The Day Today

After performing some search engine optimisation for this blog by setting up wpSEO I discovered UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrier). This plugin will allow wpSEO to add tags as keywords to the meta tags for posts, which would be a far smarter idea than the current wpSEO behavior of adding the first 20 or so words of the entry as keywords. Until now I’ve been using categories in Wordpress as if they were tags, and as a result I have lots and lots of categories.

Installation is as simple as any Wordpress plugin, and the configuration (Options, Tags) allows you to set how tags look in the URL, add tags as keywords in the page meta information (I’m letting wpSEO do this), automatically add links to tags, and automatically add categories as tags.

By far the most impressive feature for me is the Tag Suggestions (courtesy of Yahoo!) because now I can just click a button and then select relevant tags from the list provided. A nice way of adding tags you almost forgot!

Update: Setting up the tag cloud took some time, and involved editing some themes but it’s there now and I’ve reduced the number of cataegories so it’s all looking good now.

This blog’s been running again now for a few weeks, and Google Analytics reports are looking healthy for such a new site, however I came across a Wordpress plugin that should improve my ranking by search engines. This entry is a guide to using the wpSEO plugin, written as I implement it on this site.

It seems that a Wordpress blog without plugins or tweaks is not well optimised for search engines. One problem that may be causing your site to possibly not even appear on search results is that Wordpress could generate multiple URLs for each entry (by date, title, id, etc) and you can actually be penalized for this by search engines and be temporarily excluded from their index.

wpSEO is written by Sergej Müller in Germany and is currently in version 2.1. Make sure you download the English version, unzip in onto your machine and then copy (or FTP) it to your Wordpress plugins directory (/wp-content/plugins/). Once this is done, go to the ‘Plugins’ tab within your Wordpress admin site and activate wpSEO.

To configure wpSEO go to the ‘Options’ tab and the ‘wpSEO’ subtab.

Before you activate the wpSEO plugin make sure no <title>, <meta name=”description”> or <meta name=”keywords”> tags are stored in header.php. Those would conflict with the wpSEO plugin. You can uncomment those tags in header.php.

In my theme I needed to comment out the title, but there were no meta tags for description or keywords - an obvious area for search engine optimisation. I’ve left the Convert Title settings as their defaults, with the exception of changing the article label to “entry” so my titles would mostly be “[title] » entry » TheDayToday”.

For the Convert Description I added the following default value “TheDayToday is the blog of an IT professional providing solutions and advice on subjects encoutered in his day-to-day life.” It’s a bit lame but it’s all I could think of for now. I changed the article and page descriptions to take part of the post for the description. All other pages use the default. The description is truncated to 20 characters.

wpSEO attempts to extract keywords from the entries, which may not be an ideal situation. It can use STP or UTW tags, which will be worth investigating for further search engine optimisation - I feel another post here.

Another cool feature of wpSEO is the ability to export the settings as an XML file, which means I can use this as a template for other weblogs I may need to optimise. Using wpSEO is very easy however there could be more documentation to assist in understanding each of the configuration options. Only time will tell if this plugin will benefit me, but it certainly wont do any harm!