Malcolm Coles » Wordpress

29 easy ways to fine tune your blog

Malcolm Coles — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:44:20 +0000

Organising your content

Review your categories. Do they still make sense? Make sure you redirect if you change them.
Review your tags. Are all relevant posts tagged correctly? Once you've tagged all the posts, review your tags. Do you still need them all (EG, I've ended up with review and reviews as tags). Delete those you don't need, and redirect the tag pages.
Follow-up posts. Have you got follow-up posts? Edit the older ones to link to the newer ones.
Are posts related to each other? If so, install a related posts plug in or manually edit old posts to include the link to later, relevant ones.
Check your blogroll. Are they still all sites you really want to link to?
Uncategorised. Have you got any posts in the Uncategorised category? Categorise them!

Helping search engines

Google Webmaster. If you haven't got one, get a google webmaster account. It'll tell you where you're going wrong.
Broken links. Use that account to identify links to pages on your blog that are no longer there. Use a redirection plugin to redirect them somewhere sensible.
Sitemap. Set up a sitemap if your site is big enough.
Nofollow. Look in your theme, and nofollow links to pages you don't want search engines to see, like your RSS feed.
Robots.txt. Check your robots.txt file, and use it to tell search engines to ignore pages like your account login page, and other pages there is no point them indexing.
Meta descriptions. Make sure you have unique meta tags on your pages. Use the tip on this blog or else a plugin like AIOSEO.
Pagination. Turn off comment pagination if you don't have that many comments. Even with no comments, you'll get multiple URLs for each post. And try using the rel=canonical tag, too.
Anchor text. When you're looking through old posts, check what anchor text you're using to link to other blog posts. Make sure you use relevant text, rather than words like 'read more'.

Making your blog easier to use

Font size. How big is the font size? Edit the theme to make it bigger if it's too small.
Browser check. How does your blog look in other browsers? Use a service like browsershots to check.
Comment threading. Assuming you've got 2.7, turn on comment threading.
Bounce rates. Sign up for google analytics. Check the time spent by users on each content page. If some pages have high bounce rates or little time spent on them, try to work out what people want and edit accordingly.
Review and edit. Check out each page of content - split up long paragraphs, make sure subheadings are used liberally, and that introductions make sense. You'll probably find you've got better at writing blogs, so early posts might need more tweaking to make the content web-reading friendly.
You. Add an 'About You' page. If people are interested in your content, they'll probably be interested in you. Tell them.
Excerpt. Change to using just the excerpt on category archive pages. This is all people really need to see on an index page.
Custom 404 page. Add a custom 404 page:
Add sharethis. Make it easy for people to tell others about your content.
Hey, it's me! Style your own comments differently.
Subscribe to comments. Allow people to subscribe to comments by email.

The backend

Plugins. Turn off any plugins you're not using. They'll slow down your blog.
Optimise your database. All those deleted and draft posts and comments have probably left it with all sorts of junk in it. Try this page or this one.
Update theme. Check the homepage of whoever created your theme. Have they updated it?
Sort out your security. Make sure people can't access your plugin or other folders.

Got any more suggestions? Let me know and I'll add them!

Can you use rel = canonical to fix duplicate comment problems caused by comment pagination in wordpress?

Malcolm Coles — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:49:15 +0000

If you turn on comment pagination in wordpress, you get duplicate content problems.

This means a posts' comments are split across several pages and URLs - the post at the top is the same on each URL but the comments are different. There is also a URL version - the /comment-page-1/ one - that is identical to the permalink. This is a problem even if you don't have enough comments for pagination to kick in.

This means you'll end up with people linking to different 'versions' of the post, diluting the SEO benefit of those links.

Rel = canonical

The major search engines have agreed a new tag - rel=canonical - so that you can tell them, if you have the same content across several URLs on your site, which is the 'real' one. They'll treat the different versions as if they were the real one - including the benefit of all the links to the other URLs.

It's designed to help sites whose URLs contain session IDs or, say, sort orders for tabular information. But can you use it to fix the problem of the same post with several URLs, each with different comments on?

Code to use rel=canonical

This is the code you'd add to your head section to make rel=canonical appear:

echo '';
} ?>

I'm sure with my customary inelegant PHP, this can be optimised.

Anyway, what do you think? Is this the solution to duplicate content caused by comment pagination?

