Better SEO for Wordpress - 2 major aspects of WP blogs many people overlook

Google loves Wordpress blogs! I'm not saying Google likes Wordpress more than any other platform such as custom html sites, but it's an easy to configure, and easy to optimize platform. Google doesn't like, 'straight out of the box' Wordpress blogs, obviously.

It likes sites with SEO friendly URLs, meta tags, sitemaps, etc. None of which comes from a fresh out of the box Wordpress Install.

Anyways, back to the main point. I wanted to provide some quick tips to help you optimize your Wordpress blogs better, than you might be already. I'm more or less talking about niche sites here, or 'sniper sites' whatever you call them. 5-10 pages or whatever.

1 - Wordpress links to the SAME content WAY TO MANY TIMES on the same blog.

Homepage displays your posts, you click on the title of a post, you go to the post you were already reading.

Widgets lead to the same content. The 'posted in 'category-name' link under posts leads to the same content.

The 'tags' under your posts lead to the same content. You know where I'm going right?
Heck, the only content on your blogs NOT linked to over and over are your pages!

So how do you fix that? Simple, here are a few things you can do to help.

Find a theme, or create one which doesn't make use of the 'posted in category' link in posts, or the 'tags' links at the bottom of posts. Both of those things are unnecessary for small niche blogs, and eliminates 2 links leading to the same exact content with different URLs. If you have a huge site with several categories and different tag groups, then this is a great feature, otherwise, ditch it.

Always make use of canonical urls! Whether it's via the all in one seo pack or otherwise. This 'in a nutshell' tells Google you have a main source of the content, and all the identical content on different URLs isn't duplicate content.

Also, the widget on the side. If you display all of your posts on your home page, why the heck should you have links to them in the sidebar? That's another batch of links leading to the exact same content.

With an HTML site, you could make your widgets display whatever links you want, per page. So if your homepage displays the first 3 articles, the sidebar would link to the last 3 articles, and vice versa. With Wordpress, you have to use special plug-ins to do that, or edit your sidebar.php file which can get dangerous!

So if you have small Wordpress blogs that display all of your posts on the homepage, why not just put links to your 'pages' in your sidebar instead?

You see, Google likes websites with a CLEAR HIERARCHY. Meaning, homepage > other content > useful info. Rather than the typical Wordpress setup homepage > same content > same content. You see?

I'm not pulling your leg here. That is a huge overlooked step in optimizing Wordpress blogs. Google doesn't like sites with 10 links to the same darn post, on a 5 page site! Know what I mean?

2 - Wordpress generally provides IRRELEVANT content FIRST, rather than your keyword rich content.

I'm an SEO freak ok? I test things all the time, I do things wrong on PURPOSE just to see what happens. I do things the way I think it should be side by side with the wrong way, and see the results.

I've proven this fact to myself, PROVIDE YOUR KEYWORD RICH CONTENT FIRST, and your generic, supporting content LAST!

For example, I consider the about us page, contact us page, sitemap, privacy policy etc to be 'supporting' and 'generic' content! This should NOT come FIRST on your blog.

You know the typical 'nav bar' at the top of most blog themes? Those pages should be at the BOTTOM of your blog, under your keyword rich content.

Have you ever looked at your website in a text browser? This is similar to the way search engines see your site.
Go to Lynx Viewer

What I noticed, is that if you have your sidebar on the RIGHT, this content displays LAST in the text browser. If the sidebar is on the LEFT, this content appears ABOVE your main content, kind of like a table of contents.

So, sidebar on the RIGHT allows search engine spiders to read your main content first, assuming they view your site similar to it's appearance in a text browser. Thus I have found, that having the sidebar on the right, is better for SEO (assuming the text browser theory), which I believe to be true.

So, what 2 major things have I learned to implement on my niche wordpress blogs?

1 - Don't link to the same content on your blog 100 different ways
2 - Make KEYWORD RICH content available to spiders, before supporting generic pages.