SEO Plug-Ins vs The Walrus

[walrus]

Let me start by saying I do not consider myself a SEO expert. I read, I test theories and then I apply common sense to what I think I’ve learned. The information provided seems to work for me and my blogs and I see no reason why they shouldn’t work for anyone else.

If you’re worried about optimizing your blog pages and using a SEO plug in, it’s my belief that you are adding an additional strain on a script that really isn’t very efficient in the first place.

All SEO plug-ins target 4 area's of search engine optimization, the title tag, the meta description tag, the meta keyword tag and duplicate content inherent to a blog CMS. Even with the SEO plug in you have only done a small part of optimization.

Meta Tags are not a Magical Solution

Meta tags do not and probably never been a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on a search engine. I believe that the most valuable features they have to offer us bloggers is the ability to control to some degree how our web pages are being described by some search engines. They also offer the ability to prevent pages from being indexed at all.

The meta tags along with your title tag reside in the header.php of your theme between the head tags

The Title Tag

<title>Your Title here</title>

The title tag is used for two things, one related to the surfer, the other with search engines.

For the surfer, the title tag is the text that's seen at the top of you browser window and if the site is bookmarked, the text that describes the bookmark.

For search engine relevance the title tag is the most important location for you targeted keywords. I’m not talking about spamming your keywords here. I’m talking about making sure that at least one or perhaps two of you most targeted keyword phrases should be a part of this title.

Most wordpress themes use your blog title (entered in settings / general) for the title tag and for category pages and post pages it combines your blog title along with either the category name or the post / page title.

Most SEO plug ins allow you to add a description for your index and will allow you to enter a different title for a post if you feel the need. If you don't enter a different post title it uses the post / page title you made when you created the post / page.

I'm not sure why you would want the meta title to be different than the post title. In both instances, I would think that you would want the title to contain your most precious phrases you want to rank for. If your going back trying to correct past mistakes, I personally think you can find more productive ways to spend you time.

I personally like to use my blog title plus the tag line I enter for my index title. My category title is my category name - without the blog title - and for my page / post title I use the title of the page / post itself. Below is a sample of the code I use in my header.

<title>
<?php
// let's generate info appropriate title tag for index page
if (is_home()) {
// we're on the home page, so let's show blog name and tagline
(bloginfo('name')); echo " "; (bloginfo('description'));
}
else { (wp_title());
}
?></title>

If you want to use your own description, different from your blog title you simply change the a single line

This line changes from:
(bloginfo('name')); echo " "; (bloginfo('description'));
to
(echo "Your Blog Title Here";)

The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page with the search engines that support the tag. Generally 200 – 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of that amount will be used in the display.

It is worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, because it gives you some degree of control with various search engines but I have not found anywhere that it affects your search engine relevance or placement. It does help in that it gives the surfer enough information to decide if he is going to click your link.

Wordpress themes don’t support the tag. I'm not sure why but WP doesn't allow you to enter a description so there is no automated way to get one into the header.

Most SEO plug ins allow you to enter a description for your index and encourage you to use the post excerpt for a posts meta description. Some will even pull the first 160 or so characters from your post for the post description if you don't enter an excerpt.

Since the description is not used in determining relevance, I try to write a description that will interest the surfer and use that description on all pages. I see it like this, the title tells the surfer he's found what he's looking for, the description explains why the resource is worthy of his click.

I add the following code to the header file:

<META name=”description” content=”Your Description Here”>

Meta Keywords

Again Wordpress doesn't support keywords.

The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for search engines to index along with your body copy. How does this help you? Well, for most major spiders, it doesn't. That's because MOST search engines now ignore the tag.

The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for ON THE FEW SEARCH ENGINES THAT SUPPORT IT. For instance, if you had a page about anal sex -- AND you say the words anal sex at various places in your body copy -- then mentioning the words "anal sex" in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words. It does no good to have a keyword in your meta tag if it is not somewhere in your content!

