Blogging, Marketing

SEO & WordPress

January 8th, 2010 by Matt Haff

These are just some quick and dirty notes taken at WordcampATL during “SEO & WordPress”
Presented by: Topher Kohan, SEO Coordinator at CNN

SEO Basics

• title tag
• headline
• first 250 words
• url slug
• alt attributes
• when it comes to content make sure you have enough in your body to support the head and the tail.

Template Optimization

• breadcrumbs
  • single post pages
  • home > article > topher is cool
  • good usability
  • the engines love them
  • yoast breadcrumb plug-in (www.yoast.com/wordpress/breadcrumbs/)
• clean code
  • css, js, ajax
  • external files
  • keep the inline minimal
  • reduce whitespace (yoast.com/speed-up-wordpress/)
  • in 2010 the speed that your website loads will effect your search engine ranking
• plugins
  • all in one seo pack
    • works well
    • could screw up the world
    • can’t be used on wordpress.com
• page rank sculpting
  • use of nofollow on links
    • rel=”nofollow”
  • nofollow reciprocity PLUGIN
  • nofollow External Links PLUGIN
  • don’t follow links freely. you start off with 100 points and every external link you use decreases your points
  • everytime you link to them, you’re “voting” for them
• noindex, follow archive pages…… point everything to single post page, block the archives, search, etc.
  • google follows all the links
  • pages not in the index
  • robots meta plug-in
• noscript tag
  • put plain text description of content that shows up in search engine-unfriendly format on the page
  • could be considers spammy by the search engines.
    DONT USE FOR KEYWORDS, ONLY TYPE WHAT THE SCRIPT PULLS.
  • textbox in flash search engines can see
• image size
  • bigger better (search engines like it) or video
  • higher res better (search engines like it)
  • image search
  • alt attributes
  • file name
• canonical tag – NEW works for Google works on same domain and cross domain
  • reduces duplicate content
  • yoast plugin
  • points all duplicate pages to the original place
  • Recommend that you take the time to read the official Google Blog post on it before you do it http://kl.am/canonical

Resources

• WordPress SEO
  • andy beard – andybeard.eu
  • joost de valk – yoast.com
  • sugarrae – sugarrae.com
  • michael gray – wolf-howl.com
• General SEO
  • seomoz – seomoz.org/blog
  • search engine journal
  • search engine watch
  • matt cutts – mattcutts.com/blog (RUNS GOOGLE SPAM TEAM)
• Twitter!!!
• RAVEN SEO TOOLS
  • social media tracking
  • post directly to wordpress
  • keyword research
  • serp tracking