Obviously, this case is slightly different to the use intended for rel=canonical, as the content isn't identical (as the comments are different) - apart from the /comment-page-1/ version, where it is identical.

SEO friendly URLs: myth and fact

Malcolm Coles — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:52:03 +0000

There's a lot said about SEO friendly URLs - the idea that having keywords in your URL will help you rank well for those keywords. I list several sites saying this below ...

The bad news: SEO-friendly URLs are largely a myth. They don't make that much difference. The good news: it's still worth putting keywords in your URLs.

Confused? I'll explain ...

Google doesn't take much account of keywords in URLs

Intuitively, you might think google would want to take account of what a URL has in it. This sounds a fairly good guide to what the page is about.

However, the drawback is that lots of URLs aren't SEO friendly - EG those of CMSes that don't generate them. Or consider youtube which has no keywords in its URLs.

And Google wouldn't want to artificially boost pages just because they happened to have SEO-friendly URLs. This is, at heart, just a technical issue that shouldn't really influence the search results.

So having keywords in your URLs makes little difference to how well you rank in google's results. SEO friendly URLs are largely a myth.

Don't believe me?

In its guide to SEO, google does say to improve the structure of your URLs. I explain why below. But it doesn't at any point say that keywords in your URLs will help you rank better for those keywords.

And it's not just google that says it. Check out the SEOmoz guide to google ranking factors on the subject of keywords in URLs. Sample quote: "The influence of this one is microscopic."

However ... you should still use seo friendly URLs

There is still a reason to use SEO friendly URLs. And it's because of second order SEO factors. For instance (these are all reasons google gives):

Google bolds keywords searched for in URLs in its results. So using keyword rich URLs will encourage users to click your page - because the words they searched for will stand out in bold in the URL in the results. This is also a reason to have short URLs - google will truncate them if they are too long.
Google takes a lot of account of the terms used to link to a page (so if you link to this page, don't say 'read this page' - use 'SEO friendly URLs' as your link text ...). If keywords are in your URL, and people use the full URL as the link text, you'll get benefit from the keywords in the URL. Of course, most people don't link like this, and some forum software truncates URLs.
SEO friendly URLs will help users understand what the page is about. So if it looks relevant, they are more likely to click it.

So, there is a reason to use SEO-friendly URLs - it's just maybe not the one you thought. SEO friendly URLs should be aimed at humans to encourage click throughs. They should not be aimed at search engines to influence rankings.

Update 18 March: Matt Cutts of Google has posted a video saying that having keywords in your URL "does help a little bit". He doesn't actually say how (ie whether they directly affect rankings or whether it's these second-order affects). And he says not to obsess about them. So the conclusion remains the same: they don't make much difference to rankings ... but still use them!

SEO friendly URLs in wordpress

There's a lot written about this. I, for instance, use the post name as my URL. So the URL of this post is www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/seo-friendly-urls-myth-and-fact/. This is deemed an SEO-friendly structure.

However, before you rush to adopt this, be aware of the drawbacks of SEO friendly URLs for wordpress. Read this.

What other people say about SEO friendly URLs

When you read the following pages, bear in mind that lots of what is said isn't true. But some is. Hopefully if you've read the above, you'll know which is which ... (NB all links made nofollow for now until I can work out why this post won't appear in google results for a search on 'seo friendly urls' ...):

Avoid duplicate content with paged comments in wordpress

Malcolm Coles — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:47:46 +0000

I've written before about the problem of duplicate content problems with wordpress comment pagination.

After reading this post about using the excerpt on pages 2 or higher of the comment loop, I discovered the variable that will give a similar solution to that for duplicate content in pages 2 or higher of the wordpress loop.

So use the PHP below, and you won't have duplicate content problems if you have paginated comments. Update: And see Christian's comment at the end to see it not only in action, but how he's edited All in One SEO Pack to get it to work with that as well. Blimey!

Use cpage instead of paged

To avoid duplicate content problems, you need a different title and a different meta description. The easiest way to do this is to add 'Page X' into the title and meta description of the blog post.

Here's the code to do this - add it into your theme's header just before the closing tag:

else { echo (' - comment page '); echo ($cpage);}
?>

Do something similar with the code that generates your meta description.

What the code does

If you're on page two or higher of paginated comments, it adds ' - comment page X' (where X is the comment page) to the end of the title (which is the heading that appears in google).

You can use something similar in your meta description code.

Where can I see it working?

