Getting your WordPress SEO right is probably the most important part of running your SEO blog. It’s true you can drive to your website with PPC, Article marketing, or various other ways, but it is essential to use SEO to your advantage to keep your costs down. After all, who doesn’t like getting free traffic.
One of the issues that many wordpress bloggers have to deal with is the issue of content duplication. The template that you use, and they way WordPress is designed in general can get you in trouble with search engines. For instance, in most blogs, domain.com/cat1/cat2 story and domain.com/cat1/story return the same page which could be counted as duplicate content on major search engines. So you want to make sure you address potential duplicate content issues with your WordPress blog as soon as possible.
The issue of link weight is also important towards for your SEO efforts, so you want to make sure you are not leaking pagerank by linking out to unrelated sites (either through comments or links on your pages). Well you can address this issue by adding the META Robots tag as below:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>
If you are familiar with HTML, you know that the above meta robots tags, when added to your pages, instructs search engines to follow the links on the page and index them as well. Now if you have 200 pages, you simply cannot customize your robots tag per page easily. That’s just not how WordPress is designed right now. But that’s where META Robots plugin comes in.
META Robots WordPress plugin allows you to apply the above tag to all your pages. In addition, the box below shows up under each and every post, allowing you to override the settings for each post. This plugin allows to avoid indexing your META pages and other useless pages as well, which can only help your SEO efforts.
Now here is what you should know before using this plugin:
- You want to make sure your WordPress template comes with a call to wp_head().
- You want to make sure your theme is using wp_list_categories for listing categories. META Robots is not compatible with older function calls such as list_cats.
- You want to make sure you don’t add no index or no follow if you don’t know what you are doing. If you add no index to your homepage, your homepage will not be indexed by Google, and your site could drop from the face of the earth.
But give this a try. It’s simply an amazing simple but powerful WordPress plugin and it’s free too!