WordPress SEO, WP SEO, Nofollow and Page Titles

So after changing from Joomla to WordPress I eventually got a few hours this evening to take a look at the site from an search engine optimisation point of view and sort a few things out.

1. As with any blog. I was getting pages from my archive indexed. So although only running a small wordpress site. I was already creating duplicate content. Go me. So I added noindex to my archive posts as by putting the following line into the header.php

<?php if(is_archive()){ ?><meta name="robots" content="noindex"><?php } ?>

2. I was having issues with my page titles. The default page title is as follows:

<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php else is_page() ?><?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>

Pretty rubbish so I changed it to:

<?php wp_title(); ?> :: <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?>

This was good but now my page titles looked as follows:

<< Post Title :: Blog Title

Some weird character at the start of the post. It turns out that is put in by wp_title. So I changed it to

<?php wp_title(’’); ?>

This basically put nothing into the title. So I get the page titles I wanted.

3. I also followed a pretty cool technique on how to add nofollow to links in your blogroll. The process is detailed pretty well here:

Blackdog Blog

Worth checking out …

4. Lastly I just installed Headspace2. So need to get my head around that. I am a no wordpress guru but shouldn’t take me more than a few weeks to figure out the basics of SEO on one of these.

Related posts:

1. What to do with your NoFollow Tags now
2. Rel=Nofollow PR just evaporates :: SEO News
3. SEO for Joomla Site – NoFollow tags for Read More Links, PDF, Email and Print Icons
4. The Long Tail Rawks – SEO for WordPress
5. Google’s Operation Bendover – Nofollow PR Going Missing ?

Tagged as: nofollow tags, weird character page titles blackdog header php blog archive rubbish blogroll guru point of view, wordpress seo

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