A very comprehensive Wordpress SEO article with plenty of new and advanced tips I have not read before. I thought I know I a lot about SEO, but after reading your great SEO article. I was a little ashame as I found that I still don't know many SEO stuff.
Alan Liew
Alan Rezon
· 2 years ago
Great SEO article. I have blog, but I have few visits. I shall use your recommendations. If it will help me, I shall be very grateful to you. Thanks for article.
James D Kirk
· 2 years ago
There's always something more to learn. Every time I feel we are on "top of it" with our sites, I read something from Andy, and realize I have to get back to work! Thanks for the continued good stuff, Andy.
Urbanist
· 2 years ago
Excellent, exhaustive and helpful, but I have one question: do you think that submitting a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools does basically the same thing as using robots.txt to tell bots not to index semi-duplicate category/tag/archive pages?
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
A sitemap might help Google index pages if you have a poor linking structure, but the spiders only use it as a reference. They still crawl your site and index what they find. Pages that are not on the sitemap will still be indexed.
[edit] I now have lots of evidence to suggest that Google doesn't always pick up as many pages if you have a sitemap with significantly less pages in it than there actually are on the site
Owen
· 2 years ago
Excellent review, Andy. There are some great pointers in there .. and a lot of work for Tim (and all of us)
mattsofi
· 2 years ago
Another great post Andy.
Thanks for the custom query string plugin pointer. Have been looking for it and need it badly. :)
To be honest, I believe that I am on the right track but still a long way to go. This post has greatly shorten my r&d time.
I have not yet played with my robot.txt but does it really necessary? I rely heavily on Google Sitemap and my traffic from google is now almost 45%.
Thanks.
Atletismo
· 2 years ago
Really helful your tips, and specially the "Spider Circle mapped out"
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
In the ebooks I mentioned they map these things out much better, explain how to create dynamic linking on conventional sites (although that is easy using nofollow), and have a lot more diagrams of some quite amazing linking structures for multiple sites.
Whilst Google might frown on "link farms", yesterday's linkfarm is today's blog network, and so can be looked on as white hat as long as you have good content.
Julie Simms
· 2 years ago
Everytime I read this blog I receive helpful information. It's great to have a resource like this to turn to and learn from.
Thanks
Julie
Jay Thompson
· 2 years ago
Well that was a wealth of knowledge! And a lesson in just how little I know about SEO. Thanks for sharing!
KAVITA
· 2 years ago
Nice review,If possible visit my site to give your reviews and get Money Making Ideas From Websites Which pays
[edited - self promotional links of no value normally get people blacklisted}
Bob
· 2 years ago
great article, how much would someone have to dish out for one?
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
Total costs through PPP Direct are $130 + 10% = $143
That being said I am selective and try not to cover the same topics twice, thus this will certainly be the last review for a blog in this niche, though there will be a lot of followons to this post that will get it additional linkage as I progress with the theme. It has already been syndicated as well - there is a good chance that was the first openly disclosed paid post that was subsequently syndicated on a major SEO site http://www.searchnewz.com owned by Jayde, the WebProNews guys.
I have always believed there is a quality threshold for anything regarding paid post, or affiliate marketing, where the value to a reader of the content becomes so high, it doesn't matter if there is/was compensation in some form or not.
Jay Thompson
· 2 years ago
I have always believed there is a quality threshold for anything regarding paid post, or affiliate marketing, where the value to a reader of the content becomes so high, it doesn't matter if there is/was compensation in some form or not.
I can assure you that *I* got more from this post than you got in your bank account. I'm sure Tim found it money incredibly well spent.
Have you (or would you consider) reviewing a real estate blog?
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
Hi Jay
I would think about it. One big problem is that you have a quite mature blog, and as seems typical in the Real Estate business, quite an extensive blogroll.
I am not sure how much of the sidebar cluter is helping you. Lots of blog directories might require a backlink, but don't require it sitewide. If it affects your rating, it might be possible to stick a nofollow on the links on most pages.
Your blogroll gives me heart palpitations but much of it might be reciprocated.
You are most likely using widgets. it is very hard to optimize linking structures with widgets
Sourav
· 2 years ago
Great post.....
I have never seen such a comprehensive article on optimizing wordpress....
corporate comedy magicians
· 2 years ago
Thank you for the in-depth post. I have been coming here for little over a month and I always get something new; even in stuff I've read before. I may not try to make money at blogging, but I can still use your advise.
Andy - wow, thanks so much for stopping by! I removed a lot of the directories, they weren't really driving any traffic anyway, and I moved the massive blogroll to a separate page (freeing up sidebar space that I'm fully intending NOT to clutter up with more junk!)
I don't know what it is about real estate blogs and massive blogrolls, but we do tend to get rather lengthy.
