Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

You’ve setup WordPress, now what?

If you’ve just setup WordPress on your site, from an SEO point of view, there’s quite a lot you can do after you’ve installed WordPress.

The most first thing you should do is to double check that your blog has been made visible to everyone including search engines and archivers. Navigate to /wp-admin/options-privacy.php (or Privacy under the Settings menu in the admin) to check this. The first radio button should be selected “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati and archivers)

If this option is set to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” , it will cause the robots.txt to be updated with a rule to block all spiders from indexing the website, it will add a robots meta tag “” into the head section (if wp_head is used) of your sites source which will also tell search engine spiders to ignore your site. Pings to ping-o-matic and any other RPC ping services will be stopped and the update services will be hidden.

It’s recommended that you install a couple of plugins to enhance WordPress’s functionality. The All in One SEO Pack is a free plugin, you can download the plugin here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Take a look at the feature log for full details as to what the all in one seo pack provides. In short, it generates meta tags automatically, improves wordpress’s canonical URL’s and allows you to fine-tune everything.

Another recommended plugin to install is “Google XML Sitemaps”. This allows you to generate an XML sitemap from the wordpress admin from which you can easily update. View the plugin page here.

Take time to search around for any other features you’d like to add to your WordPress blog, with 10,246 plugins and counting in the plugin directory, there’s a good chance you’ll find it.

Tags: privacy settings, Search Engines, seo point of view, spiders, wordpress
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation on July 12th, 2010 by Peter | 2 Comments »

An Introduction To WordPress As A CMS

Whilst WordPress’ primary use is to be a blogging platform, WordPress can and is now used for much more than a traditional blogging system by many users. WordPress is now being used as a fully functional content management system (Yes, some might say “OLD NEWS!”), however many people still don’t look at WordPress in this way.

Pages

A standard feature to WordPress is it’s paging system. You can manage, edit and delete pages from the admin. Pages are able to be set in a hierarchy so that you can have a parent page and then sub pages to that parent page which is pretty useful for situations such as having an about us page and then having a location page, privacy policy page, TOS page etc.
Page Templates

WordPress allows you to create static web pages using page templates. It supports the use of multiple templates which enables you to style each page individually.
Front Page

By default, posts are displayed on the front page however, the front page can display a static page instead. You can then set up a new directory to display the posts. This allows you to use WordPress’s blogging features as a sub part to the site instead of it being the main feature.

Permalinks

Permalinks allows you to create URL friendly versions of URL’s generated by WordPress, you can have the page/post name as the URL instead of the ugly and SEO and user unfriendly standard way.
I recommend you use /%category%/%postname%/ for the structure.

Post Settings

You can password protect specific pages to hide posts from certain users and you can also disable comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. Custom fields are a great way to display content such as images and the alike.

Plugins

There are thousands of free plugins for WordPress which enable you to expand WordPress’s features even further such as:
Sitemap

Google XML Sitemaps allows you to generate a Google XML sitemap which is updated everytime you create a new page or post etc. Google XML Sitemaps isn’t the only plugin that allows you to do this although it is the most popular.
Custom Code

You can use php, javascript, xhtml and css in WordPress posts and pages using a plugin such as Exec-PHP.
All in one SEO pack

The All in one SEO pack is one of the most used Plugins for WordPress. It allows you to insert meta data and many other SEO related features, in posts and pages. You can set the meta to be specific to specific pages. It really does do what it says.