Looking for WordPress SEO Tips and Tricks, read the basic WordPress SEO Tutorial for Beginners below. WordPress SEO Tip 1 Name your Blog Posts and Static Pages with SEO in mind. If you create a post about “How to Save Money on Groceries” you should title the post something like “How to Save Money on Groceries” not “Had a Good Idea Today”. Might sound obvious, but many WordPress bloggers title their posts in an anti-SEO way by being too general like the “Had a Good Idea Today” title. By naming your posts with SEO in mind the posts title tag will have your keywords, the posts slug (the URL to the post) will use the post title. In our example […]
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Adding a Sitemap to a WordPress Blog?
Hi David,
I really love the new WordPress theme, but I have two questions I hope maybe you can help me with. I’m new to using WP and no coder, so please be kind.
First, what do I have to do to get the sitemap to show up in the theme?
Second, I am trying to add a small logo picture to the header to the left of the blogname and blog description and am not sure where to add it in the header.php code so it will show up on all the pages?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Terry
Adding a Sitemap to a WordPress Blog?
Creating a WordPress Sitemap Page Template
I’ve not used a sitemap with any WordPress blog so don’t know how you use it.
I know there is a sitemap.php file with the original theme and I left it in mine, but I’ve not optimised the code since loading the page results in an error page.
Had a hunch on how to use it and was right.
To create a sitemap create a new page (not a blog post, but a page like an about page). You can call it anything you like, but as it’s a sitemap naming the page Sitemap makes sense :-)
Somewhere (changed in WordPress 2.5) on the WordPress editor page will be a templates section, select the sitemap.php template file and save the page and you’ll have a new page that lists links to up to 1,000 of your posts.
Please note I haven’t optimised this page (going to have to now :-() so won’t have AdSense or SEO code (yet).
With regards adding a small image to the left of the name of the site in the header look to add your code around this area-
div class=”header_site_desc”>
Put it right after that div and it will be close to working.
David
Creating a WordPress Sitemap Page Template
WordPress Category Description
At the category description, I found that the theme does not take the description from the category admin but rather take something odd:
how can I change it?
WordPress SEO Title Attribute of Text Links
Not sure what you mean by something odd?
If you add a Description to a Category you’ll see it as the title attribute for the Category link instead of the usual-
“View all posts filed under Category Name”
When you hover overthe link in a browser.
If you hover of this pages Categories (currently 2 Cats), one has the default View all posts…. and the other a slight derivative of the Categories name.
This is how it’s meant to look.
I wouldn’t worry much about what goes in your title attribute (not the same as the title element or title tag as a lot of people wrongly call it since Google etc… completely ignores it’s contents.
You see all these so called SEO experts adding keyword rich title attributes to their text links and even image links, but they didn’t go to the trouble of testing if Google actually counts it towards a pages SERPS (it doesn’t). See for test details.
Thinking about it, if you tried to add html code to the description that could cause a mess.
David Law
WordPress SEO Title Attribute of Text Links
WordPress SEO Category Meta Description Tag
Thanks,
I agree with what you wrote.
however, what I meant is the term -&raque- that appears in the archives meta description. as well as in categories: like is this site see one of categories meta description – description” content=” » AdSense Blogspot Templates, AdSense templates and themes for WordPress and Blogspot blogs”
what is raque??
WordPress SEO Category Meta Description Tag
Category Meta Description Tag WordPress SEO
LOL
Understand now. That’s the meta description for the Categories, the Categories admin description setting is for the Category menu links title attribute I spoke about above, so isn’t used as a meta description.
Since WordPress doesn’t have a built in way to add a unique Category meta description tags I used the name of the Category and the general Blog description for this meta tag.
The raquo is the code for the two >> like sign and is built into WordPress (you can’t easily remove it at theme level, probably a way, never tired). You can see the >> in the title element (title tag) of Categories and blog posts/pages as well. Basically it’s a built in separator as the usual title element format is-
Blog Name >> Post Name
Blog Name >> Category Name
Since the meta description is not used by the major search engines for ranking purposes it’s not important what you put here beyond as (probably discussed above) Google will sometimes use the meta description as the snippet of text for a search result, (might increase your click thru rate a little if it reads well) but it does not increase rankings.
