6

Blogging, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

SEO & WordPress

January 8th, 2010 by matt

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
  • 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

The opinions expressed on this site are the opinions of the participating user. 12Stone Church acts only as a passive conduit for the online distribution and publication of user-submitted material, content and/or links and expressly DOES NOT endorse any user-submitted material, content and/or links or assume any liability for any actions of the participating user.