It was working here when I tried it. As the most comments I have on a post is 19 so far,Â however, I don't actually paginate my comments yet (it's set to the default of 50 - I changed it to 2 to test it, but i couldn't really leave it like that!!)

Perhaps someone with a lot of comments could use it and provide a link so we can see it working ... Update: See Christian's comment for someone who has done just that.

IntenseDebate, SEO and post counts

Malcolm Coles — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:01:50 +0000

IntenseDebate used to have an SEO problem - with javascript off, comments didn't show so weren't visible to google. At the time, I gave IntenseDebate 0/10 for SEO (and remarked it was a pretty poor non-javascript implementation). They've partly solved it - but they still have a problem counting comments.

Partial solution

The wordpress plugin version of IntenseDebate has solved the problem. Partly.

It outputs the comments in a noscript tag - so that google (and anyone else surfing with javascript off) can see them.

Although Alex pointed out that this is only a solution if you're using the plugin (and he has a wider review of these comment systems) rather than the widget.

Still a problem: comment count is wrong.

However, the comment count is not the same when javascript is off as when it is on.

Take this post, for instance. With javascript on, there are 7 posts. With javascript off, there are only 5 - The ones from Louise and Danny disappear.

New SEO score for IntenseDebate: 7.1429

As it is outputting 5/7 of the comments, I guess its score should be 7.1429 (5/7 of 10, in case you wondered).

Breadcrumb navigation trails and WordPress

Malcolm Coles — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:16:17 +0000

This post shows you to use one line of PHP to show a breadcrumb trail in wordpress - dispensing with complicated code and breadcrumb plugins. You will have to make a few minor changes to one core wordpress file.

What is a breadcrumb trail

Breadcrumb trails are those URLs you see at the top of many large sites' pages that look like this:

Home > Category > Sub category > Title of page you're on

You can see them in action on, for instance, the wordpress site - the top left bit that says:

WordPress â€º Support Â» How-To and Troubleshooting

Why you might want a breadcrumb trail

If you have a large site with many categories and sub categories, you might find it useful to have a breadcrumb trailÂ - especially if you are using wordpress as a CMS for instance. Breadcrumbs are useful as:

They give users an easy way to get to higher level pages.
They help users understand where on the site they are.
And they also help them understand what a site is about.

You don't really need one on a small blog - I just list the relevant categories under the main title of each page, and this is sufficient as I don't have lots of sub categories.

How to add a breadcrumb trail in WordPress: plug ins etc

There are several ways to do this. However, many only add the breadcrumb trail on category pages - you really need them on individual posts as well. Current methods that do this include:

This plug in does most of what you need. But plug ins aren't fun are they ...
This method works, but I think if you have categories only - if you have sub-categories, it doesn't include both parent and child categories.

There are various other bits of code you can find in a google search.

My new method for breadcrumb trails in WordPress

Anyway, if your site is organised so that each post is in only one category, then there is an existing wordpress function, the_category, that will generate a breadcrumb trail automatically.

This code:

Home >

would generate this:

Home > Category,Sub-category

There's one small flaw however - there's no space before or after the comma. If wordpress could solve this, you could generate breadcrumb trails incredibly easily.

There is a solution ... If you go here and follow the 'this diff' link towards the bottom to here. Then all (cough, ahem) you need to do is edit your category-template.php file in the wp-includes directory.

You need to replace the bits in pink with the bits in green - the easiest way is to open the file in a simple text editor, and then count the lines down to the relevant line numbers. Lines 204 are lower than you think due to some comments that you should ignore. NB The line numbers given are for wordpress 2.6. If you've upgraded to 2.7, the changes are the same, but the line numbers are different. It's easiest to search for the code you need - but be aware that some of the spacing has also changed from wordpress 2.6 to 2.7, so "function the_category($separator" becomes "function the_category( $separator". Anyway, you'll find it all eventually!

Anyway, basically, edit the file as shown. And then you can use this in your article/post templates:

Home >

which will generate this breadcrumb trail:

Home > Category > Sub-category

Perfect. As long as you don't mind editing the wordpress files directly ... (When doing this, make sure you keep a back up of the original in case you do it wrong).

Note, too, that this all only works if you assign posts to just one category. If you are adding them to several, your breadcrumb trail will look a right mess with this method - stick to the plugin!

This might all sound daunting, but (1) I made the changes first time with no problems and (2) it's a bit more understandable than all the other methods out there.

