How to optimize a wordpress blog

[EricVallee34]

I’m helping a client optimize a word press blog, and I’m not that familiar with Wordpress.  The site is www.athleticfoodie.com.

At first I was treating it like a normal website, where the categories would be optimized like pages on a website.  However, I now realize that categories don’t have any content on them, so I can’t really optimize anything other than the names.

Are the following things the best way to handle on-page optimization for a blog?

• Optimizing the homepage & domain: Find ways to incorporate the most important keywords into the elements on the main frame of the site: Navigation menu, Widgets, Category names, Alt Images.
• Optimizing the categories: For the posts within the categories (i.e., photos), work to make sure the category keywords are worked into the post titles (but not too much to seem spammy)
• Optimizing specific posts. Work keywords into the text and images.

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[MarieHaynes]

I have some sites that are static and others that are WP blogs and there isn't much difference between how I optimize them.  I use the all in one SEO plugin for my WP sites which allows me to set the title and meta keywords.  I don't pay much attention to tags.  In the video below, Matt Cutts explains that tags don't really help much in regards to SEO.

watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg

[EricVallee34]

Hi Dunamis,

Does the plug in allow you to make the Title Tag different than the category name?

Eric

[AdamThompson]

Eric,

If you are optimizing category pages, I recommend modifying your theme to display your category description as visible text on the page. This will allow you to have some optimized text on each category page. I believe there is a title tags plugin that will allow you to change the title tags of your category pages individually, also.

[MarieHaynes]

I don't utilize categories much so I may not be the best one to answer this.  The All in One SEO plugin allows you to change how your category titles are displayed, i.e. %category_title%.

You can change category title by changing the name of the category.  But I'm thinking you want to have the category displayed as "Green Widgets" on your sidebar, but have the title something like, "Buy Green Widgets here.  Free Shipping!".

I'd be interested in hearing more about this if others have ideas.

[sferrino]

The few things I would point out, which aren't so much WordPress issues, but are how this WordPress installation is configured, are:

1. No description tag, that is in the 'Settings -> General' page
2. Well over 100 links on the home page, mostly because of the 'Blog Archive', are people actually clicking on those items?
3. No good H1 tag, the one that was created by the theme "Athletic Foodie" has been commented out and the current (second) one is, "How about a 2,000-year-old Salad? Kale!!", a poor descriptor of the page.
4. Dangling links, some of the images are linked to themselves, that is set on the post or page they are created on.
5. The page names 'slugs' don't usually match their titles, ex, Fiber: health benefits for athletes...., would be: 'fiber-health-benefits-athletes', etc.
6. From a user standpoint, way too much text, the full posts could be reduced by using excerpts and linking to a separate page, increasing load time, and most likely page views. Would you scroll all the way to the bottom? What if it was half or a quarter this size?
7. The 2 main items "Recipes" & "Videos" go offsite? And they are follow links! What the!

Cheers.

[EricVallee34]

Hi Adam,

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "modifying your theme to display your category description as visible text on the page"?  I don't understand what this means.

Also, thanks for the heads up on the Title Tag Plug In

Eric

[EricVallee34]

Great info.  I will look into these more deeply.  Thank you!

[AdamThompson]

When adding or editing categories in WordPress, there is a field called "description" (not meta description) with the label "The description is not prominent by default; however, some themes may show it." Your developer can modify your theme so the description text is displayed on the category page.

[EricVallee34]

Thank you!

[kwoolf]

Hi Eric,

I would recommend the Yoast WordPress plugin available at http://yoast.com/wordpress/. This plugin covers pretty much all the SEO issues you'll encounter in WordPress, plus there is a handy tool that will analyze important text fields in your posts to see if your articles are optimized for the keywords you're looking to rank for. This plugin won't put heading tags in the template, but I think it's worth a look.

Another consideration for WordPress is your permalink URL structure. As of WordPress 3.1.2, there is a definite performance issue when starting the permalink structure with either the category, tag, author, or postname fields. You can read more under "Structure Tags" at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. I'm not sure how this affects SEO, so it'd be great to get some feedback on ranking results using different WordPress URL structures.

[EricVallee34]

Great info, Kevin.  I appreciate the quick feedback.

Eric

[mattotoole]

Kevin and Eric,

Performance issues aside, I prefer the simplest URL structure:

http://sitename/postname

Unless you really need advanced categorization, siloing, etc., bringing your content up one level and having shorter URLs is always better, IMO.