Advanced WordPress SEO Optimization

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Love the great information! thank you for taking the time and effort of posting this to us!
 
great thread, do most of this stuff already but some things I didn't consider.

Luckily I knew how to code before using wordpress so realised myself that it is a myth that wordpress is SEO friendly.
 
As other people have asked, does anyone have recommendations of a good theme that has some of these things to start with, to save some work?
 
@tilraen I always use custom themes (built from scratch) on important sites. On support sites I don't care how optimized they are because I don't need them to rank. That being said, I know of no theme to be 100% SEO optimized by my standards. There are many who say are optimized and stuff but most themes advertised as SEO optimized are crap in terms of SEO.

One other thing is Wordpress is fro blogs and a site is not a blog. A blog is a limited from of a site but if you're serious about your business and conversion rates then I hope you people aren't using a WP theme/setup that looks like a blog. It kinda works for MFA sites that you don't care much about but not for a serious site you want to be truly optimized for conversions. Think how a wordpress blog with product reviews looks and then look at reviews.cnet.com and you will understand what I mean.
 
@tilraen I always use custom themes (built from scratch) on important sites. On support sites I don't care how optimized they are because I don't need them to rank. That being said, I know of no theme to be 100% SEO optimized by my standards. There are many who say are optimized and stuff but most themes advertised as SEO optimized are crap in terms of SEO.

One other thing is Wordpress is fro blogs and a site is not a blog. A blog is a limited from of a site but if you're serious about your business and conversion rates then I hope you people aren't using a WP theme/setup that looks like a blog. It kinda works for MFA sites that you don't care much about but not for a serious site you want to be truly optimized for conversions. Think how a wordpress blog with product reviews looks and then look at reviews.cnet.com and you will understand what I mean.

As I posted before this is a great thread and you could could easily convert this to a WSO. That said, the vast majority of BHW members are not going to code their own site. They want to sell rather than become php experts so they will continue to use WordPress. Break up your advice into what a noob can easily do to optimize existing themes, perhaps rate SEO friendly themes as you grit your teeth when you look at the code and then outline how to build and customize code for site and you got your self a book and a real service that is sorely lacking on the net.

Thanks again for your insights and I'll look to see what I can implement on my next site!
 
@bartbaby - I know what you mean but I'm giving knowledge for free. If they want to put the bone to work and learn to do it right, good. Otherwise I don't really care. There's no way to make a guide/book/wso that covers all possible themes out there. You could give examples for 1-2 themes but almost every theme I saw has some particularities. Even if they would have the simplest file structure, you still need to understand CSS in order to fix it after your optimization messes up the styles. Who is not willing to learn can always reach for the pocket and pay $30-50 to a freelancer to implement the changes.
 
I'm trying to keep it as simple and natural as possible for my new websites cause I don't really into getting the Google over optimization penalty.
 
Man, this is eye opening. Seems the basics are the most important yet overlooked steps in everything. Thanks for sharing!
 
Very useful info I've found here... I think I'm going to read this again to fully grasp the things which are new to me.
 
very good ! especially your quote "Knowledge is only potential power, without action it is useless."
 
Hi madoctopus, first of all thanks for the wonderful information.

I have a question about siloing. I read about it and I am slightly confused.

WP displays all the categories on every page/post either in sidebar or at the top (menu bar) which messes with the silo structure since every other "post" links to every irrelevant category. I can get rid of the categories on individual
"posts" using a plugin and make sure my silo structure is fine but that would hurt user experience as the visitor will have to go to the homepage to see other categories.

Is there a way to maintain the silo structure by having all the categories display on the posts only to visitors but not to search engines ? Maybe noindexing the sidebar widget which displays the categories (not sure if this is even possible?) or if not will nofollowing those irrelevant sidebar category links help?

Also can you give me an example of a properly siloed blog if possible?

Thanks
 
WOW!!! great info.. Recently transferred my site from HTML to Wordpress. Was really worried about optimizing it. But this info helped me a lot. Thanks for sharing!!!
 
I love you dude :)
Its one of the best article / post in this forum. thanks for sharing.
 
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