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:
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.
