We tried to analyze gaining the trust of readers in our endeavor to know the secrets of successful blogging. Now let’s see adopting some strategies to tame those search engine crawlers to obey our directives, after all, they are our traffic officers. Find below a set of search engine optimization tips, tricks, techniques, and advice for WordPress blogs to be search engine bot friendly though this may not be a complete list of what to do on gaining trust of those spiders as algorithms change often; however, I’m confident that it throws at least some light for a beginner or somebody who is in trouble with Google’s algorithm changes and hence less traffic.
Search engine optimization tips
- If you think Google hates your site, get over it. Algorithms don’t hold grudges. A set of pages that appear in Google’s index today will vanish tomorrow and will surface again day after tomorrow. It’s a hide-and-seek game by those algorithm writers; else, they’re going to be out of business because of discontented searchers. Even if you write some minty fresh article that’s alien to the Milky Way or at least to the Internet right now, Google may dump it as crap unless you have umpteen links pointing to your article. No matter even if it is really crap, but it also can be propped up with links from other sites! Hence, first of all, keep aside your worries; if there is a will, there is surely a way to fix your troubles.
- Similarly, don’t worry about Alexa ranking. Given the fact that Alexa ranking for a site is calculated on the basis of how many visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed have visited that particular site, the results of traffic are definitely going to be inaccurate. Not every single visitor will have the Alexa toolbar installed on his browser. So there are millions of websites that, even if they have a lot of traffic, are not ranked high enough by Alexa.
- The age of a domain is the most important thing to bring in trust for search engines. As I said in the previous post, many blogs fade out or vanish in a few months from launch and crawlers too take into this account. Trust builds up only with growing age.
- I was displaying whole posts everywhere, i.e., on the home page, its continuation, categories, archives, tags, etc. However, according to Matt Cutts, it would be preferable to use post excerpts. Hence except for a single post page, I started using excerpts everywhere. You too make sure that a single content is inaccessible to the spiders with different URLs (even on your own domain). Else, even if your content is original, search engines may stamp it as duplicate and dump it. At all other URLs other than original posts and pages, such as archives, categories, and tags display only excerpts.
- Decide whether or not to use www in your URLs and be consistent about it. Be sure to set your preference in Google Webmaster Console.
- Prefer static URLs over dynamic URLs as search engines don’t like dynamic URLs. A dynamic URL is the one with variable characters like ?, &, =, etc.
Example of a dynamic URL: http://www.rajn.co/thread.php?threadid=AX325&sort=date
Example of a static URL: http://www.rajn.co/tame-crawlers-to-obey-your-directives/
Static URLs are typically ranked better in search engine results pages, and they are indexed more quickly than dynamic URLs. Static URLs are also easier for the end-user to view and understand what the page is about. If a user sees a URL in a search engine query that matches the title and description, they are more likely to click on that URL than one that doesn’t make sense to them. - Prefer dashes over underscores in URLs. If you have a choice about how to structure your URLs, use dashes to indicate word breaks. If you have used underscores already, don’t bother making the switch but be sure to use only one of the two.
- I just write one or two posts a week, but the site command on Google was showing thousands of pages indexed by Google (with static and dynamic URLs). Google is very specific about displaying only high-quality sites appearing on its search results. Hence, with a lot of useless and crappy contents of this site on Google’s index, it could well invite a panda slap. I haven’t placed any restrictions for spiders on my robots.txt. However, since the Google Panda update going global, I had to place restrictions on what to index and what not. It was just like training a sniffer dog to “Do this, don’t do that, don’t pee here, don’t shit there, sniff that corner” etc. Prefer optimizing your blog with a search engine optimization plugin like HeadSpace 2 or WordPress SEO by Yoast. For any reason, if you are unable to use any of these two plugins, place this PHP code below the title tag in your header template:
<?php if(is_single() || is_page() || is_home()) && ($paged <= "1")) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
<?php } else { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php }?>
Meaning of this code: You are directing the bots to only index the home page, single posts and pages. For the rest of the areas like home page continuation, archives, categories, tags, etc., the bots should only follow the links but not index them. You ought to have a great relief now with all the not-so-important pages of your WordPress blog now removed from Google’s index.
- In a similar manner, block those admin/useless files getting indexed by Google either with robots.txt or “noindex” meta tag.
- With an increase in the number of sites that point your pages, your authority also increases. Hence to gain such links voluntarily, submit articles to blog carnivals. Try to gain links from other authoritative blogs as well.
- Write at least one or two posts a week to keep search engine spiders visiting your blog frequently; search engine spiders like indexing new content; however, note that quality is preferred over frequency.
These blog optimization techniques should ensure good results for your blog. However, please note that Google hates content farms, scraper sites, and auto blogs. These search engine optimization tips can do nothing to pull those spammers out of trouble.
Let me hope you found these SEO tips useful. Let’s see some other basic blogging lessons on improving user experience in our next post.