I am a WordPress SEO guy just because I have to be. I do love SEO and Wordpress but I am not a WordPress SEO expert. However, there are a number or weaknesses in WordPress that hurt your Google standings from an SEO standpoint. These do come from WordPress SEO experts, I just happened to write about them.
#1 The WordPress title tag code sucks
Harsh, but the only way to put it. The way your WordPress title is currently set up adds a bunch of worthless navigational based words into the title tag or ends up keyword stuffing the title tag by repeating your blog title on subpages. Worse yet on every subpage. Google sees this as keyword spam.
Use this code to fix it:
<title><?php if(is_home()) { echo 'ENTER YOUR HOME PAGE TITLE TAG HERE'; } else { wp_title('') ;} ?></title>
Replace your WordPress title tag code in your header.php file. Make sure you leave the single quotes ' ' around your home page title tag text. Now the text you enter will be in the title tag only on your homepage.
But on your articles standalone posts pages, (called a single in WordPress) the only thing that will appear is the title of the blog post.
#2 WordPress uses <h2> tags for the blog post title.
These should be <h1> tags.
Open your index.php page and your single.php page (depending on the theme) and look for this.
This is the title of the post. It should be in <h1> tags so that you are telling search engines that this is the most important text on the page since <h1> tags denote the largest font size.
#3 Wordpress uses <h2> tags to create your navigation labels, like archives and categories.
<h2> tags should be reserved for the second most important words on the page, I use them for sub headlines.
Change them to <p> paragraph tags and control how they look with CSS classes. If you do not know how to do this then just style the individual labels.
They are found in your sidebar.php file.
#4 Use nofollow or remove redundant links in the sidebar and the footer.
NoFollow does not mean that search engine spiders stop and do not continue to the link target. It only means that you are telling Google (thru Googlebot) especially that you do not want to pass on link juice (I hate the term PageRank) to the link at the other end. This is especially important to administration page links, a contact page, site map, privacy policy, terms of use page, copyright page, Wordpress admin links and of course the Wordpress.com link.
There is a finite amount of Google link juice you have to pass on to other sites, why waste it on links that do not need it or do not warrant it.
Well that about does it for a Wordpress SEO tweak article. If you do not want to FTP each file up and down or just do not know where they are in the couple hundred files that are a Wordpress install do this.
Log into your WordPress control panel and go to "theme editor." From there you can click on the file name on the right hand side of the page and open it in the textarea. Then you can change the items I mentioned.
Do yourself a favor and back up that file if you are not familiar with HTML. Right click the file text when you first open it, click "select all" then right click the highlighted blue text and click "copy."
Now open WordPad in Windows and paste the code into the page. Then save that page as the file name you opened in the "theme editor" in WordPress. Save it to the desktop. Now if you really mess up the code up you can always replace it with what you started with.
If you are totally lost in this article consider hiring a WordPress guy like me to do this for you. Or you can just contact the author of your theme and he should be glad to get the extra work.
