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wpSEO: More SEO for Wordpress
August 20th, 2007 in Developer's Toolbox | 73 Comments
Wordpress is simple, minimalistic and yet extremely powerful. However, being easy-to-use, the engine has also some huge disadvantages - e.g. “naked” Wordpress is very inefficient when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Reason: there is simply too much to tweak, too many plugins to use and too many details to take care of.
Title, Meta-Description and Keywords determine the way your posts are shown in search engines, and thus how appealing they appear for random users. The better description your weblog provides, the better idea users will have about the content of your post, which results in the amount of your page impressions. Furthermore, if your Wordpress automatically generates several URLs for a single post (date, id, title of the article), you might run into serious problems with search engines. In fact, sites with the so-called Duplicate Content are often penalized and can be excluded from the search index for several months.
Therefore it’s extremely important to have a profound understanding of what can and should be done to avoid penalization and ensure optimal presentation in search engine results. Popular Wordpress Plugins Optimal Title and Head META Description offer help, but their possibilities are limited.
So if you’d like to have a more comprehensive solution, you should consider the not-so-well-known wpSEO-plugin, which is an effective Wordpress-plugin which can help you to achieve optimal results in search engines. The plugin comes from Germany, was written by Sergej Müller and has been recently released in Version 2.0. So, what can you do with wpSEO?
wpSEO: More SEO For Wordpress
The Meta-Description is used by Google and other search engines to provide the description of a page. This is quite important - particularly since Wordpress by default does absolutely nothing about it. wpSEO can generate post descriptions in a variety of ways, however in most cases it makes sense to cite the actual postings - automatically. If you’d like to be more precise, you can also provide a brief summary for Meta-Description manually.
The definition of used Meta-Keywords offers you more flexibility. If you are already using the plugins UT’W or STP, wpSEO can use your tags as keywords. Otherwise the keywords will be automatically generated from the article, which is not always a sound solution for efficient SEO. By default wpSEO generates keywords fully automatically, however you can let it extract text passages marked in bold or italics or in <span>-tags. You can also use filters to ensure that only relevant data is being used (see screenshot below).
Optimizing <title>-Tags is neither time-consuming nor difficult - in fact, it’s rather simple and comfortable. You can use keywords, a separator, category names or the blog title. wpSEO takes care of Duplicate Content (e.g. tag-pages) by using the NOFOLLOW Meta-Tag. It also marks content sections for Google AdSense (google_ad_section) which might be useful as well.
To install the plugin, it’s enough to upload it to the plugins directory (wp-content/plugins) and activate it in the Wordpress engine. You should avoid using two or more plugins (as mentioned before) at the same time. Previously installed plugins can cause conflicts, just like manual entries in your header.php file. To make sure the wpSEO is working properly, you should at least deactivate similar tools; better - delete them.
A last useful feature you might never use, but would be happy to have available once you need it: you may export all your settings as an XML-file and use them for another blogs. Therefore it’s very easy to maintain the optimal configuration and adjust it to a number of blogs.
At the moment wpSEO doesn’t provide a documentation in English - Sergej is still looking for a translator. However, you can be sure that you won’t really need a step-by-step-tutorial. wpSEO is free, simple and self-explanatory.
Summary
- It’s important to have a profound understanding of what can and should be done to avoid penalization and achieve the optimal click rate in search engine results.
- Title, meta-description and keywords determine the way your posts are shown in search engines, and thus how appealing they appear in search results.
- Compared to Optimal Title and Head META Description, wpSEO is a simple and more comprehensive solution you can use to take care of SEO optimization.
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Binny V A (August 20th, 2007, 8:33 pm)
I would not say that naked wordpress is bad for SEO - just make sure that the permalinks are set up correctly. Also meta keywords and description is ignored by most search engines.
Laburno (August 20th, 2007, 8:34 pm)
What are the diffferences between wpSEo and AllInOneSeoPack ?
Linus (August 20th, 2007, 8:54 pm)
wow, it sounds really helpful, just a bit concerned if i have delete existed meta tag that already been detected by google, anyway, i’m gonna give it a try.
redwall_hp (August 20th, 2007, 11:39 pm)
“Also meta keywords and description is ignored by most search engines.” Or so we’re told by the search engines….
Google seems to penalize sites for not having the tags. I wonder if they secretly do check the tags, but they don’t place too high a value on them.
