Setting Your Tags, Category and Archive Pages To Display Excerpts

Except for the home page where some people prefer to display the entire content of their recent post and post page where you have no option other than to display the entire post, other parts of the blogs such as tags, archive, author and category pages can be made to display the excerpts all you have to do change this is by looking in to the specific template file and change the code

This

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<?php the_content(); ?>

To This

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<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

That’s how easy wordpress has made things for us.

Using noindex and nofollow tags

Before we proceed any further I want to clear your heads a bit about nofollow tag, many people think that nofollow links are of no use and search bots do not look in to it. This is a wrong assumption, search engines do crawl through nofollow links as well and index pages, but adding nofollow tag is just to instruct the Google bot not add any pagerank value or authority to the links, thus making it less valuable in terms of SEO, noindex tag on the other hand prevents indexing of specific page or category or any part of the blog or entire blog as a whole making it more powerful.

In order to instruct search engines only to index the contents in your home page and exact post page and not the other replicas found elsewhere in the blog use the following code in your header.php

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<?php if(is_home() && (!$paged || $paged == 1) || is_single()) { ?>
<meta name="googlebot" content="index,archive,follow,noodp" />
<meta name="robots" content="all,index,follow" />
<meta name="msnbot" content="all,index,follow" />
<?php } else { ?>
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,noarchive,follow,noodp" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<meta name="msnbot" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php } ?>

This code instructs the googlebot and msn bot to follow links present in the homepage and exact post page but do not index them if the contents are not in blog index or post page. You can replace the follow tag to nofollow if you do not want the links to be followed which is a personal preference.

Also there are people who like to have their tags and archive pages to be indexed as well for some specific reasons. Its totally up to you whether you want contents on the other pages not to be indexed or to be.

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1. How To Prevent Content Theft From Your WordPress Blog
2. 5 Truths About Duplicate Content In Google And Search Engines
3. Avoiding Google Duplicate Content For Technology Sites

One of the most powerful feature which wordpress offers to its users is the ability to alter your permalink structure to suit your taste, apart from offering you four predefined url structure to choose from, it even even goes one step further with offering you an option to customize it to your taste as well. So which structure to choose and what will be a best bet for your blogs is the primary question.

Permalinks With Dates

It is sensible to have a permalink with dates in it, if you are running a site which is primarily a news site, or where the value of the contents expires after a specific point of time. It just gives an hint to your users and you as to how old the particular content is. Date segment of the permalinks has three attributes one for day %day% month %month% and year %year%. you might choose to use all the three or pick the ones which you think will be useful for you and put them in to your custom structures.

Permalinks With Keywords

Custom structure is so powerful that you can also embed a particular keyword in to all of your urls. Just for your understanding, if you have a site that basically does a review on a service or product, and you need include the word review in to all of your links then you can do so too. This will ensure your primary keyword is present in all of your urls.

Permalinks With Categories

All though few complain that including your category names in to your links has some server load issues and its not advisable to use it, but I have been following that structure on couple of my blogs without any problems for over a year now. But I will leave the choice up to you on following this structure. You can include category in to your url by using %category% attribute.

Permalinks With Just Post Names

Using just post names is one of the widely followed and popular structure for one main reason, it keeps your urls short which is a good practice from SEO perspective. Some people even include a post id in it, just to give your post permalinks some unique id.

Related posts:

1. How To Alter Permalinks In WordPress
2. Why Is It Important To Choose The Right Themes For Blogs
3. Fast Loading WordPress Themes – How To Choose Them

Duplicate Content

One of the serious problems with having an auto blog system in action is the duplicate content. Duplicate content is not necessarily a bad thing SEO wise, but the problem starts when your scraped contents starts to rank high over the original content page. Frankly no webmaster or blogger what to be a victim of such issues. you should know that its not beyond possibility. Search engines values the content on a site based on nearly 200 factors and there are instances when it decides to rank the syndicated content on the top over the original one. I have heard about cases where people are forced to shut their blogs because of legal threats. In some cases the original author of the content directly approaches the web host and request them to take the site down. Auto blogs are definitely vulnerable to legal actions on the long run when you are not respecting the copyrights.

Search Engine Penalty

Its been really misunderstood that search engine penalizes sites for having duplicate contents, this is not really true. Search engines do easily identify sites that has similar contents but not necessarily penalizes just because it is holding a scraped content taken from somewhere else. The real reason behind why search engines might penalize a auto blog is something else.

