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I spent a few hours last night making sure that all of my Wordpress blogs were optimized, SEO was good and that the blogs were in fact running correctly. I went through a lot of steps but I have a bunch of blogs, some running Wordpress 2.3 and some running Wordpress 2.5 and did all of the optimizing for SEO at the same time.

Here are the steps that I took on each of the blogs

1. Getting rid of extra Wordpress plugins - I got rid of all of the extra SEO plugins knowing that I was going to be using the All in one SEO Pack. I had a bunch of other meta tag stuff and URL rewriting stuff but I just wanted to standardize. Another plugin that I upgraded on all blogs was the Sociable plugin that puts little “Share this on social networking sites” buttons under each post.

The reason that I did this work is that I was getting errors and my sites have been non standard with a lot of different version of the plugins above. Standardization is a great thing to have.

By the way, there is a story out there that plugins that are set as inactive will still be a drag on your site, slowing page loads so I also got rid of all the unused plugins by deleting them off of the server.

2. Standardizing URLs and nofollow to search engines - I like to have all of my posts only have the title of the post instead of the standard with is “blogname >> Post title”. This change makes your titles more relevent to search engines in that they will know what the page should be about, often the blog title is just extraneous info to them and is not necessary.

Setting no follow and no index to the archives of my blog was an effort by me to get rid of duplicate content on pages and have a tighter set of pages for the search engines to worry about. I have been really agressive with noindex over the last couple of months but last night started an experiment to allow the search engines to index my categories and my tag pages. We will see how this works out across all of the blogs

I was able to set these settings in the All in one SEO plugin and now that it is set Google should see a lot more pages and index tag pages and index category pages in Wordpress now.

I am going to watch my traffic across the 10 blogs that I am running and will see over all of these sites how much change there is in pages indexed but more importantly the amount of traffic that I get.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 11:39 am and is filed under seo.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.