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..