Wordpress SEO

You should be logged into your Wordpress blog so we can tweak it for SEO.

First up we are going to change the permalinks structure of Wordpress, we can argue all day about the advantages of adding .html to the end of posts and pages but in reality this is all good in terms of SEO, it will not hurt your site, if anything it will improve navigation and crawlability, if you optimise your categories and post/page titles you will also improve search engine rank.

SO just do it, any extra advantage you can get take it.

BM is old school SEO and it makes perfect sense to add descriptive URLS and directories that reprasent the silo SEO system that was designed to optimise HTML based sites, this structure was proven to improve performance and search engine rankings plus you can get a good silo structure running on Wordpress using free plugins, so its stupid to not to be optimising for this.

It’s also good idea to mix up the structure of Wordpress if your rolling out big link networks (multiple targeted sites) in the 100s or 1,000s as the footprint is not an exact match across your link graph which Google can use to track down your networks and slap your sites rank and discount links.

Fixing Wordpress Permalinks

Go into settings/permalinks and tick custom structure then copy and paste: /%category%/%postname%.html

Ok problem with this is Wordpress still won’t add the .html extension to the “pages” so we add a plugin to handle this called HTML on Pages, get it here and install it.

You link structure will now look like
/category1/categroy2/postname.html or /pagename.html

Next up you can strip one level of the category listing in the URL, for example, boganmarketing.com/blog/affiliate-marketing/, but when you’re in the top level categories you will get /category/blog/ which is confusing when Google indexes the site. To fix this you can use the Top Level Categories plugin which will strip away the top level and make your site have a silo type layout, so install and activate top level categories now.

Please not you must have this structure in permalinks settings /%category%/%postname%.html

Ok so we are getting there, our URLS are descriptive and we now have the .html extension loaded on our post and pages.

Next up you want to get your media looking nice and neat, go to settings miscellaneous, change “Store uploads in this folder” to “images”, Untick “organize my uploads into month- and year- based folder”.

Sweet now we want to start locking down our blogs categories and archives so we don’t leak Page Rank into areas that are non critial. The above setup is perfect for SEO, however the search engines will still index areas that make your site appear to have duplicate content all over it.. Not good.

Wordpress Silos

You need to install Robots Meta to nofollow and noindex certain areas of your new site, this is critical for out Wordpress SEO silos.

So we will need to nofollow a bunch of categories to create the silo structure, don’t stress this is very easy to do and free using 2 Wordpress plugins.

You will need to prevent indexing of the following using the Robots Meta plugin, tick the check box in all the below fields in the Robots Meta Screen, click Settings then Robots Meta.

Prevent Indexing

This site’s search result pages
All admin pages
Author archives
Date-based archives
Tag archives

Archive settings
Disable the author archives
Disable the date-based archives
Redirect search results pages when referrer is external

Internal no follow settings
Nofollow category listings on pages
Nofollow category listings on single posts
Nofollow outbound links on the frontpage
Nofollow the links to your tag pages
Nofollow login and registration links
Nofollow comments links

NOTE every page you created for Contact-Privacy Policy-Website Agreement you need to set the permissions on the actual page, this box will be present of every page if you select edit or add new, for the site map page just select noindex, follow for the rest we want noindex, nofollow.

Sweet you have now created a massive flow between the Home Page/Category > Pages-Posts.

Now you just need to set the sitemap up so the Googlebot knows exactly what’s up.

You must install Google XML Sitemaps plugin then simply select the following in Sitemap Content.

Include homepage
Include posts
Include static pages
Include categories
Include the last modification time

Done, you now have a crazy good SEO optimised blog using free plugins..

Basic Wordpress SEO Blogging

This is mega basic stuff, however we will drop some now to put you on the right track.

When writing or queuing articles use h1, h2 and h3 tags to highlight headings containing keywords…

All your subheading should be in either h2 tag to highlight the articles points, then any smaller important points can go into the h3 tag, you could also add the strong tag to 1 of the main keywords your article is targeting, but h1, h2 and h3 are enough, even just h1 and h2. The general rule of thumb is 1 h1 containing your target phase then the longertailed keywords spread out with h2 tags, you can use as many h2 tags as you want when highlighting new points within your posts.

You want about 3-5% keyword density, use this keyword density to check your site and live keyword analysis to check your articles keyword density.

When writing your blog posts youshould have a rough idea of what keywords you want to optimise and rank for, I suggest when writing an article you install SEO Blogger and load it up when you start writing to make sure your hitting on the best keywords for whatever topic your blogging about, we will go into this in greater detail soon, so just a heads up to check it now.

Another suggestion is adding your main keyword into the sidebar or footer and linking it to your homepage, sure this is a ROS (run of site) link, but they DO increase rankings. You can also change the home link to be more descriptive, so not just a home link, try adding your main keyword then link it to your homepage, in this sites case it would be Bogan Marketing.

Deeplinking is also extremely critical, adding deep links across you site whenever you can to form keyword relationships is important, it also helps on page ranking, crawability and best of all DOUBLE LISTINGS. I talk about Ninja Affiliate later in the training, this is a nice trick, instead of replacing keywords with affiliate links, try assigning keywords as deeplinks then set it to deep link 1 word per article, automated Deeplinking anyone lol, you can do this across multiple link networks, this is extremely powerful.

You should also check out our blog post about Boosting CTR with Optimised Title and Description Meta Tags.

iframes and Wordpress

Lat up we is iframes, Google treats all iframe content as being unique to its origin. So you can iframe as much data and content onto your sites and Google will not count the iframe content or data as being part of your site, wicked good, however you’re responsible for framing the content so don’t go stupid.

You should create a directory for your iframe code then block it in robots.txt
/iframes

Of all my testing using invisible iframes, there is only one browser in the world the leaks my iframe data, it’s called Dillo 0.8.6 Dillo 0.8.6 / from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), so iframes are very safe.

See how it’s messed up, BUSTED.

This is how it should look.

meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex,noarchive,nofollow”

meta name=”robots” content=” none ,noindex,nofollow”

By using the above meta names you can create an external .html file for framing onto your sites without the content ever being indexed.

You can use EmbedIT to insert iframes into Wordpress blogs.

You can encrypt your iframes using a HTML encrypter here, just paste whatever iframe code you are using, this is good for hiding links and content, dont do this for Google, because they will slap you for it sooner or later.

Why iframe? Simply we want to make Google think the site contains no ONSITE affiliate links, you can also achieve this by doing mosaic cloaking which is better and more effective. But iframes are ok if you only have a few affiliate links, iframes are also very good optin-squeeze pages and split testing so start experimenting with them.

For more Wordpress optimisation check out how to configure robots.txt for silo SEO , its a robots.txt file that will lock down a blog for SEO, even though we done most of our hacks using the Robots Meta plugin you can cut and paste BMs actual robots.txt file which is a massive time saver.