Word Press Seo Errors/ Questions

[TinaGammon]

Hi my name is Tina I am new here I hope you guys can help me out. I thought building my new site with Word Press was going to simplify things, however I have a ton of errors, and I am not sure what they are, or how to fix them.

I am hoping someone could share with me a solution for these errors.

I have 28 rel=canonical errors, I am not sure what this means, I understand it to mean my pages are similar, and this is to set a heirarchy between my pages. Please correct me if I am wrong.

If I am correct would this be necessary to add if my main keyword was "widgets" and my home page was optimized for "widgets" and my next page was "blue widgets" and so on.

While my pages are similar they are all optimized for different versions of my main keyword some using long tail keywords. Do you know of a plugin that can help solve this problem?

Also does anyone have a plugin they recommend for G+ my G+ authorship verification is causing an error as well?

I am using Head Space 2 I have used this seo plugin numerous times with great success it has been my favorite seo plugin. However, we have a portfolio that shows our clients websites, and on those pages Head Space will not let me enter a description tag.  What plug in do you guys recommend with more control over each page?

Another interesting issue is on one of our pages I optimized it for our Canadian clients, and now every page has been listed in Google.ca for the keywords it should have on Google.com.

We are listed on Google maps, verified  in Google places, and our address is on the site so they know we're from the USA however, the majority of our keywords are only listed in Google.ca. We're on page one for all of them, we are in the top three on most of them so that's not bad, but we want to be listed in Google.com as well. Any suggestions on this?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Tina-

Couple of things. Lets make sure you understand what "canonicalization" is......when the search engines determine the best version of a single page that can be pulled up using more than one URL. In the process different URL's would be able to display the same identical content.

This could be happening for a number of reasons and might not make a big difference in your SEO or it could be hurting your SERP values. Essentially you want to make sure that your rel=canonical issues are simple redirects that are necessary so that you aren't being penalized for duplicate content. To make sure this is correct work through the errors and make sure that your sitemap is set up correctly and you are effectively using your url descriptions to tell the search engines what the various pages contain. It does make sense to make sure that your URL is as descriptive as possible.

If you want to get the simplest and easiest explanation of rel=canonical issues, read Matt Cutts blog posting from a few years back. We use it in our SEO playbook.    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

I would recommend 2 plugins for you with wordpress (I have done over 30 wordpress sites in the last 6 months and we havetested a bunch of them).

Wordpress SEO by Yoast. This is an all in one SEO plugin which will solve your "description tag" issue and will give you much more flexibility for basic and advanced SEO. Here is the link:  http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#utm_source=wpadmin&utm_medium=plugin&utm_campaign=wpseoplugin

There is another plugin called redirection by John Godly.  It manages your 301 redirects and keeps track of your 404 errors (rel+canonicals) and helps you clean up your site. It is solid and easy to use.

Another issue you might be having with your duplicate content can be avoided by creating original content., if you have  one page with a widget and another with a blue widget and another with a pink widget and all the verbiage is the same, except for the color, then you have duplicate content. Use the rel=canonical to make sure you don't get penalized for duplicate content. Another solution is if on the widget pages you can provide several different descriptions of the widgets that go beyond colors, then you start to create unique content and you get SEO value for each separate widget page without having to do a rel=canonical. We have several ecommerce clients that have 10-15 variations of the same product and we have helped them develop unique content for each one, (hundreds of extra pages of content), which has dramatically increased their relevancy and quality score for their specific keywords....but it has to be unique.

Your last issue is related to Canada and search results. This really relates back to your internal sitemap structure. Remember, Google and other search engines send spiders to your site to crawl. They only know what they can see and what you tell them. if you dont do a good job of sitemap/url structure and definition, they are going to try and figure it out themselves. If I was you, I would create a separate url structure for your canadian group that would be something like....www.dropshippingsupplies.com/specifickeywords_canada_locations   Then all of the SEO value stays with your core site but you designate that those pages and keyword content are related to Canada.  You should also make sure that you have geotargeted keywords in the core content of the page....so that you mention canada or the cities and towns where you aretargeting, within that core content.

Hope this helps..

Mark

[TinaGammon]

Thanks anyone else have a suggestion?

[Chenzo]

Tina, you are going to run into a few SEO issues with Wordpress but don't worry to much about over optimizing since Wordpress is still one of googles most favored platforms. Ultimate SEO plugin is best and really try to consider the following: 1) title tags Wordpress will automatically title the page universally leading to duplicate page title issues 2) meta tag discription Aside from those two I usually do not use the other options as they are not needed when developing a natural/organic white hat type of site. Ps, a neat trick is to not use the Wordpress platform for the entire structure of the site but just the content areas. Giving you in essence 2 power house domains as you are able to upload a Wordpress through the root file under another keyword. Drop a line and I can explain further ... Hope this helps Your pal Chenzo