A UK SEO

I”ve only been reading Joost de Valk’s blog recently and have found it immensely useful. The main topic is SEO but Joost is also a really good WordPress plugin developer. It doesn’t end there, he’s developed Firefox plugins, grease monkey scripts and SEO general tools.

Generally if your into WordPress and SEO you can’t go wrong with any of his suggestions or plugins. This site is running 3 plugins from Joost and made some changes to the architecture of the site thanks to some of his suggestions.

I have to admit from reading the articles and looking at the plugins he’s created you can’t but be jealous of his talent and expertise in SEO hence the link on the blog roll. So get over to yoast.com and subscribe.

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I’ll be doing a few posts about WordPress Plugins for SEO but I’ll start with the three that are essential. I’ll list them in order of importance.

All in One SEO Pack
The all in one SEO pack uses WordPress’s custom fields to create a friendlier page title and meta description and allows you to add into certain pages to reduce content duplication.

The default set up on the All in One SEO Pack seems to do the trick, for the titles and descriptions you leave the boxes blank on your post page and it will create the meta title from the blog title and take around the first 160 characters for the meta description. All you need to do is remember to try to have a good opening sentence for your blog. For example this post I’ve mentioned the title of the article again so it’s included in the description.

Google doesn’t look at the keywords tag so I keep this blank, but you can tick a box to make the plug in use the categories as the keywords.

The options to reduce internal content duplication allows you to add the noindex, follow tag to the archives, categories and tag pages. I leave the default settings so Google’s isn’t indexing the archives and categories.

Link to download

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
Not essential but helps to get some of those older blogs in WordPress cached. Each time you edit a post the site map is rebuilt, this means once you’ve set it up you don’t really need to do anything. The newer version of this plug in does all the work installation work for you creating the XML sitemap file.

Link to download

Alinks
Alink essentially is a text replace script. It will replace a word in your blog with other text. E.g. every time you mention GWT it can replace it with Google Webmaster Tools. But, it will also replace text with links, so each time you mention contact us it will replace it with contact us. This is great for creating relevant internal links to deeper pages in your site. Many blogs also use the plug in to add in affiliates links.

Really this is a time saver plug in and means content writers and clients don’t have worry about linking to the correct pages with the correct anchor text.

Link to download

So get those three plugins into your WordPress blog and you can’t go wrong!

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One of the minor problems with WordPress from an SEO point of view is the set up of the H1 and H2 tags on individual blog pages.

On individual pages the title of your blog post will be in a H2 tag. Really you want your title of your post to be in a H1 tag. To add to that your theme may also contain a blog title in a H1 in the header, which means duplicated H1 tags on individual pages.

Something like this isn’t going to cause a detrimental effect to your sites progress in the rankings, but having your title in a H1 tag may help you rank slightly higher in the search engine result pages.

So whats the change?

Step 1 – Make the blog title only a H1 on the home page.

Some people have recommended pasting the header.php into the home page of the site, index.php (sometimes home.php depending on your theme). You then edit the header.php for the inner pages making the blog title H1 a span (plain text). Then edit the code added to index.php for the home page, keeping the blog title as a H1. This method means that you have two headers, meaning double editing for the future.

A cleaner method is to keep the architecture and have a conditional check.

If home page
H1 blog title
else
Span blog title

Replace the code from the header.php with something like this.

<?php if (is_home()) {echo '<h1>A UK SEO</h1>';} else {echo'A UK SEO';}?>

Just style the span up the same as the H1

Step 2 – Change the post title on the individual pages from a H2 to a H1

The code in the single.php is change from

<h2 id="title"></h2>

<h1 id="title"></h1>

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