Without using WordPress SEO plugins you can’t add a custom meta description tag and I personally wouldn’t use my time using a plugin and creating unique meta descriptions to this level as they have so little value.
You know I charge at least £250 a month retainer fee to my SEO clients for support questions like this :)
David Law
Category Meta Description Tag WordPress SEO
WordPress Comments Author URL
Hello,
Call me 5 months slow on this one but I just realized, as per this comment form I’m using now, that you cant leave an optional url with your comment post. I cant find an option for it in the dashboard discussions section. Can you help with this? Is this just a standard thing for WP?
PS – Last week I used the WordPress automatic update to WP2.8 without any problems that I’m aware of.
Thanks!
David Elton,
WordPress Comments Author URL
WordPress SEO : Remove WordPress Comments Author URL
I assume you mean you can’t add a URL to comments with the Talian theme. If so it’s something I added (well removed to be precise) to reduce comment SPAM for links).
By default Talian like all the WordPress themes on this site will not show the URL options for those posting comments on your WordPress blogs. The benefit of this is, it removes an incentive for link spammers to comment on your blogs. Some people only post on comments for links and quite frankly the vast majority of their posts are very low quality (over my WordPress blogs I delete at least 20 low quality comments a day despite no link being available!).
I’ve been running the themes this way for ages and have pages with hundreds of user comments since the vast majority of real website users who want to comment don’t care if they get a link or not.
That being said if you want the URL option look in the /alt-files/ folder of the Talian theme and you’ll find a comments.php file that includes the URL coding. Copy comments.php over the current file and you’ll see the URL box on comments again and author names will be links again (removed that as well).
I have a Yo Mammas So Fat jokes page with over 600 comments! The site as a whole has over 2,000 approved comments (I had to read them all and many are racist unfortunately!).
A page on the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax (or not) has 80+ comments. That site has only 18 posts with over 400 approved comments.
So you don’t need an incentive to get people to comment on a site. This site has over 200 comments spread over 28 posts/pages.
David Law
WordPress SEO : Remove WordPress Comments Author URL
WordPress SEO vs Joomla SEO?
David, I’ve been using WP a long time, and just stumbled across your site. It is a shame it took me so long to find. You certainly know your WordPress SEO, and I commend you for giving so much valuable information away for free.
I have one question:
I am making a new site, that ordinarily I would have set up through Joomla. It is more based around static pages rather than posts. I was thinking of setting up a static homepage, and directing visitors to my other pages. The reason I am doing this is because I think that with this template and other SEO tips you give about WordPress my site will be very successful. Would few posts and very strong pages rank well, or should I go with Joomla?
WordPress SEO vs Joomla SEO?
WordPress SEO CMS
I’ve not used Joomla extensively (tried it, preferred WordPress).
What you describe is similar to what I’m doing with this site. If you look at the home page I’ve got a static like home page which links to the WordPress themes. The links and images are added manually, but having a static home page is a WordPress option.
Regarding blog posts vs static pages, there’s not really a great deal of difference between them. Although WordPress is blogging software if you remove the date references (on this page you see “Posted on September 23rd, 2007” near the top) it’s just like any other general CMS.
Quite easy to remove the date references, so you can use WordPress blog posts to create a non blog like site: to remove dates you’d use Widgets and not add the monthly archive widget, edit pages like single.php and page.php and remove the date reference (I should create a post about it).
WordPress also has the static like page posts as well (WordPress didn’t make it easy to describe the 2 types, ones called pages and the other posts!).
On the right menu of this site is a section “Pages” which lists all the sites static pages like the WordPress SEO Tutorial pages, with this type of page you can setup child pages under a page, for example under I’ve so far added 4 child pages.
So as long as you understand how WordPress works there’s a lot you can achieve.
David
WordPress SEO CMS
WordPress SEO H1 Headers?
Hi David,
for SEO prospective – what is the reason for inserting the blog name & description between span and p rather then H1/H2.
see here:
<a href=”https://stallion-theme.co.uk/”>SEO/AdSense Ready WordPress Themes</a> AdSense templates and themes for WordPress and Blogspot blogs
wouldn’t it be better using H1 (in addition to the title of post).
thanks
WordPress SEO H1 Headers?
WordPress SEO H1 Tag Best Practice
That’s a major SEO feature of the WordPress SEO themes I develop.