Chris Taylor
· 2 years ago
Hi Andy,
I must say I follow Michael and Leslie teachings a lot too but unlike them my mathematics is no where up to par. lol
I see your point about about many outgoings links, I guess I forget about this point as I am tending to try and minimalize such links... although all comments will still follow of course.
So really the tag pages "main purpose", based on the above is to feed more or a larger % PR back to the home page rather than to outgoing links... hadn't thought of that one. ;-)
The second purpose is increasing backlink anchor text throughout the whole site by having more pages.
Same with using the wp language plugin although I hadn't thought of changing the footer to appear in english and point back to the main index page... might have give that some testing and test ranking before and after on an individual keyword.
The only question I have is... on the tag and normal pages how do you stop the tag cloud stop feeding back to those same pages. probably a silly question, I'm sure you could write the script to place "nofollow" tags in these sections.
Cheers, Chris
michael zahnarzt wiesbaden
· 2 years ago
Hi Andy! Took me ages to read the whole article. Although i have to admit that i didn´t get everything concerning the linking structures, i liked the idea of using categories as landing sites. i make sure to think about that next time i create a category. Sorry for my poor english Michael
michael
· 2 years ago
Wow. Thats one of the most indepth posts I've seen on Wordpress and Blogging for SEO purposes. One of my mates has been building these networks of blogs with good results. Am going to have to start trying to build my own micro-network. Will let you know how I get on.
Il Giornale di Copenhagen
· 2 years ago
Very nice inspiration for my italian version of Blog advice.
Thanks
ms danielle
· 2 years ago
hi andy, great post. i'm eagerly awaiting news about the sandcastle theme, as i'm not convinced i'll be able to achieve such results trying to optimize my theme myself! again, great article and thanks for sharing such insight. i agree with sourav, i don't think i've ever seen a more in-depth article about how to optimize a wordpress blog.
Shawn
· 2 years ago
Thank you Andy for such a detail rich post about SEO. I just totally changed my theme and am trying to get better at SEO before the PR update. Since I've only known about SEO for 2 months, any and everything is appreciated. I followed most of everything discussed until you go into the advanced SEO and presentation. Again, thank you!
Shawn
seo wordpress
· 2 years ago
We just release a new kind of plugin .
Still in french , V 0.1 , just release this day
Give your page the 301 +url , 302 + url , 404 error code from the "edit post page"
Traduction needed ! ( mail can be found on our site if you can help )
How it works : Download, copy to plugin directory, Activate.
When editing you can choose Leave, 301, 302, 404 ( and url for 301, 302 )
Licence , "can be stolen" ;) and we still dont care of man who still want to give a licence for "nothing" like this !
Comment for make it better welcome
Sorry for my english ++
QC Davenport Search Optimizer
· 2 years ago
Now that is what I call a post. I wish more people would actually post quality content like that.
Terry Reeves
· 2 years ago
Wow, that was quite a read and well worth the time. I have bookmarked this post as I definitely need to reread and view the links out.
Andy, I must say, you are the real deal. Excellent communicator and you definitely know your stuff. I am only beginning to learn the ins and outs of Wordpress but I can clearly see the platform is worth the trouble.
Thanks.
Mikko
· 2 years ago
I was searching around the net for Wordpress linking strategies and oh boy, did I ever find it. This is probably the most informative blog post I've ever read, so a big, huge -thanks- to you Andy! Good luck with creating the sandcastles/sandbox -theme, I'm extremely interested on seeing how it turns out.
ps. This is the first time ever a blog post has been so impressive, that it has made me leave one of these "thank you" notes. I hope this gives you a warm & fuzzy feeling inside ;)
seo Mexico
· 2 years ago
Amazing info. Great detail in everything you write here. Now I see why you are an authority. Congratulations Andy !
SEO Marketing Blog
· 2 years ago
That's an excellent post for a newbie like me. I've used your hacked social bookmark. Thanks a lot for your efforts.
uGuX
· 2 years ago
How much do you recommend using custom created meta-tags (description)?
Lazar
· 1 year ago
Hi Andy,
Thanks for this (yet another) very detailed post. And for the graphs!!!
There are only few SEO blogs I really enjoy reading and yours is one of those. You do have a talent of engaging the reader, and keeping him curious to the very end of the post. Good content and links to resources is, of course, a part of it, but good writing style is also an important factor.
Since many of your posts are very long, I tried to analyze what exactly makes me read each to the very end (and click on many links in it!). I think that it is a dynamic nature of your paragraphs - they do not just separate thoughts, but switch focus from displaying facts, linking to resources, to your analysis, suggestions, practical codes, etc.
I don't think that you do this on purpose, it is probably 'just' a style you developed over time. And it works so well! This kind of thing is very difficult to do today when most pages receive only few seconds of users time.
Great job!
