Teaching the Search Engine Robots to Focus on your Blog Topic

The Robots Metatag Plugin from Joost de Valk is a must have Plugins if you are looking to improve your Search Engine Optimization for your WordPress based Blog or website.

Why, because it will prevent, or cure, your WordPress Blog from having to many pages in the Search Engine Indexes.
You should provide the search engines with pages that bring focus on the topic of your Blog or website, and not on pages like “About”, “Contact” or even worse, a lot of duplicate content pages…so, get focused!

The Robots Plugin is not only easy to install, but it also has some great options which extend to your posts and pages as well.

Installation is simpel, just like any other WordPress Plugin, download, unzip, upload and activate…
But to set the Options, you don’t go to the options page, but to the Plugins menu:

Once you are in the Options screen, it can be somewhat overwhelming, you have options for several parts if your WordPress installation:

• RSS Feeds
• Pages, like tag pages, category pages, author pages, etc
• DMOZ and Yahoo Directory settings
• Permalink settings (trailing / )
• Archive Settings
• Internal NoFollow settings
• Plugins settings
• Verification for Google, Yahoo and MSN Webmaster Tools!

And the content of your robots.txt and .htaccess file is show in edit screens to make it even simpler for you to edit.

Below you can see that most of the options are active in my own Blog, except for the category pages…
Why that is, I will wrote more once we get to the templates and how to improve them.

After these general settings, its time to look oat some of the pages you created, which you don’t want to get so prominently in the search engine results pages.
Open one of those pages and look at the page options you find on the right side of your screen. you should see an extra field:

 
This field you can also find on your post pages.
Here you can easily set stuff like Index,NoFollow on pages like “About” or “Contact” to get more focus on pages and posts that really matter and points the robots to the on-topic posts and pages of your Blog or website.

Now you are ready for the search engines…. you think?
No, there is a lot more to do, so stay tuned for the next posts.

And in the mean time… get a subscription on the WP Plugins & SEO Mailing-list of Joost de Valk, highly recommended, just like his Robots Meta Plugin..

WordPress Permalink on Windows Hosting

So, you are running a WordPress Blog on a windows hosting account…
And you have read all about these great options to improve your search engine rankings by using the right Permalink structuur.

You want to use that to, but somehow it you just can’t get it to work, the .htaccess file doesn’t work, and you get all kinds of strange errors.

Well, that is just because you are running it on Windows, like on your own PC ore server.
To work with .htaccess and Apache and Mod_Rewrite, you need to be on a Unix / Linux based machine.

But here is a solution that comes close the the options I pointed out in the previous post.
On a Windows based machine you should not use /%postname%/ but instead you use /index.php/%postname%/ 

This will give you a URL like www.example.com/index.php/wordpress-permalinks-on-windows-hosting/
So yes, there is a index.php in the URL, but is gives you the better part of rewriting that the big boys do

And the best part…. your old URL should still work and pick-up the new URL.
Try it, check a nice post for your website from the Google results page and see if you are forwarded to the new URL on your windows based WordPress installation…

WordPress SEO Starts with a Clean Search Engine Friendly URL

Running a WordPress Blog is best done on you own Domain, and for the best results you need to create Search Engine Friendly URL’s.
This means instead of a post link like http://seo4wordpress.wordpress.com/page=33 (example) you get links to http://seo4wordpress.wordpress.com/2007/03/31/the-beginning-of-search-engine-optimization-for-wordpress/

If you want to use the permalinks option to get clean urls, there are three conditions you have to meet:

Conditions: 

• Webserver running on a Unix or Linux Distribution (Windows is possible, but much harder)
• Webserver software you use is Apache with the MOD_Rewrite module active (Most hosting servers provide this)
• Use of you own .htaccess file.

If your webhosting provider is running these options, as said most of the do, you are ready to activate the permalinks option.

Login to you administration panel and go to the Options menu and then choose for Permalinks.
Tick the option – Custom and use then /%postname%/ for the best results.

WordPress will not let you create the same post slugs so you don’t need to be affraid that you get duplicate urls..

The .htaccess File

Once you set the option, you get an update of the field content below that shows you the content of what is going to be your .htaccess file.

If you uploaded an empty .htaccess file and made sure it was writable WordPress would have filled it for you.

If you didn’t you need to copy and past the content of that field into an empty file created with Notepad, Not Word or any other wordprocessor, because you need a flat file.

Save it as htaccess.txt and then upload it to your root directory of your wordpress installation.
Once you have done that, set the permissions to 707 and rename the file to .htacess.

Most FTP Programs will not show you the file anymore, than the . files are hidden files in Unix.
Fillezilla has an option to show you these hidden files.

If you did everything the right way, you should now see your URL as mentioned above.

The Beginning of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress

The First thing to do is find a nice Theme that is allready Optimized for SEO, Like Cutline from Chris Pearson.

Version 1.1 has some great features and you can download it for http://cutline.tubetorial.com/cutline-11-released/

I will tell you how you can even improve that Theme.

The Theme used here on WordPress itself is Version 1.03

SEO for WordPress

 Yes, even an great Blogging tool like WordPress needs some work to get the most out of it.

After writing on Joomla and Search Engine Optimization, and Seo for Drupal its now time for me to show you how you can impove your WordPress Blog to perform at its best in Search Engines Like Google, Yahoo and Live..

Stay Tuned, will get to the basic soon.