Content Spamming

To be more precise the real reason for penalties on auto blogs is spamming contents. There are a lots of people who are greedy to make hundreds of dollars over night and think auto blogging can do the trick. But building a blog overnight with hundreds and thousands of over night gives your site an outright confirmation that it is spamming to search engines. When you are using a system that generates automatic contents for your blog, keep in mind that do not over do it.

Use Creative Commons

Its a good idea to use creative common contents from sites like wikihow. Where you are free to use their contents on your blog provided you link back to them or provide some kind of credit back to the original owner. If you want to use contents that are not under creative commons then its a good idea to approach the real owner and obtain permission.

Conclusion

Autoblogging is not a necessarily a bad thing when you respect the copyrights and do not spam hundreds of contents over night, keep your blog clean and use only contents that are allowed to be shared by its author.

No related posts.

Tags Create Indexable Contents

You should know that creating tags for your posts instantly creates new contents for your blog that can be indexed by search engines. So the more number of tags you create for your posts, more number of contents you create for your blog.

Create Similar Tags For Multiple Posts

If the contents in your blog are related to a single topic, it is a good idea to create common tags for multiple posts. Creating similar tags for many posts will mean multiple posts are linked together by common tag, which increases the increases the pagerank value of the particular tag and also increases its chances of being indexed by search engines.

Use Long Phrases For Tags

I often notice many blogs utilizes single words for tags, unfortunately using single words for your tags will not do you any good in bringing more traffic to your site. It is a good idea to choose a long phrase that users are likely to use when they search for information in search engines. Long phrases increases the chances of tags pages are being found through search engines.

Avoid Using Too Many Tags

It is a good idea to stick with one tag or at the most two tags for a post instead of using multiple number of tags, using multiple tags would mean that more duplicate contents being found on your blog.

Avoid Duplicate Content By Using Excerpts

It is a good idea to use only excerpts of the post in the tags pages instead of displaying the entire content, this will potentially reduce the duplicate content issues with your site. If possible you can also use custom excerpts for your tags and category pages.

Conclusion

Tags can be very useful to bring more hits to your site through search engines, but you should know that tags themselves are not magical and do not bring you tons of hits over night. Careful planning of your tags will ensure increased benefits for your blogs.

Source: Vladimir

Related posts:

1. Importance Of H1 And H2 Tags – Optimize H1 And H2 Tags In WordPress
2. Why You Must Avoid Posting Under Multiple Categories In Your Blog
3. 10 SEO Benefits Of WordPress – How WordPress Can Help You With SEO

Instead of wasting our time arguing how it does not matter at all, lets focus on how to distribute it across your blog very effectively so that your pages get very good chances of ranking  high in Google and also possibly on other search engines as well.

1. Link To Your Popular Posts On Your Homepage

In general when we look at a blog in common, most of times we tend to notice that homepage of the blog carries more PR value. This is not a surprise as most of us tend to build more links to our homepage. It is a good idea to place your popular post links on the homepage. You can make use of the text tool to manually add links to your important posts or you can make use of popular posts plugin from wordpress which can do the job for you. Some people even add tags in to their sidebar which is a good idea too.

There are themes which comes with side tabs widget built in to it. Just like the one you can notice on the sidebar of this blog, which instantly links to popular and featured posts and also tags and I really appreciate using those themes.

2. Build Links To Your Sitemap Page

If you are not aware of the fact that you can create a sitemap page for your blog just like the one you can find here. You should go ahead and install this plugin in your blog and create one now.

Creating a sitemap page will be really useful to distribute the pagerank evenly across your blog. All you have to do is build more inbound links directed towards it and it takes care of the rest.

3. Tag Sculpting

Tag Sculpting is a similar is really similar to creating sitemap page for your blog, except that you will create a dedicated page for your tags. This method is more powerful for a single reason, all your tags are linked from real posts in your blog and this enable your tags page to accumulate a massive amount of pagerank in a single location enabling uniform distribution of pagerank across your blog.

Related posts:

1. How Does Pagerank Work – Things You Need To Know About Pagerank
2. 7 Tips On How To Distribute Keywords Across Your Site
3. Press Release Distribution – What Are They Really?

1. Get A Better Webserver

Not many people stress on this primary point but I do. If you want a speedy blog, then choose a better webhosting company, this blog is hosted with pacifichost and they offer Award Winning cPanel Hosting from only $4.95. Also their support is one of the best in the industry, most of my support ticket were taken care of within 60 minutes. If you are having a crappy server then choosing pacifichost is something I really recommend.