SEO
· 1 year ago
Great tips and theory for Wordpress seo Andy.. Waiting for anothers.. Thanks.
Virtual Real Estate
· 1 year ago
Hi Andy, that was a great article about how to optimize a Wordpress blog for competitive niches! It definitely was a long one, but sure as 'peep' wasn't boring ;)
Always nice to learn new things about seo. Great stuff!
Thanks for sharing that with us :)
I also would've loved to ask you a question, but to be honest, I can't think of one at the moment... :P
One the other hand, I do would like to share something with you...
You see, I recently wrote a review on my blog about WP SEO Sniper, which is a seo tool for your WordPress blogs that will help you to optimize it for better search engine results, the easy way...
Thanks,
Robert Mollers
Civita
· 1 year ago
Thanks for that great post. I am glad I found your blog. I just subscribed and I am hoping to be able to put a lot of your advice into action soon.
Thanks again, Civita
SEO Expert
· 1 year ago
Crazy detailed post and killer screen shots! Kudos. I am printing this out to help explain SEO to some people I work with. Very elegant, especially the colored panels and the web, internal link structure diagrams.
Paul
· 1 year ago
Fantastic tips and theory for this kind of Wordpress stuff. I'm Waiting for more.. Thanks.
estetik
· 1 year ago
Hi Andy, that was a great article about how to optimize a Wordpress blog for competitive niches! It definitely was a long one, but sure as 'peep' wasn't boring ;)
Always nice to learn new things about seo. Great stuff!
Thanks for sharing that with us :)
I also would've loved to ask you a question, but to be honest, I can't think of one at the moment... :P
One the other hand, I do would like to share something with you...
You see, I recently wrote a review on my blog about WP SEO Sniper, which is a seo tool for your WordPress blogs that will help you to optimize it for better search engine results, the easy way...
Thanks,
Drabdesign
· 1 year ago
Fantastic! I have always just left my blogs to run free with links, now I think I need to do a little bit of work on them.
Oh well there goes my Sunday!
Mikko2
· 1 year ago
Still a great post. I have a couple of questions if your not bored with the subject yet...
1. The sandcastle pic shows one of the links from category to single page as two way. Is this a mistake?
2. I assume date/author based archives are blocked (robots.txt?) and everything else is index, follow, including tag pages?
3. What if some posts absolutely need to rank, even if it would cost other content to suffer a bit (I assume this is quite usual for most bloggers). How would this be achieved? Are the posts that need to rank left in as sidewide links?
4. Have you since tried this structure in practice? I'm curious to hear how this would work, as it has many unusual decisions (like only third level pages (tag pages) using followable links to link back to index).
SEO Pune
· 1 year ago
You've made a good point ..Having a key-word related url does not give importance to a particular site. Google and other search engines seem to consider the content as the deciding factor in search engine ranking.
Wow, I love the depth and the quality of the writing. I've just posted it as a Tweet on my Twitter page.
Anybody using Wordpress has got to see this. And while this is Wordpress specific, I think a lot of it applies to any blog, and even web sites in general.
I wish I'd found this a year ago.
AndyBeard
· 5 months ago
I replied to your tweet first - this needs a bit of an update, and will probably be turned into a more comprehensive report.
All Comments
Alan Liew
Pages that are not on the sitemap will still be indexed.
[edit] I now have lots of evidence to suggest that Google doesn't always pick up as many pages if you have a sitemap with significantly less pages in it than there actually are on the site
Thanks for the custom query string plugin pointer. Have been looking for it and need it badly. :)
To be honest, I believe that I am on the right track but still a long way to go. This post has greatly shorten my r&d time.
I have not yet played with my robot.txt but does it really necessary? I rely heavily on Google Sitemap and my traffic from google is now almost 45%.
Thanks.
Whilst Google might frown on "link farms", yesterday's linkfarm is today's blog network, and so can be looked on as white hat as long as you have good content.
Thanks
Julie
[edited - self promotional links of no value normally get people blacklisted}
That being said I am selective and try not to cover the same topics twice, thus this will certainly be the last review for a blog in this niche, though there will be a lot of followons to this post that will get it additional linkage as I progress with the theme.
It has already been syndicated as well - there is a good chance that was the first openly disclosed paid post that was subsequently syndicated on a major SEO site http://www.searchnewz.com owned by Jayde, the WebProNews guys.
I have always believed there is a quality threshold for anything regarding paid post, or affiliate marketing, where the value to a reader of the content becomes so high, it doesn't matter if there is/was compensation in some form or not.
I can assure you that *I* got more from this post than you got in your bank account. I'm sure Tim found it money incredibly well spent.
Have you (or would you consider) reviewing a real estate blog?
I would think about it. One big problem is that you have a quite mature blog, and as seems typical in the Real Estate business, quite an extensive blogroll.
