Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to optimize a wordpress blog
-
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.
-
Kevin and Eric,
Performance issues aside, I prefer the simplest URL structure:
Unless you really need advanced categorization, siloing, etc., bringing your content up one level and having shorter URLs is always better, IMO.
-
Great info, Kevin. I appreciate the quick feedback.
Eric
-
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.
-
Thank you!
-
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.
-
Great info. I will look into these more deeply. Thank you!
-
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
-
The few things I would point out, which aren't so much WordPress issues, but are how this WordPress installation is configured, are:
- No description tag, that is in the 'Settings -> General' page
- Well over 100 links on the home page, mostly because of the 'Blog Archive', are people actually clicking on those items?
- 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.
- Dangling links, some of the images are linked to themselves, that is set on the post or page they are created on.
- The page names 'slugs' don't usually match their titles, ex, Fiber: health benefits for athletes...., would be: 'fiber-health-benefits-athletes', etc.
- 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?
- The 2 main items "Recipes" & "Videos" go offsite? And they are follow links! What the!
Cheers.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Hi Dunamis,
Does the plug in allow you to make the Title Tag different than the category name?
Eric
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I Change My Blog Permalinks to Remove The Date
Hi All Thank you in advance for any help. Last year a website was moved to multisite and the permalinks for the blog posts were changed to include a category, the year, the month and day. As a result most of the page URL's are flagged as too long. A number of the pages are receiving good traffic, so my question is whether just to leave them as they are or to change the permalinks? My gut feeling is to take the short term hit and change the permalinks, but I thought I'd take the advice of the forum before doing so. Many Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | DigitalProgress2 -
Should I redirect a popular but irrelevant blog post to the home page?
Hi. I'm trying to get my website; www.ciphr.com , to rank for keywords relevant to "HR Software" in the UK. It's a highly competitive industry and we rank ~mid to low on page one for some of our ideal keywords that are highly relevant and high volume. Years ago we took the decision to blog about topics more loosely related to the world of work. One of our blog posts, about plants in the office https://www.ciphr.com/advice/plants-in-the-office/ is popular. It gets decent traffic and consistently builds backlinks to the post without any further effort on our part. The specific page has a PA of 46 and DA of 55 with >500 domains linking to it. This compares to our home page with a PA of 47 and 700 linking domains. It is typically the home page that ranks for our money keywords "HR Software" "HR Systems" in the UK. Because this blog post is so loosely related to our actual business, the traffic it generates is highly unlikely to turn into a customer of ours. I am considering redirecting the blog post to the home page to pass link juice to the home page. The concern I have is that, based on the anchor text and contextual signals from linking pages, Google might then infer that our home page is less relevant for our money keywords and more relevant for "plants". Are my concerns unfounded? What are your thoughts? Should I redirect the blog post to the home page? Another internal page? Keep the blog post live? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson19922 -
How does Google handle read more tags in Wordpress
Hi Everyone I am wondering how Google handles the read more tag in Wordpress. I pasted the link to a blog post on Google and found nothing (domain.com/post#readmore). Then I paste the version without #readmore (domain.com/post) and found that Google indexed the page but with the option to click "read more" to read it. The full blog post is not in their index, just the version asking you to read more. Is this because Google hasn't gotten to it or is Google ignoring it. I am not sure but ideally I rather have the full blog post indexed, not the read more version. I am curious to whether this will cause duplicate content issues. What are your experience with this and is it advisable to use an alternate method for read more. Maybe with a Wordpress plugin. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | gaben0 -
Best way to separate blogs, media coverage, and press releases on WordPress?
I'm curious what some of your thoughts are on the best way to handle the separation of blog posts, from press releases stories, from media coverage. With 1 WordPress installation, we're obviously utilizing the Posts for these types of content. It seems obvious to put press releases into a "press release" category and media coverage into a "media coverage" category.... but then what about blog posts? We could put blog posts into a "blog" category, but I hate that. And what about actual blog categories? I tried making sub-categories for the blog category which seemed like it was going to work, until the breadcrumbs looked all crazy. Example: Homepage > Blog > Blog > Sub-Category Homepage = http://www.example.com First 'Blog' = http://www.example.com/blog Second 'Blog' = http://www.example.com/category/blog Sub-Category = http://www.example.com/category/blog/sub-category This just doesn't seem very clean and I feel like there has to be a better solution to this. What about post types? I've never really worked with them. Is that the solution to my woes? All suggestions are welcome! EDIT: I should add that we would like the URL to contain /blog/ for blog posts /media-coverage/ for media coverage, and /press-releases/ for press releases. For blog posts, we don't want the sub-category to be in the URL.
On-Page Optimization | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
SEO Optimizing in UMBRACO
Hi there, I am planning to use UMBRACO to manage my existing website, so my question to Seomozzers out there is what should I be aware of, how safe is it to have UMBRACO in terms of SEO. By using this software, would it be possible to get a positive or negative impact on my keyword rankings? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | matti_wilson0 -
WordPress and category/subcategory landing pages
Hey, Here's my situation. I'm building a WordPress blog for product reviews of a certain niche. Current category setup is 4 main categories with 4-8 subcategories each. Each subcategory has a unique description that will help it become a landing page for certain keywords, after which it lists the posts from that subcategory. The posts will always be assigned to a sub-category, never to a main category. My issue is what to do with the main categories. They're fairly general so they're not really targeting any keywords, and don't have any unique descriptions attached to them. I was thinking of choosing between three options on designing the main category pages: List the subcategories + normal posts loop that bring the latest posts from the subcategories (may create a lot of duplicate content since the subcategory pages are also listing their posts) List only the subcategories (+ maybe just the latest post from each subcategory) Don't link the main categories at all, instead only use them to create dropdowns for the subcategories So, what would you choose, and why?
On-Page Optimization | | mihaiaperghis0 -
Blog.mysite.com or mysite.com/blog?
Hi, I'm just curious what the majority think of what's the best way to start a blog on your website for SEO benefits. Is it better to have it under a sub domain or a directory? Or does it even matter?
On-Page Optimization | | truckguy770 -
How many keywords max can I optimize each page for?
I don't want to over optimize by doing 1 keyword per 1 page, but then if I do more, seomoz on-page tool report doesn't give an A grade for each keyword I optimize. I usually optimize for max 3 keywords that are very closely related, meaning they use the same words. Ex. dentist los angeles, los angeles dentist, dentist in los angeles Am I on the right track or what's your recommendation? Should I create different landing pages for each keyword?
On-Page Optimization | | sub90900