Pashmina (August 21st, 2007, 12:29 am)
I completely disagree with you. Wordpress out of the box is not inefficient when it comes to SEO. If you’ve setup your permalinks correctly then it is quite good. I’ve found it to be better for search engine ranking than other CMS solutions.
Wil (August 21st, 2007, 12:57 am)
What is the code that needs to be used for the keyword tag? I found the description one:
” />
But just replacing “description” with “keywords” didn’t seem to work.
Thanks for the plugin suggestion!
SEO Girl (August 21st, 2007, 3:21 am)
As others have mentioned WP does pretty well out of the box, and generally you can rank well for low competitive keywords easily as long as you use permalinks and keywords in your post titles. Going for broad terms or really competitive keywords may require more work but it’s not rocket science and really boils down to relative content and inbound links.
I’ve managed many many sites over the last ten years and never experienced the so called Duplicate content penalty. Google may only rank one page (out of multiples) but they don’t blacklist, filter, or penalize your entire site.
Please note that I’m not trying to be confrontational here, I just think it’s hard for people to figure out what’s what with so many people writing about SEO. In my experience it pays to keep things simple…only do the barest minimum of optimization necessary and focus on quality content that generates conversation.
Ozh (August 21st, 2007, 3:56 am)
Argh. Yet another full of FUD and urban myths article about SEO problems.
1st point: “WordPress” is not bad for SEO. Nor good. It’s not a WordPress issue. It’s a theme issue. Your theme might be good or bad for this matter. Just like WordPress is not ugly : your theme might or might not be pretty. And being a theme matter, it’s not a plugin’s job to enhance SEO.
2nd point: Duplicate content is a false issue on the same website. Search engines penalizes duplicate content when found on differents websites, and ignore the ones they think is not the original one.
Having an article’s content replicated on index page, the article page, the categories archives and the day/month/year archives is good for SEO because, simply put, it generates more content. A site with 1000 pages filed in a variety of way is better than a site with 100 unique pages. Putting nofollow or noindex on parts of your site is the dumbest idea ever. I get about 2% of my SE visitors on archive pages, why should I get rid of them ?
This said, if you’ve written a kick ass article about toothpick, it’s your responsibility to make sure that search engines will point people searching for toothpicks to your article page, and not the monthly archive where it belongs. Why ? Because it will interest more the reader to find the article than the archive full of different stuff.
But then again, presenting content differently in archive pages than in the article pages is a theme’s job.
Bottom line: get a SEO optimized theme, not plugins. Link [planetozh.com].
Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (August 21st, 2007, 6:19 am)
wpSEO is mostly about meta-tags and titles. this is not a theme’s job.
Kyle Eslick (August 21st, 2007, 9:54 am)
I’m not a fan of this plugin. I’ve had much better results using Link [wp.uberdose.com], which integrates well with UTW and allows me to get custom meta descriptions for each individual post.
Oh, and I’m not affiliated with All-in-One SEO, just a huge fan! ;)
Starfeeder (August 21st, 2007, 10:14 am)
Your summary link: “Head META Description” goes to a 404 page
I’d like to learn more about how META data is treated by search engines..
Gerd Wippich (August 21st, 2007, 4:43 pm)
@ Ozh
Interesting comment. Which WP themes are the best SEO optimized (in your point of view), can you name a few? Thanks!
sean3 (August 21st, 2007, 7:48 pm)
@Ozh:
Wallace (August 21st, 2007, 8:27 pm)
i don’t apply any SEO plugins as i am not sure whether they work.
my blog received hundreds of targeted readers from google everyday although just change the permalinks.
All you should do is setup the permalinks, no date,no id,only title.
Link [your-blog-name.com]
Jermayn Parker (August 22nd, 2007, 2:17 pm)
Think I will try and experiement with the all in one seo pack plugin first and then if I dont like it, then I will try wpSEO.
Thanks for providing the discussion though Smashing Magazine
Graeme Mac (August 22nd, 2007, 2:21 pm)
–> Ozh.
had (August 22nd, 2007, 8:40 pm)
i think that naked wp is very good for seo.. but you just have to know, what you want!
Tommy Holiday (August 22nd, 2007, 9:04 pm)
hmmm, i also cannot agree with “naked WP is bad for SEO…” and such plugins like wpSEO, i don’t know… I obtained good results with the naked wp ;)
Cadu de Castro Alves (August 23rd, 2007, 12:22 am)
Content is everything. Not SEO.