I am not sure how much of the sidebar cluter is helping you. Lots of blog directories might require a backlink, but don't require it sitewide.
If it affects your rating, it might be possible to stick a nofollow on the links on most pages.
Your blogroll gives me heart palpitations but much of it might be reciprocated.
You are most likely using widgets. it is very hard to optimize linking structures with widgets
I have never seen such a comprehensive article on optimizing wordpress....
You can save the world.
I don't know what it is about real estate blogs and massive blogrolls, but we do tend to get rather lengthy.
I must say I follow Michael and Leslie teachings a lot too but unlike them my mathematics is no where up to par. lol
I see your point about about many outgoings links, I guess I forget about this point as I am tending to try and minimalize such links... although all comments will still follow of course.
So really the tag pages "main purpose", based on the above is to feed more or a larger % PR back to the home page rather than to outgoing links... hadn't thought of that one. ;-)
The second purpose is increasing backlink anchor text throughout the whole site by having more pages.
Same with using the wp language plugin although I hadn't thought of changing the footer to appear in english and point back to the main index page... might have give that some testing and test ranking before and after on an individual keyword.
The only question I have is... on the tag and normal pages how do you stop the tag cloud stop feeding back to those same pages. probably a silly question, I'm sure you could write the script to place "nofollow" tags in these sections.
Cheers, Chris
Took me ages to read the whole article. Although i have to admit that i didn´t get everything concerning the linking structures, i liked the idea of using categories as landing sites. i make sure to think about that next time i create a category.
Sorry for my poor english
Michael
Thanks
Shawn
Still in french , V 0.1 , just release this day
Give your page the 301 +url , 302 + url , 404 error code from the "edit post page"
Traduction needed ! ( mail can be found on our site if you can help )
http://www.wordpress-seo.com/seo-http-error-man...
How it works :
Download, copy to plugin directory, Activate.
When editing you can choose Leave, 301, 302, 404 ( and url for 301, 302 )
Licence , "can be stolen" ;) and we still dont care of man who still want to give a licence for "nothing" like this !
Comment for make it better welcome
Sorry for my english
++
Andy, I must say, you are the real deal. Excellent communicator and you definitely know your stuff. I am only beginning to learn the ins and outs of Wordpress but I can clearly see the platform is worth the trouble.
Thanks.
ps. This is the first time ever a blog post has been so impressive, that it has made me leave one of these "thank you" notes. I hope this gives you a warm & fuzzy feeling inside ;)
Thanks for this (yet another) very detailed post. And for the graphs!!!
There are only few SEO blogs I really enjoy reading and yours is one of those. You do have a talent of engaging the reader, and keeping him curious to the very end of the post. Good content and links to resources is, of course, a part of it, but good writing style is also an important factor.
Since many of your posts are very long, I tried to analyze what exactly makes me read each to the very end (and click on many links in it!). I think that it is a dynamic nature of your paragraphs - they do not just separate thoughts, but switch focus from displaying facts, linking to resources, to your analysis, suggestions, practical codes, etc.
I don't think that you do this on purpose, it is probably 'just' a style you developed over time. And it works so well! This kind of thing is very difficult to do today when most pages receive only few seconds of users time.
Great job!
Always nice to learn new things about seo. Great stuff!
Thanks for sharing that with us :)
I also would've loved to ask you a question, but to be honest, I can't think of one at the moment... :P
One the other hand, I do would like to share something with you...
You see, I recently wrote a review on my blog about WP SEO Sniper, which is a seo tool for your WordPress blogs that will help you to optimize it for better search engine results, the easy way...
Thanks,
Robert Mollers
Thanks again,
Civita
Always nice to learn new things about seo. Great stuff!
Thanks for sharing that with us :)
I also would've loved to ask you a question, but to be honest, I can't think of one at the moment... :P
One the other hand, I do would like to share something with you...
You see, I recently wrote a review on my blog about WP SEO Sniper, which is a seo tool for your WordPress blogs that will help you to optimize it for better search engine results, the easy way...
Thanks,
Oh well there goes my Sunday!
1. The sandcastle pic shows one of the links from category to single page as two way. Is this a mistake?
2. I assume date/author based archives are blocked (robots.txt?) and everything else is index, follow, including tag pages?
3. What if some posts absolutely need to rank, even if it would cost other content to suffer a bit (I assume this is quite usual for most bloggers). How would this be achieved? Are the posts that need to rank left in as sidewide links?
4. Have you since tried this structure in practice? I'm curious to hear how this would work, as it has many unusual decisions (like only third level pages (tag pages) using followable links to link back to index).
Anybody using Wordpress has got to see this. And while this is Wordpress specific, I think a lot of it applies to any blog, and even web sites in general.
I wish I'd found this a year ago.
Tiffany Jewelry,
Tiffany