WordPress not optimized for search engines

Posted on 2007.08.21
Categories: PHP; Tagged with: , ,

WordPress is, in its “natural” - that is, packaged - form, a wonderful piece of software for blogs on the Internet. But WordPress in its natural form is also designed for humans… not search engines.

I’ve known of this problem for a very long time, since before this site was created. Back then, I believed that having a blog that could be fixed later was better than no blog at all, regardless of search engine rankings. Now, I have some different opinions.

First off, I’m not going to switch to something else simply because of an imperfection that can be resolved. There are many plugins that can help a blogger optimize his WordPress site, including SEO_WordPress, which will assist in deterring search bots such as Googlebot from duplicate pages (like /trackback and the archives), and Add-Meta-Tags, which will add META tags to the “head” section to help Googlebot recognize certain keywords.

I haven’t installed either of these yet, but I will… as soon as I publish this post. I recognize the functionality in SEO_WordPress (except blocking the RSS feeds), and the intended purpose of Add-Meta-Tags (although Googlebot is sufficiently intelligent to recognize keywords from the massive text on any blog). I would recommend these plugins to other WordPress bloggers.

Now, let me install them…

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2 comments.

I don’t blog enough »« Robots - robotic lawn mowers

Comment on October 30th, 2007.

Now I’m using SEO All in One (named something like that) which has now replaced both of the above. Disregard them… All-in-one SEO (the plugin) is a lot better.

Comment on December 12th, 2007.

See my other post (Favourite WordPress Plugins) for newer analysis of such plugins. A note: All-in-one SEO is updated really often.

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