They say WordPress is pretty SEO friendly right out of the box, but often there is still room for improvement. Mistakes are often made that can hinder or severely harm the overall search engine rankings of a WordPress site.
1. No canonical url set
When visitors come to your site can they get there from http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com? Or how about some monstrously long url that is common in blog feeds? Well, if you don’t have a canonical url set then the search engines count each url as a separate page even though they all point to the same thing.
You can avoid any kind of duplicate content issues by making sure your blog has the proper canonical url tag in the head section.
2. Permalinks
The default permalink settings after a fresh install of WordPress are crappy for SEO. If you write a blog post about pink poodles in the park, you will have an easier time ranking in the search engines if your permalink looks like http://yoursite.com/pink-poodles-in-the-park/ as opposed to http://yoursite.com/?p=35.
If you’re coming off a fresh install of WordPress, go into your permalink settings and change it to anything other than the default. If you’ve been blogging for a while with the default permalinks then you might need a redirection plugin in order to switch permalinks optimally.
3. Javascript navigation
Some people will replace their site’s menu with some form of a glitzy javascript. Sure, sometimes this might improve the wow factor of your site, but it doesn’t help your internal link structure. Search engines have an easier time crawling your site through text links, and the anchor text of these text links can impact how well your pages rank for that term.
If you replace your site navigation with javascript over html you are just making your SEO efforts more difficult.
4. The home link
In the navigation menu on WordPress sites I can think of no good reason to use the text “home” to link to your home page AND have that link be a “follow” link. I always no-follow that type of link to the home page. It’s not like you’re trying to get your blog ranked well for the keyword of “home”.
5. RSS links
Similar to the home link listed above, I can think of no good reason why anyone would want to pass off any amount of “link juice” to their RSS feed. That type of link mojo is better spent on other links. If you have a link to your RSS feed on your blog, put in a no-follow attribute to it just like the home link in your navigation menu.
6. Proper use of heading tags
Despite the talk that Google is placing an equal value on all heading tags, I’m still a proponent of using heading tags the way I’ve always used them in WordPress. Depending on your theme, you may be using them incorrectly.
On your home page, the h1 tag (the tag with the highest value) should be used for the title or name of your blog, and all your post listings should use h2 tags or lower for their respective titles. When clicking through to a post, your post title should then become a h1 tag and your blog’s title tag should drop to something no higher than an h4.
When you think about this it makes sense. If you visit a blog post on pink poodles in the park, shouldn’t the title of that blog post carry more weight than the name of the blog?
7. Inadvertently blocking bots
Sometimes in the course of implementing security measures you may accidentally block search engine bots by mistake. You should always check, double check, and maybe even triple check anything you do with your robots.txt or .htaccess files.
I made that mistake with this blog with an .htaccess file. I set up an .htaccess file in a subfolder to lock it down and only allow certain file types to pass through. Everything looked fine on this site to normal visitors, but Google was giving me 403 errors for every page on this site.
The problem was with the caching system. Visitors to this blog see a cached file that is served html style, and html files were allowed through. However, Google wasn’t getting the html file; they were being served a gzip file and by not allowing gzip files through I was inadvertently blocking Google from crawling this site. After adding the exception, everything was fine again.
8. No sitemap
If you want to ensure that search engines know about all of your blog content then you need a good sitemap. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin is a fantastic plugin that every WordPress blogger should be using. Once you choose your initial settings your sitemap is taken care of and requires no more maintenance from you.
9. Limit what gets indexed
Not everything on your blog needs to be indexed by the search engines. In fact, indexing every single post or page on your WordPress blog is a great way to run into duplicate content problems. Archive pages, tag pages and other types of pages on your site don’t need to be indexed by the search engines so steps should be taken to stop that from happening.
If your theme doesn’t include options to limit what pages get indexed, the All in One SEO Pack plugin can do that for you.
10. Comment moderation
I have seen some blogs that are obviously not moderating comments. I’m sure you’ve seen at least one yourself. This is an absolutely horrible thing to do in regards to SEO.
If you allow every comment to be published on your blog without checking them first, you are opening yourself up to every spammer in the world. Your blog pages will be filled with links to every porn and pharmaceutical site on the internet. These links to bad sites will most likely be no-follow links, but your WordPress blog can still be penalized for linking out to sites that search engines deem to be bad.
Using Akismet, comment filters and .htaccess hacks can make the job of moderating comments easier.
Final thoughts
Did you notice anything in this list that you’re guilty of, or did you think of something that should have been listed here? I’d love your feedback on what you think!
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