2. Minimize Your Plugins And Widgets Usage

Excessive plugins means more codes that needs to be processed by your server. Do not hold many plugins installed on your blog that practically serves no real purpose. Also its a good idea to check what are the plugins which really causes your blog pages to load slower and try to find a faster laternative for it.

3. Messy Database Can Slow Down Your Blog

Try to access your PhpMyAdmin and delete the tables which you are not using and try to clear of the overhead space and optimze all the tables to keep it super clean and light. Optimizing your database will result in faster loading blog. Check the detailed tutorial on how you can make use of phpmyadmin for wordpress blog

4. Minimalist Theme

Using a minimalist theme is a good idea to reduce your blog loading time, avoid using themes which demands too many addons and plugins to function. There are a loads of professional looking themes which have a minimalist approach, settling for one might be a good idea. Also using using theme frameworks can be an excellent idea, as most the frameworks comes with plenty of builtin functions in itself eliminating the need for using many plugins.

5. Image Usage

There are lots of blogs which use images in uncompressed png format, using png images are fine but you need to know that these format images always tend to have a bigger file size when compared to  compressed image formats like jpg and gif. Your best bet would be opt for these compressed formats as their file size are a lot lesser which would prove to speed up your blog a bit. Also its a good idea to hiding the images from being visible in the homepage and archive sections. Display images when your user wants to view the post.

6. Avoid Social Plugins

You might feel good to see your posts got retweeted number of times, but you should know that when your readers really like your posts they will share it with their friends no matter what. Social plugins like twitter and facebook has really proved to increase your pageload times a lot, I mean A LOT! best option would be use an alternative without a plugin or don’t have it at all. I remember my blog taking three seconds more just because of it having a retweet button near the post. Three seconds is a lot of time.

7. Paginate Your Comments

One more thing which takes up a lot of time for blog pages to load are the comments. More comments you got on your posts more slower it going to load. Best way to reduce it would be paginating your comments, just display the first five to ten comments at the bottom of your posts and make the excess comments move to next comment page. Remove the gravatar support in your wordpress admin and also if possible have a small button called view comments at the bottom of your post so that only users who are interested in comments can access them.

8. Reduce Traking Scripts

Avoid using number of tracking scripts in your blog, just stick to a single one, if you are using Google analytics just stick to it and remove the others or if you like some other service use it and remove the rest. Too many tracking scripts are going to slow down your blog. Also avoid using stat plugins like wp-stats and wassup for example.

Related posts:

1. 7 Tips On How To Make Your Blog Load Faster
2. 5 Best Ways To Reduce Bounce Rate On Your Blog
3. 5 Best Tips On How To Get More Comments On Your Blog

1. Permalinks:

First thing that comes to my mind about wordpress in terms of search engine optimization is the flexibility it provides with respect to url structure. You can alter the structure of permalinks to your liking and add keywords you want to focus on for each and every post you make. You should know that search engines even look in to the url when ranking webpages in its index.

2. Simple But Effective Default Theme

WordPress now comes with a really attractive default theme. This theme is not only flexible but it also loads pretty fast and codings in this theme is very clean and search engine friendly. You should know that latest search engine from Google does take site speed in to consideration. So using default theme can help you to rank high in search results now

3. WordPress codes Are Clean

Stable releases of wordpress always has clean codes, although latest version of wordpress does have some issues with memory limit. As far as I know the people who are involved in coding wordpress really know what they are doing and they are pretty good at it. So how does it help in terms of SEO? well if codes are clean blog pages displayed by wordpress is also clean, also uses less server resources that means your pages loads fast and overall site speed increases. This will not only enhance user experience it also makes the job of search bots a lot easier.

4. Usage Of Tags

With wordpress you get the ability to tag your posts, it not only gives you an additional navigational option but also lets search bots to find your internal pages and posts more easily. WordPress also lets you to post your tags in your homepage which eases the process further for search engine spiders.

5. Categories

You also get the ability to categorize your posts in wordpress. Which means you can use keywords in your category names and also wordpress gives you an option to alter the url slugs of category names, so you can use multiple versions of your keywords. Which is a good thing.

6. Easily optimize Images

With insert image function you can easily upload the images and also optimize the images easily by adding alt and title tags, wordpress provides you with a feature that will let you to not only add title for your images but also you can add captions for each images. Search engines loves pics with all these information embedded in to image url and use them to index it on its image results.

