WordPress update from yesterday

Ok. I still haven't gotten the sitemap up yet. I'm waiting for some template changes from one of the other guys.

However, I did a little tweaking with the title tags. Here's what I put in:

<?php if (is_home()) { ?>
<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> | (Lot's o' keywords here)</title>
<? } else {?>
<title><?php wp_title(); ?> | <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<? } ?>

Hopefully this will help as well.

Wordpress Robots.txt

Since WordPress doesn't provide a Robots.txt file with the standard implementation. I needed to find one. I looked around and the version over at www.askapache.com seems to be working well for a lot of people.

I uploaded it yesterday...

Wordpress SEO again today

One more piece of the puzzle (i really should compile all of these into one post but it's been done so well here)...

Having "related links" at the end of an article is a good way to create interlinking to older content. It's SEO goodness, people. And, of course, there's a plug-in out there. I found one that's absolutely super-duper. It's at Contextual Related Links link.

This one's as easy as pie to get up and running. You just need to tweak a couple of things.

1) As mentioned in their site, change the related.php function related() file to what they have in this file. (i tried pasting the code but the formatting got all janked and I didn't have the patience to fix it. Use the link, please.)

2) Add the following php snippet to your single.php or other article file where you want the links to appear.

if(function_exists('related')) related($post->ID);

If you don't add this code, the links will only appear at the end of the comments section. You probably won't want them there.

Thanks again, www.weblogtools.com!!! This was the easiest implementation I've had yet.

WordPress SEO cont.. cont....

Ok. So I tried using the ddsitemapgen and it blew up the posting rating system that one of the other guys had set up.

On to Plan B...

This guy had another idea. It involved installing the phpexec and the wp_Catgegory_post plugins. I won't totally go into the rest of the steps. You can follow the "another idea" link. Why am I telling all this if someone else already had it worked out? Well, because it didn't work for me.

I ended up installing the exec_php plugin, which has great documentation BTW. This one worked and you don't need to put tags around everything.

Couple of IMPORTANT things to remember...
Don't forget that you have to turn off the WYSIWIG and balanced tagging for your profile. If you don't WordPress will, which is VERY irritating, keep changing your code and stripping out the php tags.

I just have a little more formatting to do and I'll be ready to put up the new sitemap. Bye for now!

Google Labs Gets a Little Busy

Google labs has put up some interesting new tools/ideas for enhanced searching functionality... and stuff. Check it out here : http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html

WordPress SEO cont....

Today, I updated the .htaccess file to redirect everything to the same style URLs. For example, there were instances of paths ending in a "/" and some where they were not. This should tighten up the links that Google is picking up to where there aren't any duplicates. Here's the basic code:

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myblog\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myblog.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myblog.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

Then, I used the DDSiteMapGen plugin to create the sitemap. Actually, the plugin was already installed. They just didn't have the link to the actual sitemap anywhere in the site. This should help the spiders pick up any URLs that they may have missed.

I'll keep you posted!

(UPDATE: forgot to mention... thanks to http://www.jimwestergren.com/wordpress-users-sharpen-your-urls-with-google/ for the code)

Now Optimizing a WordPress site

I'm starting a project to do some SEO for an area of a site completely generated with WordPress. Preliminary checks of the source code show some small, easy-to-fix issues such as duplicate keyword meta tags. I think this is most likely due to the autoMeta plugin running alongside the keyword generator widget you see when post an article. I still haven't decided which I'm going to keep. If anyone has any thoughts, let me know.

Once I make that decision, I need to decide what keywords to even optimize for. I've retrieved a list of phrases from our web analytics application and then run a Google report against them. We're doing pretty well there. Now, I'm waiting on a Search Volume Report on that list from one of our SEM guys. He gets it from Yahoo! but we can use that as a guide.

If the search volume is too close to the traffic generated by these terms, then we may have too look elsewhere to generate traffic and this might not be an SEO project after all.

I'll try to keep up with everyone on how page-views are increasing (hopefully) as the project progresses.

Any tips, as always, are welcome.

maybe a little harsh

ok, maybe i was a little harsh. i think i figured it out.

Mobile non-sense

From what I can see, you have to have a separate blog for your mobile uploads. WTF? Is it too much to ask to be able to send stuff right to the blog I just spent the last hour setting up?

Just set this up. Let's see how she goes...

Ok so I just set all this up to see how it goes. I'd like to think that I'm going to do something with this (and this site in general). All I gotta do now is figure out how to set up the mobile access and then let the posts fly.