is the dataset I used: Dataset