Notice all the caveats in that statement. Given that a blog is dynamic and things are constantly changing for keyword to even have the possibility of influencing your search engine relevance, on those few engines that do pay any attention to them, you would need to be adjusting your index page, category pages and tag pages every time you post and you would have to be able to set keywords on a post by post basis for your post pages.

Most SEO plug ins allow you to enter keywords, some will use either your categories or your tags as keywords.

I use the simple tag plug in. This gives me improved keyword management over the wordpress tagging system, it allows me to use my own list of keywords and auto-tags all of my posts from that list and will automatically generate the keyword meta tag. It also means I don't worry about the mechanics of adding keyword to a post.

Duplicate Content

DO NOT NOINDEX anything on a production blog. There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. There is a duplicate content filter. But whether it’s a penalty or a filter, it is extremely unlikely anything on your blog would be found as duplicate content anyway.

Lets look at this logically for a moment. You’ve got your blog setup to display the most recent 10 posts on the index page. Which means it will also show 10 posts on the category page, the tag page and any other archive page you have.

Compared to the post page (1 post) all of these other pages will have less than 10% of the content duplicated. I seriously doubt that would trigger any type of filtering.

Compare the category page to the index page. Unless you tend to file everything into the same category, the odds are pretty slim that you would exceed 20% duplicate. Is that enough to trigger the filter, who knows but is triggering the filter a bad thing. Do you really care if a surfer finds your blog, your content through the category pages, index pages, tag pages or archive pages? I don’t. That is what the duplicate content filter does; it selects which one of these pages to show. It does not affect your ranking on any of them.

In fact, noindexing could actually hurt you in the long run. It could be that the combination of posts on a category page, because a spider uses the complete page to look for keywords, could increase your ranking over, lets say the index page. A tag page should definitely increase your relevance over any other page on your blog. Why, because the keyword density on the tag page should be higher than the keyword density on a single page or any other page.

Preventing the search engine spiders from indexing them must limit your search engine relevancy more than the duplicate content filter could harm you.

[Lucifuge]

Very nice, thanks Walrus.

[secretagentwilly]

Thanks for sharing the wisdom, I'm going to read that a few times and see if I can grasp it...thanks

[hashbury]

So Basically, You can do everything that a seo plugin can do but better(leaving out the unnecessary crap). And you dont have to worry about straining you wp script.
I have seo plugins on 40 or so blogs. Im going to change it around a bit when i have time.
This is really good info, Thanks walrus

[digifan]

Thank you Walrus

[ronnie]

Great post.. From some one who probably used to many plug-ins..and those darn widgets..lol

Couple things I would like to add that I believe should be included in SEO, but few people look at it or take it into account.

The SE's are looking for content, this we know, they are not looking for code. What seemed to work well for me was to basically strip my single post pages, because often they included un-necessary content and far too much un-needed extra code. Side bars are a good example, do they really help your page?

I also use to use a social bookmarking plug-in that made the pages look so cool because they had all these cool social media icons. That is until I really looked at all the extra code. Crap that plug-in alone would over power most pages content, content v.s. code that is. I then started using a plug-in that put in two lines of JS and that was it. Cut down the code by at least 90%.

I looked at a blog today, had a real nice comments section. It had all these cool smilie faces you could add to your comment, but here again, a ton of extra code that did not help the the SEO of the page, better chance it was hurting it.

It's a pretty safe bet that it is your single post pages that will have the best chance of getting ranked. I've always kinda seen the index pages are a blow off page, because it's tough to focus or narrow in on one keyword/phrase on the index, there is too much going on.

So I usually stripped down the single post pages to only the bare necessities. Usually all that was left was the post content, a couple navigation links and usually I put up the category listing.

Again just my two cents and I hope I haven't taken away from the original post..

[walrus]

ronnie, great addition to the post and something I hadn't really thought about. Your right there is a ton of crap in almost every theme that you can probably do without.

[LeRoy]

Thanks walrus. Just started a little blog hub today. So I'm just pokin' around.

Good stuff.

[raven1083]

thanks for sharing it i really do appreciate it