7. Make Pages

You can post pages in wordpress, meaning you can make pages for important keywords you want to focus on and have it on your navigation, Makes it easy for search engines to find your pages and rank it. You can take the wordpress seo page which you can find in the navigation for this blog. Also check where I rank for the term in Google

8. Make A Static Homepage

You can write a detailed page with all the keywords you want to focus on in your homepage and make it static instead of displaying your recent posts in the homepage which keeps changing always. This will really help you with your rankings.

9. Ability To Comment On Posts And Pages For Users

I cannot count how many times people have found my blog posts through the comments which my readers left on the blog. Blog comments does bring you a good deal of traffic especially when your blog gets popular. Also search engines give importance to posts with more comments in it.

10. Pinging Option

You can easily ping your posts to various pinging services easily with wordpress. All you have to do is fill in the ping form with all the urls you need.

Related posts:

1. How To Integrate Google Analytics With Adsense And Benefits

Most cases whenever people think about optimizing their wordpress blog for search engines the only plugin that comes in to their mind is all in one SEO plugin for wordpress and no wonder its the most popular SEO plugin there. On the other hand if you really need a plugin that will practically do all the things which all in one SEO plugin does with very little work then SEO ultimate plugin is something I would highly recommend. Why? you will know as we proceed through this tutorial.

If you want to follow through this guide then go ahead download and install SEO Ultimate plugin straight way.

So now you have installed the plugin lets go straight ahead on how we can use this plugin to better optimize our blog for search engines.

You should now notice a whole new array of options available to you in the wordpress admin panel with the lable SEO. just like the one the picture below.

So we will be using these features available to use through this plugin and lets see how we can do that.

1. Canonicalizer Avoid Duplicate Content Issues:

One of the main problem commonly faced by many bloggers is that their blog often getting penalized by search engines for hosting duplicate content and duplicate content doesn’t necessarily mean that you are copying your contents from somewhere else, they could be right within your site. For example when you add tags to your posts, your tag links redirects you to the same content as your post title links is it not? by default search engines consider them as seperate urls and index both this potentially increases the risk of duplicate content. Generating link rel = canonical tags will avoid such issues and tells search engines that they direct to the same content. This will let search engines to decide up on the best url it wants to index keeping you out of danger. To do so just choose canonicalizer and choose generate rel = canonical tags

2. Install Analytics And Other Tracking Codes:

Code inserter option lets you to insert the desired codes in to your blog, for example you can use it to insert the Google analytics code or if you are using any other tracking services you can use this place to insert those codes and it really does come handy and makes your job a lot more simples.

3. Comp researcher:

This option mainly lets you to use different search parameters you can use to analyze your competition in Google really quickly and easily. As far as I know there is no other plugin in wordpress which comes with this option. It should be really helpful to get a rough picture about your competition and with whom you are sharing your search results.

4.Deeplink Juggernaut:

I must say this is one of my favorite tools that comes with this plugin, if you have read my wordpress seo tutorial I was mentioning about the importance of internal links and how it could potentially affect your search rankings. With this tool your work to achieve best internal links is made possible. All you have to do is fill in the url and keyword you want that url to be linked to and update. Once your updates are done you should notice that whenever the term you have submitted here appears anywhere in your blog post it is automatically linked to the url you have mentioned here. Don’t you think that drastically reduces your work to edit each and every post to add the links to the keywords? also it improves the pagerank distribution across your site. So why not go ahead and fill in the urls and keywords you want to focus on? you can also control the maximum amount of links you want to appear on your posts through content link settings.

5. File Editor:

This option mainly helps to alter your robots.txt and .htaccess right from your admin panel. it sure does come handy rather than using your ftp to locate these files and editing it from there. This one is optional if you don’t want to use it its still fine.

6. Internal Relevance Researcher:

Again this tool can come handy when you want to search in Google for certain posts of yours with the keywords. I don’t want to put this one in detail again as its not something which you need to be bothered much in this context. So lets proceed to the next option.

7. Link Box Inserter:

This is something which I don’t use in this blog, but still I highly encourage to use this feature. What it does? it gives out the link to the post at the end of post or pages or where ever you want it to appear. Extremely helpful when people want to share your posts and pages somewhere else.

8. Meta Editor:

This option covers the important aspect of SEO, it lets you to add meta description about your blog and also to insert meta keywords. Though meta keywords are no more used by Google you can use it to focus on other search engines. Additionally it lets you to add verification codes for Google , yahoo and bing. Which is nice in my opinion.

9. More Link Customizer:

Helps you to optimize the read more links when you use more tags in your posts to avoid displaying the whole of your article in homepage. And you can optimize it to focus on the keywords you want in your more link, you can also add custom more keywords for each post using the seo settings which will be available for you under the post editor once you install this plugin.

