Web Application Design, Development & Innovation in Cape Town

Pumping Up WordPress For SEO – WordPress is an incredibly popular blogging platform and CMS system. This session shows you how to quickly tune WordPress with plugins and settings to get the most out of technical SEO. Programmed by Jane & Robot.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

• Jon Henshaw, Co-Creator & Product Manager, Raven Internet Marketing Tools
• Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
• Jordan Kasteler, Co-Founder, Search & Social

Michael Gray aka @graywolf is making a special appearance for the Q&A at the end. Due to a double booking Jordan Kasteler is talking first.

• Create a robots.txt to block out the unwanted files like the wp-admin folder. If using a template
• rename image files
• rename css, ids and classes
• Put blog post first in <title>.
• Canonical URLs, use them!
• Remove dynamic code as much as possible, make as much static as possible. Convert dynamic code to HTML to speed up page loading.
• Create SE friendly URL, remove month and date and only inlcude the post name.
• Slug Trimmer removes short words (because words like “a” and “the” are rarely significant), shortest first.
• Create user and SEO friendly Navigation with WP-page numbers
• fill out category description to get categories ranking
• Remove unnecessary links to save link juice
• Brad Crumbs are great for usability and Search Engines to find where post lies in infomation architecture
• Create custom 404 page to for dead links and monitor with GOggle Webmaster Tools and 301 redirect links to where you want.
• User Generated Content is Very Important, use the dofollow plugin to entice commentors and the top commentator widget

This post will be continued to include the rest of the talk. I’m off to register the raf.iq domain.