Example breadcrumb trail on a wordpress site

You can see the solution in action on my draft setting up your business site.

Adding page numbers: How to avoid duplicate titles and meta descriptions in pages 2 and higher of WordPress category and tag pages

Malcolm Coles — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:12:19 +0000

I have written before of the problems of WordPress comment pagination and duplicate content and how to get unique meta descriptions in wordpress.

I have now solved the problem of all pages in the WordPress loop having identical titles and meta descriptions.

The problem

Whether it's your main index page or a category or tag page, WordPress works in the same way. It shows the latest, say, 10 posts. And it then gives you a next link to click. If you click next, the URL will be very similar, but will have /page/2/ on the end. And it will show the next posts.

However, this second page (and any third, fourth, fifth etc pages) will all have the same titles and meta descriptions. This will confuse google.

The solution

The answer is to include the page number in the title and meta description of subsequent pages of the loop.

Here's some code to let you do this:

What this does is to check whether the page is the first one or is page 2 or higher.

If it's page 1, nothing happens. On page 2 or higher, it adds: Page 2 (or 3, or whatever).

So just add this code after the code that is generating your meta description or title.

An example

The code to generate my title looks like this:

<?php wp_title('»', true, 'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_home() ) {echo (' - Reviews, SEO, wordpress, how to do things ...');} ?> <?php if ( $paged < 2 ) { } else { echo (' page '); echo ($paged); } ?>

So if you go here, it should say 'page 2' at the end of the title (check your browser bar to see it).

WordPress comment pagination & duplicate content

Malcolm Coles — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:37:13 +0000

WordPress version 2.7 has comment paginationÂ - so that pages with 00s of comments only display, say, 50 at a time - built into it (the functionality is built in - you still need to make a load of amends to your theme to get it to work. More on that another time ...).

But it has a problem. (Update: See later post with solution to duplicate content on paginated comments).

Duplicate content

Comment pagination is likely to lead to issues with duplicate content in google - the paginated comments will have the same titles and meta descriptions. Google will see them as identical and therefore discount all but one of them. For instance, compare this page and this page - same titles, same meta description, same post at the top - but different URLs and different comments.

So if your comments are useful from an SEO point of view, I wouldn't use comment pagination (you can turn it off, or set the number of posts per page to be very high).

Sorting out pagination, meta descriptions and titles

This is already a problem with the standard wordpress loop - pages 2 or higher of a category, tag or whatever are already often seen as duplicate content.

My unique meta descriptions for wordpress method doesn't solve this problem. But then what does - all in one seo pack doesn't either.

There's a possible solution to this - if wordpress gave an option to automatically append '- page X' on the titles and meta descriptions of any paginated page. It's just wordpress doesn't let you do that.

So until something like that is introduced, I'll see if I can find anyone with a work around and report back. Or if you've got one, post it here.

And I'll try not to rise to the bait of anyone pointing out that I don't have enough comments on any posts for it to be a problem ...

Unique meta description and meta keyword tags in your WordPress themes

Malcolm Coles — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:17:51 +0000

Meta description tag: update

Here is the meta description PHP with both category and tag pages included (and updated again to make them more than one word and to include monthly archives):

if(is_home()) {echo ('Malcolm Coles: His blog for his reviews, so you can find him, and other stuff that takes his fancy.');}

else {if(is_category()) {echo category_description();}

else {if(is_tag()) {echo '-tag archive page for this blog' . single_tag_title();}

else {if(is_month()) {echo ' archive page for this blog' . the_time('F, Y');}

else {echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "Metadescription", true);}}}}?>">

I've given up adding keywords these days! Remember, as below, you need to add a custom field called Metadescription to get this to work.

Original post about meta descriptions and keyword tags

I know little about PHP. But after fiddling round with other people's example code, I've finally managed to use custom fields to get a unique meta description and unique meta keywords on each post, and on the home page.

To get this to work, you need to add new custom fields called Metadescription and Metakeywords to each post. The ones for the home page you hard code. And I'm still working on the category pages ...

Copy and paste the code below into the head section of the header bit of your wordpress template.Â It basically checks if itâ€™s the home page. If it is, it uses the hard-coded meta description and meta keywords. If itâ€™s not, it goes and looks up the custom fields and uses the values from there. So there we have it: a unique meta description and unique meta keywords in wordpress.