Optimizing WordPress for SEO

Today we set out to further optimize our company website. We wanted to:

1. Eliminate /category/ from the url for category archives
2. Redirects to accommodate changes to /category/
3. Add paged navigation for archives and the main blog page
4. Add related posts when users are viewing individual posts

After a little digging around we found a few easy to implement solutions for these changes.

Initially it looked like we had to change the category-template.php file in /wp-includes/. With the rate that WordPress releases new versions (seems like every other week) this option was not a very favorable one. Plus it meant we had to remember to not overwrite the category-template.php file. We eventually found a great WordPress plugin called No Category Base that not only handles eliminating the /category/ but also provides redirects necessary to ensure we don’t get a 404 error. Having solved #1 and #2 in one shot we moved on to the rest of the list.

If you need page navigation without the “older entries” and “newer entries” you should check out Lester Chans WordPress plugin WP Page Navi. Lester has some great plugins so make sure to check them out when you visit his site. This plugin worked right out of the box providing page navigation for our main blog page and archives.

Last but not least we wanted to show other related posts to visitors when reading an individual post. Another added benefit aside from increasing the number of pages that people visit, it also improves search engine optimization of the website. Since we are using /%post-name%/ for our permalinks we get 5 keyword rich urls on every blog posts pointing to other posts on our site. After looking around we decided on Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. This worked like a charm and we didn’t even have to place any code in single.php.

Now that we have covered more of the basics its time to move onto more time consuming optimization activities but first its probably time to add a few more descriptions to past portfolio examples.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 4:52 pm in News & Media. Follow any responses through RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.