10. No Index Manager:

No index manager mainly lets you not to prevent duplicate content by not allowing certain pages of your site to get in to index like tags pages, author archives etc.

11. sharing Facilitator:

Lets you to share your posts to social media sites by adding add this and share this button to your posts. This is something I really love to use on my blogs as it makes the job a lot easier to share your links and also build links in social media sites.

12. Slug Optimizer:

This option lets you to keep your url clean by removing unwanted words in your urls such as “in” “of” “for” etc. Eliminate the need for installing another plugin to do this job. I found it really helpful on many of my blogs.

13. Title Tag Rewriter:

Lets you to rewrite the title tags of posts, pages, tags etc very easily and all in one single area. You don’t have to go in search of codes in to your wordpress files. Again reduces lot more work for you and saves time.

14. SEO Settings:

This is something which really comes handy, this option which appears just below your post editor lets you to add meta titles, meta description, meta keywords, meta robots tag and more link text for every single post you make. Something which I love the most about this plugin. Use these areas sensibly and stand out of your competition.

Related posts:

1. SEO Ultimate Plugin For WordPress Blogs
2. Headspace2 Best SEO Plugin For WordPress Blogs
3. Wassup WordPress Plugin – Best Real Time Stats Plugin

To be frank I give more importance for on-page optimization over off-page, that doesn’t mean off-page optimization is not important. but my personal opinion is on-page optimization carries 60% of SEO over off-page, I know many seo-professionals and experts may not agree with me but its my personal opinion. Whenever I design a blog I focus more on my visitors and I design my blog based on it, I do analyze what are the age groups, their behavior patterns and other details about my visitors and decide up on my layout accordingly.

I make sure my pages loads faster, I use colors that are pleasing and relaxing for my users and goes easy on their eyes, I always prefer to have a white background with black font as its universally accepted and loved by many. In almost all of my blogs and also on some of my client blogs I make sure the content comes to the left corner because that’s where the user eyes tend to fall.

I am not a big fan of ads on blogs but I do need to monetize it in order to support my hosting costs and also I depend on my blogs for my income, I make sure I place ads on spots that don’t annoy my users, I avoid using video and image ads, I always prefer text ads as it proved to get me more clicks and also they don’t spoil your page layout much, also for some SEO reasons. I think internal linking plays a very great role in your rankings in search engines, I use SEO smart links by Vladimir prelovac, in fact I am a great fan of his works that I use almost all the plugin developed by him. You can check out more on what I do for on-page seo on my wordpress seo tutorial its a real big guide worth spending some time on for sure.

With regards to off-page optimization I love to comment on blogs, do-follow blogs especially, I hate RSS feed submissions but I do allow RSS for my subscribers, mostly I find people link to me naturally and I love it when they do, other than that I use seo elite software to look through links of my competitors and build links on those sites which they have links in, because search engines tend to analyze your site’s relevancy based on your links, so if you have links on pages where your competitors are then it sure does influence your rankings in a great way. Other than that I do make up contents sometimes in order to go viral and gather more links for me, I tend to submit them in social media sites like digg.

I do a lot of other things occasionally on my blogs, I cannot discuss everything, I try to reveal things more frequently on this blog as I update it with more interesting articles.

Related posts:

1. How To Optimize Custom More Text Link In Blog For Better Rankings
2. How To Optimize Your Images In Your blog For SEO
3. How To Optimize Your Titles For SEO In WordPress

1. Enabling Web Server Compression:
Enabling web server compression will reduce the size of your pages by compressing them, this will help you a lot with faster page loads, load on the server, also search bots will find it helpful to crawl through pages with reduced file size, it increases the over all site performance and user experience. To enable this compression all you need to do is create a php.ini file in your server root and include these lines in it.

zlib.output_compression=on

if you already have php.ini just include these lines in to it at first or at the end.

Use Wp-cache:
I recommend using wp-cache over wp-supercache for a simple reason, I really didn’t find much of a difference with both, although if you find noticeable difference with both I would say its worth to stick with wp-cache because supercache proved to be little buggy or problematic when you move your blog to some other location or while selling your blog or if you want to uninstall the plugin. I have noticed using wp-cache with web server compression enabled has increased the blog loading speed to a great extent which is more than enough than loading a script or plugin on your blog which can be little buggy and troublesome at times.

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2. Tricks Theme-2 – Simple But Powerful SEO Theme
3. Site Speed To Be Taken In to Consideration For Google Rankings