Advanced WordPress SEO Optimization

Excellent stuff! I'm have most of my sites in wordpress and some of the premium themes that i used are shit when it comes to being seo optimized even though these themes are being advertised as being so.

I see you recommend HeadSpace, in what way is it better than All-In-One SEO? I'm curious because I have been using All-In-One SEO all these while. Tried HeadSpace way back but don't like it.

Thanks for the awesome share!

very detailed one.

thanks by reading this has helped me a lot

Another good plugin is Yoast breadcrumbs. It fixes breadcrumbs on posts, so once you have your permalinks setup, your crumbs are:

Site Name -> Category -> Sub-cat -> Post

instead of

Site Name -> Post

Breadcrumbs are a big indicator for Google as far as your site's structure goes. Breadcrumbs, navigation, page title and URL structure all go into this.

Your titles should always be...

Post -> Sub-cat -> Category -> Site Name
(breadcrumbs backwards)

and your URLs should always be...

sitename.com/category/sub-cat/post

Keep your crumbs, titles, URL and navigation consistent... Yoast Breadcrumbs, WP No Category Base (WP No Tag Base, too if you use tags a lot) and AIO SEO will all pitch in on this.

very good knowledge to collect in thread in my collection^^

god, this post is pure money.

Sticky this shit! This IMHO, is the greatest post on WP SEO ever written on this forum. This post will not mean much to you until you become more advanced, after stumbling around 500 seperate threads on the same subject piecing it all together, then you will come back to this and go, YES, this man has answered many, many questions about WP structure and SEO all in one post!

Headspace vs All-in-One SEO - I liked Headspace more (when I used it). I would not say it is necessarily better. I guess it is a matter of taste. Now I am not using any of them, I just use a combination of hardcoded themes, custom functions (to replace some functionality) and custom post fields (for meta keywords, description, etc).

About using titles like "Postname - Subcat - Cat" I don't recommend that because it dilutes the keyword weight in the title a bit. I prefer to have the page title just as "Postname" unless I have a very targeted blog and category names are the main keywords I am targeting with the site.

How about comparison between SEO Ultimate plugin and WP SEO by Yoast? I haven't seen any good reviews or feedback between these 2. I end up with both as both have features I like. I just disable features in each that I'm not using.

Curious if you have an opinion on these or if anyone else does. Of course would like to hear in relation to the original post and the SEO value.

Just skimmed through the post and found it extremely useful.. brilliant post bro! Subscribed to the thread

+repped

@tyler8541 while I am sure some would find such a review useful, I don't think it is wort my time to do it. A SEO plugin is only good because it allows you to optimize something. In the end it doesn't matter which one you use as long as it gets the job done and doesn't affect the site in other areas too much (e.g. performance). What is important is that you understand you should use something because it is a solution for what you need not just because you exist. Just because you have a feature it doesn't mean you have to use it. For example a SEO plugin might give you the option to add stuff in the head section (meta, css, js, etc), however that feature is useless if you don't need it.

madoctopus said:

Another thing...

A lot of people stress that you need a sitemap. I stress that if you need a sitemap then your internal linking structure is shit. If you need a sitemap for Google to find your pages you're in trouble.

I NEVER use a sitemap on my sites. I do however make sure I have not one, not two but many links towards each post. Is not even difficult. You have categories (ideally in a silo structure if you have lots of content), you have tags if you use them right, links from post to post (very useful to get many links towards posts), etc. Unless you did something very wrong with your internal link architecture or you are super lazy, you don't need a sitemap. A link from a sitemap provides extremely low value because that's a page full of links with no content.

Click to expand...

awesome thread man. And yes, if you are in a need of a site map, your website it's really really bad. Totally agree with that. It's better to inter-link websites, looks better and more natural.

Thanks for this useful share.

Great share!

I would add these plugins - yeah they have nothing to do with SEO but help to protect your blog from hacking

login-lockdown
wp-db-backup
wordpress-firewall-2

Enjoy!

This thread should be sticky.

Thank you

Can anyone recommend any service which can check and fix your theme, may be some gig on Fiverr?

On one of my sites that got hit on October 14th, I went in and cleaned stuff up after reading through G Webmaster help threads desperately seeking answers (before I realized that Panda has no quick fixes etc)

People in all of those threads were basically saying to no-index category pages (during the Panda hysteria). How do you feel about that?

IMO and experiences, a super optimized category page (WITH UNIQUE CONTENT) reaps major benefits...but Panda paranoia had me no-indexing like a madman. With Panda I honestly don't know what to expect anymore...even if your onpage is tight AND offpage is diverse, I feel almost like they reclassified certain niches/longtails that pass a certain search volume threshold...and if your site is not a big brand/giving off the "right" authority signals/deemed worthy of this traffic in Google's eyes for whatever reason (and becoming a brand is not as easy as just registering your site's name at a place like Knowem and building links with your brand name/website URL as anchor etc)...welp that traffic is gone.

Wish I had this thread 4 years ago!

Does anyone here no-index their category pages for any SEO reasons? I didn't see any benefit of doing so with my one site (that would be too easy lol and trust me I don't take advice from those areas of the web seriously that often as most of those people believe you should just write posts all day, let your neighbors know about your hobby site, and then hope people visit your website)...so curious about others experiences particularly on this forum.

nice one...good share..!

@jsherloc NEVER noindex your category pages. They help a lot with deep linking and indexing. Not to mention they help you build relevance hubs within your site.

Panda - 99.999% of people on the net got it wrong what Panda is all about. Writing about this would end up in a super long thread, not in the mood to do it now. What I can tell you is Panda is not about text or internal linking structure. Also Panda is a machine learning algorithm - it tries to mimic what a real human THINKS about a site. Also, being an algorithm it is broken by design lol. I mean you can use how it was designed / for what it was designed to your advantage. You don't even need to know how it works but what it is supposed to do.

Nice Great share