Advanced WordPress Design Tips – Day 14

Here we are 30 days into the 30 Day Guide to Internet Marketing success and today I’m going to teach you some advanced WordPress design tips. At this point you should have your website or blog up and fully running! You should have some very useful content on your site and have begun the marketing via the tips I have provided on the previous days. Today though I really want to dive deep into the WordPress system and how to use it as efficiently as possible.

Keep in mind WordPress is a great CMS(Content Management System) but there are some flaws that need to be taken care of before you get too far into your blogging experience. At this point you should have had the All in One SEO Plugin installed. If you haven’t you need to right now! This will make WordPress’ non friendly SEO habits and make them as SEO friendly as possible.

I also suggest the SEO title tag plugin, this removes all of the duplicate content from the title of your pages and allows you to create a customized title for any post, static page, category page, or any other link. Naturally WordPress leaves your blogs title in every page of wordpress, this doesn’t benefit the readers or the search engines in anyway and search engines will simply ignore it anyways. This plug in allows you to fully customize your title’s to more search engine friendly alternatives. Seo-Title-Tag-Plugin.

Another problem, even one that I fell victim to with this blog, is not enforcing the WWW prior to my link, sure www.internet-marketing-data.com will work but I’m not enforcing it. I simply overlooked this, funny as this is my internet marketing blog and all my non related blogs are set up correctly! Oh well, we all make mistakes. Anyhow, by not enforcing the www prior to your domain name you are leaking page rank and value as a result! Don’t let this happen and get full credit for your page. Add this plug in, as it will take care of it for you, automatically. Enforce WWW preference.

Speaking of leaking values of pagerank, one of the most important things to consider when creating any website is how each page links to one another. Most say that wordpress is set up to pass good keyword value form one page to another, and it is in many ways, although at the same time there are alot of things that I would personally change to make it even more efficient.

Archive Links

Placing archive links in your sidebar, or anywhere else that the sidebar is pulled up on every page of the site is a very big no no. You are not only wasting valuable links by having a whole list of links on every page with the keyword “March 2006” attached to them. Unless this is a critical part of your site from a visitors perspective, keep all of your archive links in the archive section of your website.

Recent Comment Links

This one is really crucial, I see blogs all the time set up using the recent comments on their sidebar. They typically pass on the link of the person that comments to their website, thus having EVERY page linking to that persons website. That is wasting a huge amount or link resources to an unknown source/website and Google doesn’t like that. What you want to do is remove the link in the posters name and have it link to the title of that posted page. Thus giving your other page some weight.

Statewide Links with NO Keyword Value

This is something that can be difficult and hard to do, even I am not doing it. I have mixed ideas about this theory, although it does make alot of sense. Here is what it is, basically you have things like “about”, “privacy policy”, “about” on every page. Search engines don’t assign any value to them typically and thus you are wasting resources for links. Thus in theory you should change the text to a picture if at all possible. Although this makes your blog even more weighty in size and slows down load time.

Here is the bottom line, every link or at least the majority of the links on your site should be set up to pass keyword value on to the next page that they link to. If currently you aren’t used to this idea, start implementing it from now on.

Most people are under the impression that links from other websites are what’s important to achieve better rankings, but they are not considering the fact that the internal pages of their own sites can actually offer more link value and thus its much easier to achieve. This is a simple but somehow people think advanced wordpress design tip. Not sure why!

Duplicate Content

This is something that is often misunderstood by alot of people. Most think that duplicate content simply means any portion of text that is copied and or duplicated from either your site or from someone else’s, typically in the form of a post or content. Obviously that is true, but there is more to the dupe penalty then most people realize. This has to do with the header of your site and the sidebars.  Lets back up to the archive theory, lets assume that you have a year worth of archive links in your sidebar, and you have the 10 most recent posts showing, 10 recent comments, your nav system, a blogroll and so on and so forth. This shows on EVERY single page of your blog. That’s all duplicate content and its going to be ignored to a large extent by the search engines.

Now lets assume that you are posting on a daily basis, but as most people your messages are short and to the point and your word count reflects that. Now consider you blog and its importance to search engines. All of the sudden your pages lose any significance because the majority of your site is duplicate content, thus making your website have little to no leverage and making your website look like one big dupe party.

To ensure that you are properly setting up your sites make sure that the word count of your post is higher than the word count of whats in your sidebar and navigation system. This will help it. Why do I write articles that have 600 + words minimum? Now you know why. It’s all about the content that you read and how the search engines perceive your website. I’ll be posting some more in depth advanced wordpress design tips in future days, so check back often.

[tags]advanced wordpress design tips, technical wordpress tips, SEO wordpress tips, search engine wordpress[/tags]