John Macpherson (August 23rd, 2007, 8:20 pm)
The gold old Meta tags come back again!
Meta tags mean nothing in seo rankings
Title tags and descriptive links mean a lot.
Paul (August 24th, 2007, 12:15 am)
I agree with John. I would put much more emphasis on creating short, descriptive title tags and rich, Link [www.epursuit.net] rather than spending too much time on meta keywords and descriptions.
Angelo (August 24th, 2007, 12:40 am)
I agree totally wordpress sucks when it comes to seo, some theme designs are bad too, h2 before content is such a major issue. Great post, thanks!
Anirudh (August 24th, 2007, 5:07 pm)
I completely disagree with you….SEO doesnt depend on wordpress but it depends on the theme that you are using. and secondly if you have a proper permalink then you will never have multiple URL’s for a single post.
Bill (August 24th, 2007, 10:36 pm)
I use WordPress for my blog at Link [www.vermonter.com] and find that I get best results from changing my page title meta-tag under options, whenever I post a new article. The older posts don’t seem to come up very often on their own though.
Andrea (August 25th, 2007, 8:57 pm)
…. otherwise a good plug-in for wordpress is “All in One SEO Pack”.
Shankar Ganesh (August 26th, 2007, 1:38 pm)
I’m content with the All in one SEO pack for my blog.
Fran6 (August 27th, 2007, 4:48 pm)
All-In-One-SEO is very good but can you change pages, tags and categories descriptions and keywords ?? Don’t think so… And it seems that WPseo can do so…
achmadbiz (August 27th, 2007, 6:12 pm)
what about Link [www.bercongroup.com] ?
tavla (September 12th, 2007, 6:12 pm)
ok thanks i download
Sarah McLead (October 17th, 2007, 2:01 am)
After I read the article and it reminds me of a tool I downloaded month ago. Its called g(oo)gle(sc)rambl(er) and is written in C#. —- There is a problem with copying content from other websites - google will kick your (sub-)domain very quickly. So you have to scramble the text before you put it on your website. The tool helped me very much to get a lot more visitors and the ads I host are clicked much more often. The project seems to be a non-profit project, very nice of the programmer. - Sarah
Special SEO (December 6th, 2007, 3:52 pm)
Humm…. I was using Optimal Title for some of my blogs. Will check this one out. Thanks for explanatory info on it.
Sergej Müller (January 28th, 2008, 12:25 pm)
English website of wpSEO goes online: Link [www.wpseo.org]
SEO Ireland (February 15th, 2008, 9:32 am)
Word press gives some great advantages for any SEO tasks, but just like anything it can go bad in the wrong hands. So before rushing into any seo campaign, just study it in debt first to avoid the possible risks.
Sarah McLead (February 24th, 2008, 5:23 am)
Nice website with a nice product called google scrambler
Greetings
KismetSEO (February 26th, 2008, 2:07 pm)
All in one SEO works well for me for wordpress.
Mark (March 1st, 2008, 11:39 pm)
I use the wpseo plugin and love it. Even had my developer modify it a little bit. Awsome
mike (April 15th, 2008, 2:52 pm)
I am new to WP. Can anyone direct me to a good tutorial on using / configuring wpSEO >?
SEO (April 19th, 2008, 2:16 am)
“Time is ripe for every
SEO specialists to start themselves calling as SEM (Search Engine Marketers). Search Engines have already become cauldrons where many things are getting cooked at the same time.
“
Ben Tan (August 27th, 2008, 4:52 pm)
I google on “SEO Wordpress” and your site is at the top. Thank you for the useful tips.
As I am not very technical in blogging, I wonder if you have a good plugin to do a good SEO job for my blog? I run several product blogs under Link [www.farmforfun.com] but these blogs are not well position in SERP. I would be most glad if there is a good plugin for me to SEO them. Just as example, my Link [composts.farmforfun.com] blog has been there for 8 months but it is not ranking high on the keywords I am targeting.
There is one “all in one SEO Plugin for wordpress” but their SEO looks rather simple and it does not take care of some areas that are covered in your post here. Do you have any good one to recommend instead.
Tudi (October 7th, 2008, 4:51 pm)
@Ozh: You’re so wrong, it hurts.