SEO CMS

Comment on WordPress Social Network Theme by SEO Dave.

The Stallion All In One SEO Features are to make the site appear more unique, the problem with Content Management Systems (CMSs) like WordPress is the lack of unique template elements making SEO harder.

On your average CMS site these elements tend to be identical sitewide.

Header
Sidebars
Footer

Google will of course take this into account, the algorithm won’t be programmed to see every page has basically the same header, sidebar and footer so that’s a duplicate content penalty, that would result in 90% of the Internet being considered duplicate!

Having duplicate elements on a page isn’t an issue per se, however a carefully crafted search engine optimized website not built on a CMS can have a different header, sidebar and footer for every page: every page perfectly SEO’d. For a decade I’ve know the best way to build a site is one page at a time using HTML, BUT who has the time to build a 500 page site this way with having to link every page together in a meaningful way and incorporating interesting features like comments is almost impossible! Hence using a CMS like WordPress and pushing it to it’s limits to force WP into the best SEO CMS possible.

What I’m, trying to achieve from WordPress via Stallion is the power of a CMS with the options available of creating a site using single HTML pages and it’s not easy.

I’m currently looking for ways to change the widgets so they aren’t all the same sitewide. Stallion already includes the ability to enable/disable widgets on a page by page or category basis, but it’s not automated like I’ve achieved with the Stallion All In One Related Keyword Phrases. I’d like to be able to select say three alternative titles for Categories and set Stallion to use one of those phrases for different page types.

Example

Category Title – “Search Engine Optimization” used on the widget links of Category sections
Related Keyword Phrase 1 – “Search Engine Optimisation” used on the widget links of the Super Comments pages
Related Keyword Phrase 2 – “SEO Optimization” used on the Home Page, Tags and Dated archives sections
Related Keyword Phrase 3 – “SEO Tips” used on the Category link from Posts and the widget links of Pages

This is the same concept as the All In One Phrases and would make the sidebar widgets more unique, it would still be reused content, but where the anchor text of all Category links is currently identical sitewide this would mix it up a bit.

Same concept for Tags, Blogrolls, footer links to home etc…. and you can imagine how much more unique a site could be with a small number.

That’s just given me an idea for making the Stallion All In One SEO Keyphrases and the Stallion SEO Posts Widget even better, should be able to add a mashup option where for a Stallion SEO Posts widget will use the different All In One SEO Keyphrases based on the type of page loaded: currently it’s good because the anchor text and alt text of the SEO Posts Widgets can be different to the posts titles, but they are still all the same sitewide, this option would mix it up sitewide (that will be a cool feature :-)).

Must have spent 3 hours this weekend browsing though plugins and code snippits looking for code I could use as a starting point for a new blogroll widget that would add a meta box to posts and pages edit screen where multiple blogroll links could be added. I don’t like the sitewide nature of the default Blogroll, I want page by page control so I can add relevant blogroll links. Planning to finally convert my Classic Literature sites to WordPress and want a feature like this since the site currently has that feature (the pages are basically static HTML – really old site). Didn’t find anything close to useful! I did add the Single Posts Widget in the last update that could be used for this, but would be adding fully formed links rather than a nice add a URL here and anchor text there etc… which is far more user friendly.

On domain mapping, I’m not adding domain mapping to Stallion, there’s already a working plugin called WordPress MU Domain Mapping https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/ which I’ve recently figured out how to use. What I will be doing is making sure nothing breaks in Stallion while using it since I plan to move most of my sites over to a handful of mapped WordPress installs.

David

2014 Update: added most of the SEO features mentioned above (and others not discussed) into Stallion Responsive v8