SEO Tricks for WordPress
If you missed Matt Cutts performance at San Francisco's WordCamp 2007, Lisa Barone has a pretty good recap:
Matt gave several other WordPress and blogging-related search engine optimization tricks, including:
* Don't put your blog at the root page of your domain. What if down the line you want to do something else besides a blog? Also, people will typically link to your main page and to your main blog page so it's a good way to gain extra links.
* Name your directory "blog" not "Wordpress".
* Use category names that are good keywords.
* Use Stephan Spencer's SEO Title plug-in which swaps the name of your blog with the name of your post to make your keywords more prevalent.
* If you want any hope of getting your blog into Google News, make sure there are multiple authors. Hey, that reminds me, have you seen our new Authors Page? It's pretty, except that I look psychotic in my photo.
* The type of file extension used in your URL won't affect your rankings, unless it's "exe". If each one of your blog entries is its own program, you likely have a problem.
To create an optimization-friendly blog, bloggers should also:
* Make sure your site is crawlable.
* Make post creation dates easy to find. Anyone remember Sicko?
* If you're worried that adding the date with put more slashes into your URL, don't worry. Matt says this isn't a problem for Google.
* Check your blog on a cell phone/iPhone, as more and more users are going to be looking at your site this way.
* Use full text rss feeds to get loyal users. Partial feeds get more page views, but not as much love.
* Your blog should do standard pings.