If you’ve done a little bit of SEO research you’ll probably understand H1 is important SEO wise and it should ideally be used once on a page and include the main SERPs for that page ONLY (not main SERPs for the site, but the SERPs for the page you are on). That’s best SEO practice.
So this page we are on now should have a H1 header that says something about Talian, SEO, WordPress Themes, AdSense… as those are the main SERPs.
If you view source of this page you’ll find the H1 header (only one of them) is the title of the post. This is true of every blog post and blog page for all my SEO themes, so as long as you include your keywords in the title of a page/post it’s added to the H1 header.
This is generally not true of other WordPress themes (there’s the odd one or two now that do this as well, but they are very rare).
However, since the name of a blog is usually the SERPs the home page of the blog is aimed at, you still want the name of the blog as a H1 header on the home page. If you view source of the home page of (which uses a standard WordPress archived home page, latest 10 posts, the Google AdSense home page uses a WordPress feature that takes a WordPress Static Page as the home page) you will find the name of the blog is within a H1 header. This is also true of monthly archive pages if you use them with Talian with SEO/AdSense theme (I never use monthly archives for SEO reasons).
Since you only want one H1 header with your main keywords for that page only, the usual WordPress theme design with the name of the blog as a H1 header on every page and post names in H2 is a bad SEO design (Talian was originally designed this way).
With a bit of complex WordPress theme coding and CSS you can achieve what you see with version 04 of Talian. One H1 header per page, with all themes on this site the H1 header is:
Home page – name of blog
Monthly archive pages – name of blog
Category – name of category
Tags – name of tag
Search – search query
Page – title of page
Post – title of post
The only way to improve this would be to remove the H1 header from the theme for Page and Posts and manually add a custom H1 header on all pages and posts, but the idea of using a CMS like WordPress is to automate as much as possible. Talian 04 is the best SEO setup you can get in an automated way.
On most WordPress themes the H1 is
Home page – name of blog
Monthly archive pages – name of blog
Category – name of blog
Tags – name of blog
Search – name of blog
Page – name of blog
Post – name of blog
With the real SERPs in a H2 (if you are lucky) for most page types, which is not good SEO wise.
BTW Good SEO question, it’s a shame WordPress development (the themes shipped with WordPress have the H1 issue) and WordPress theme creators don’t ask these questions. That being said if everyone knew what I know and used that info there would be no need for my SEO themes :-)
David
WordPress SEO H1 Tag Best Practice
Best SEOs on the Web
Hi David,
Thank you for your answer to my last comment. After reading many of your posts, I believe you’re one of the best SEOs on the web.
I am interested in installing forum software.
Have you tested any forum s/w with the blog theme? Which one do you recommend?
P.S. My biggest concern is related to security issues – spammers, hackers etc.
Thanks
Best SEOs on the Web
Best SEO Forum Software?
“I believe you’re one of the best SEOs on the web.”
Thank you very much :-)
I’ve not used forums extensively, played around a bit with PHPBB and bbPress a bit, so not converted Talian to work with a forum yet.
bbPress
PHPBB
I put a bit of effort into SEOing the PHPBB default template, but I just don’t like PHPBB. It is such a pain in the butt to manage SPAM posts etc… Where you can easily delete a comment in WordPress in one click, PHPBB requires about 5 clicks, click to view the post, click to delete it, click to remove inform the poster its as illegal software or something, click to delete it and then your redirected to the wrong page for more moderating!!!
It’s also a pain to setup SEO features, (requires editing core PHPBB files) removing session IDs etc… and even with the best SEO PHP mods it’s still not fully SEO’d. So I had enough of PHPBB and looked for an alternative. PHPBB is always getting exploited, so you have to keep up to date.
Playing around recently with bbPress, WordPress like format, much easier to work with from an SEO perspective, BUT I get the impression the developers are not doing much with it. So long term maybe not a good choice. It is pretty good SEO wise, but feature wise it’s lacking. No idea how secure it is, not many people use it relative to PHPBB, so guess hackers haven’t put much effort into it.
I’ve SEO’d the templates I’m using, but not to a great degree like I have with Talian because I don’t have many forum installations. Forums are so hard to get a user base.
David
Best SEO Forum Software?