How to optimize a wordpress blog
-
I’m helping a client optimize a word press blog, and I’m not that familiar with Wordpress. The site is www.athleticfoodie.com.
At first I was treating it like a normal website, where the categories would be optimized like pages on a website. However, I now realize that categories don’t have any content on them, so I can’t really optimize anything other than the names.
Are the following things the best way to handle on-page optimization for a blog?
- Optimizing the homepage & domain: Find ways to incorporate the most important keywords into the elements on the main frame of the site: Navigation menu, Widgets, Category names, Alt Images.
- Optimizing the categories: For the posts within the categories (i.e., photos), work to make sure the category keywords are worked into the post titles (but not too much to seem spammy)
- Optimizing specific posts. Work keywords into the text and images.
Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
-
Kevin and Eric,
Performance issues aside, I prefer the simplest URL structure:
Unless you really need advanced categorization, siloing, etc., bringing your content up one level and having shorter URLs is always better, IMO.
-
Great info, Kevin. I appreciate the quick feedback.
Eric
-
Hi Eric,
I would recommend the Yoast WordPress plugin available at http://yoast.com/wordpress/. This plugin covers pretty much all the SEO issues you'll encounter in WordPress, plus there is a handy tool that will analyze important text fields in your posts to see if your articles are optimized for the keywords you're looking to rank for. This plugin won't put heading tags in the template, but I think it's worth a look.
Another consideration for WordPress is your permalink URL structure. As of WordPress 3.1.2, there is a definite performance issue when starting the permalink structure with either the category, tag, author, or postname fields. You can read more under "Structure Tags" at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. I'm not sure how this affects SEO, so it'd be great to get some feedback on ranking results using different WordPress URL structures.
-
Thank you!
-
When adding or editing categories in WordPress, there is a field called "description" (not meta description) with the label "The description is not prominent by default; however, some themes may show it." Your developer can modify your theme so the description text is displayed on the category page.
-
Great info. I will look into these more deeply. Thank you!
-
Hi Adam,
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "modifying your theme to display your category description as visible text on the page"? I don't understand what this means.
Also, thanks for the heads up on the Title Tag Plug In
Eric
-
The few things I would point out, which aren't so much WordPress issues, but are how this WordPress installation is configured, are:
- No description tag, that is in the 'Settings -> General' page
- Well over 100 links on the home page, mostly because of the 'Blog Archive', are people actually clicking on those items?
- No good H1 tag, the one that was created by the theme "Athletic Foodie" has been commented out and the current (second) one is, "How about a 2,000-year-old Salad? Kale!!", a poor descriptor of the page.
- Dangling links, some of the images are linked to themselves, that is set on the post or page they are created on.
- The page names 'slugs' don't usually match their titles, ex, Fiber: health benefits for athletes...., would be: 'fiber-health-benefits-athletes', etc.
- From a user standpoint, way too much text, the full posts could be reduced by using excerpts and linking to a separate page, increasing load time, and most likely page views. Would you scroll all the way to the bottom? What if it was half or a quarter this size?
- The 2 main items "Recipes" & "Videos" go offsite? And they are follow links! What the!
Cheers.
-
I don't utilize categories much so I may not be the best one to answer this. The All in One SEO plugin allows you to change how your category titles are displayed, i.e. %category_title%.
You can change category title by changing the name of the category. But I'm thinking you want to have the category displayed as "Green Widgets" on your sidebar, but have the title something like, "Buy Green Widgets here. Free Shipping!".
I'd be interested in hearing more about this if others have ideas.
-
Eric,
If you are optimizing category pages, I recommend modifying your theme to display your category description as visible text on the page. This will allow you to have some optimized text on each category page. I believe there is a title tags plugin that will allow you to change the title tags of your category pages individually, also.
-
Hi Dunamis,
Does the plug in allow you to make the Title Tag different than the category name?
Eric
-
I have some sites that are static and others that are WP blogs and there isn't much difference between how I optimize them. I use the all in one SEO plugin for my WP sites which allows me to set the title and meta keywords. I don't pay much attention to tags. In the video below, Matt Cutts explains that tags don't really help much in regards to SEO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal Website Linking from Syndicated Blog Posts
Does it help, hurt, or do nothing for my website's SEO if I do internal linking from syndicated blog posts (on my blog) to my website pages? For example, a syndicated blog post on winterizing your house has instances of "homeowners insurance" linking to my webpage on homeowners insurance. Proper canonicalization is done as well.
On-Page Optimization | | BFMichael0 -
Looking for a Tool to Assist with Site Optimization. Does it already exist?
I'm looking for a tool that can help us quickly identify web pages on a client's site that contain a selected keyword phrase.
On-Page Optimization | | RosemaryB
I would like to enter say 100 keyword phrases and the client's URL and receive a report that shows - for each keyword - the client URLs that contained that exact phrase. Does anyone know of a tool that can do this? Thank you, Rosemary Brisco0 -
What's the best Magento Community blog extension?
We are looking at FishPig's Word Press Integrations extension. has anybody used it? Possibly a dumb question, but is SEO adversely affected by the fact it's a WordPress extension on a Magento site?
On-Page Optimization | | Anne_Marie_English0 -
Moz not showing blog errors
I have a campaign running in moz for getpromoted.in. Your moz is only crawling and showing website errors not blog (blog.getpromoted.in). Please advice whats the issue
On-Page Optimization | | zigmund0 -
Content Optimization - Multiple Keywords or One?
I have three web pages I'm trying to increase traffic to (and thus conversions). I've carefully researched and selected 15 keywords. There's about 3-5 keyword groupings that are similar enough so I can optimize each page with all of them (for example - autobody, dent repair, scratch repair). I see a couple ways to approach optimizing the pages: select one main keyword to put in the header and support it with the other 2-4 keywords in the content body select 3-5 keywords and evenly optimize the page for each (several headers and sections about each) pick one keyword per page I'm constrained to three web pages since it's a clients website. Otherwise I'm guessing the best method would be to create content for each keyword in something like a blog. I basically see the pros and cons as this: including multiple closely related keywords on a page will bring more traffic and thus overal conversions; however it will take longer to rank for those keywords. Focusing the content on one keyword will increase conversion rate and take a shorter time to rank that page since it's more focused, but less overall traffic and conversions. With the page number constraint and increasing conversions being the goal of optimization, what are your thoughts on the pros and cons of each choice?
On-Page Optimization | | reidsteven750 -
Optimization help
Looking for suggestions - one of my targeted keywords is "IT Support NY". I can't for the life of me figure out a way to use it in a sentence. Any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | CsmBill0 -
Optimizing for Bing
My keyword ranking many times vary significantly from google to bing. i feel comfortable with my google rankings but many competitors that i am ranking higher than in google are much higher than my site in bing. Any tips? www.hodgesbadge.com
On-Page Optimization | | GaryQ0 -
Doubt about correct no. of categories on my blog
I have site wide 25 categories on my blog but I dont know whether I should keep few categories only like 6-8 or having 25 categories is ok? Plz help
On-Page Optimization | | ksbnok0