Advanced WordPress SEO Considerations

Having worked through Basic WordPress SEO elements, we still have a few more cards up our sleeve that we can play to gain some additional Advanced WP SEO traction. One important aspect is getting relevant exact-match keyword search phrases distributed across multiple on and off page elements. Search engines assess many website factors, and its helpful to reinforce your on-page text with relevant keywords in all the little “out-of-sight” places. Doing this increases both the overall word count and balances keyword density… The following represents some tried and true mechanisms that will assist your site upwards…

Its by no means the final word – the goal posts are regularly moved, new strategies emerge and clever people keep creating new solutions to current set of problems. However, working through the items outlined, on top of the Basic WP SEO suggestions, should definitely give you incremental improvements to SERPs rankings.

Image Alt Tags & Titles

Many people overlook the advantage of adding relevant keyword search phrases to Image ALT tags within their posts. By default, the image file name is assigned to the Image Alt text tag. Its not quite so bad if you accurately pre-named the images for the post in question, using an “exact match” keyword search phrases.

However, most people use either a cryptic, meaningless image file name, or in the case of photographs, they go with the file name assigned by the camera.

If you’ve a lot of images across your website, manually going through post by post, or page by page and adding keyword-rich Image Alt text can be a tedious and time-consuming task.

Fortunately, there is a quick ‘n dirty solution to this which automatically populates the image Alt and Title texts – try SEO Friendly Images which allows you to automatically reset image Alt & Titles across the entire site!

This is usually a “one-time” thing where you auto-update all images at once with SEO-Friendly Images. Thereafter, you manually assign Alt and Title text to new images as you add them.

Note that its also important to accurately name your image files, preferably including an exact-match keyword search phrase that is relevant to the page / post.

Cross-Linking & Hyperlink Titles

Make it easy for both visitors to find (and search engines to index) content by cross-linking is an important strategy in your SEO processes.There are several ways of doing this, including the Navigation / Menu element discussed in the Basic WordPress SEO post. Linking to Related Posts is useful, as is ensuring that all links have, wherever possible, hyperlink Titles that include keywords relevant to the page the link is directed to.

As websites grow larger, and posts get pushed down the lists, it becomes more important than ever to have some kind of strategy in place that keeps them connected and accessible.

Hyperlink Titles & SEO

WordPress 3.x has a very important SEO-relevant facility in the Links tool. First, theres the convenience of (albeit slowly) displaying a drop-down list of all pages and posts within the site that you can link to. Second, it automatically adds the Title of the page or post as the hyperlink title of the link you are adding. That increases keyword count / density, and conveys additional accurate information to Google et al on what the linked page is about!

Use that, rather than the right-click “Copy Link Location” pasted into the link input dialog box! The added advantage is that WordPress will then prevent broken links should you ever rename the “Slug” – e.g. the page file name…

Tags & WP SEO

Using Tags correctly requires the application of some discipline to the process. It should not be a willy-nilly “shotgun” approach, where you assign hundreds of vaguely-related tags to every page! That’s just another, but far worse version of keyword Spam.

You should also make an effort to avoid content duplication – if you have a Category called Gas BBQs, you should not have a Tag called Gas BBQs because both are likely to have exactly the same content. Instead, you could tag the individual BBQ items with 2-Burner, 3-Burner, 4-Burner etc, enabling visitors to extract all associated Product posts in a more useful format. Similarly, you might assign Tags by Product Price Ranges – Under $200, $200 to $499, $500 to $999 etc. Work forward on the basis that;

Every Tag and every Category create a viewable page
Search engines don’t like duplicate content

Balance the use of Tags with the use of Categories to ensure that neither produce exactly the same output.

You should also be consistent with tag usage; review the list and reassign multiple similar tags to a single tag! For example, it would be inappropriate to have Tags (or Categories) for; Gas BBQ, Gas Barbecue and Gas Barbecue, given that those are simply variations on a theme. You might target those keyword phrases in particular posts, but I see neither reason nor merit in having multiple similar tags…

There are many and varied approaches to tagging, the one I use the most is Simple Tags – and oldie but a goodie. Its name belies its strengths because it actually performs a diverse array of functions;

Mass Edit Terms – to view/edit every post and the tags assigned to it
Manage Terms -to replace/ merge tags
Auto-Terms – automatically add links to tag-phrases found within the posts
Tag Cloud management

Use the “More” HTML tag

You should also use the “MORE” HTML tag to avoid having the entire content of every page displayed within each Category and Tag page. What “More” does is allow you to enforce a page ending at a specified location in the post, with a link to “Read More.” It effectively provides an excerpt of each post in the Category or Tag list.

Where you have many posts per category, it provides a useful teaser to each post rather than the full text output. There only seems to be one “Auto More” plugin that is supposed to automate the process of manually adding the More HTML tag into posts on the basis of pre-set rules.

However, the break by Word count does not work and the break by Characters options is not recommended, leaving break by Percentage which gives erratic results… On the basis of suboptimal automated output, I’m still adding the More tag manually – but am open to suggestions, if you know of a plugin that woks properly.

The Headspace SEO plugin provides a facility to replace the “Read More” text with something a little more juicy,

Breadcumb Navigation

Proving a “breadcrumb” trail of navigation gives;

readers an indication of what section of your site they are in, and provdes a way to retreat a level, or to the Home page.
search engines another indication of the internal structure of the website.

Both of these are “good things” and are recommended. There are multiple plugins available that provide this funcionality, including Really Simple Breadcrumbs. There are themes that provide embedded breadcrumb navigation, such as the Genesis framework from Studiopress.

Here’s an example of Breadcrumb Navigation, showing the current page, parent page and Home page links;

Duplicate Content

As alluded to before, you should be aware of this issue and take steps to minimise content duplication. For example, applying NOINDEX to archives (date-based lists of posts) makes some sense. Some people suggest applying NOINDEX to Categories and Tags.

However, if you’ve used the More tag effectively to segment posts into nicely balanced summaries, and ensured that Categories and Tags are clearly separate elements with varied content, I’d leave them indexed.

The prevailing view on Content Duplication is that Search Engines clearly understand that there is a huge distinction between INTERNAL content duplication, and EXTERNAL (copied) content. Google staff have commented on this, and view it as a relatively normal occurrence – hence the growing utilisation of the rel=canonical tag which ought to point to the authoritative source of the content… Thereby negating the need to worry excessively about internal content duplication issues.

Comments & PingBacks

Comments are a vexed issue – if you allow them, make sure that WordPress is correctly set to prevent publication prior to moderation..

I turn pingbacks off site-wide
I turn Comments off on all pages, and auto-set WordPress to turn post comments off after 2 weeks.

The Spam bots drive you crazy otherwise – on a busy WordPress site, the percentage of “good” comments is quickly overwhelmed by the trash if you don’t take firm steps to reduce it. Make sure you’ve got Akismet installed, and automatically eliminating the spam that does find a chink in the armour.

Comments and pingbacks also have the potential to drain your link juice, so you need to weigh up the pros and cons here.

Content

Given that Google now rewards good content above all else, you should be writing more verbose pages / posts with a minimum of 600 – 800+ words if you are serious about attaining rankings. Those dinky little 250-word posts that got you good rankings in the past are not going to serve you so well in the future.

In fact, you might want to go back through a few of them and expand them out with additional original text, and increase their perceived value to both search engines and readers. Doing so will ensure the former send you more of the latter, which is the objective of the entire process!