Are You Setting Up WordPress For SEO Success?

If you've ever tried to optimize WordPress for SEO success you've probably said those exact words at some point... some crazy theme breaks something, or a plugin crashes the whole site, or in terms of SEO you get 971 duplicate pages back from your crawl report.

But I don't think your troubles with WordPress  are your fault entirely. I've been there too when I was first learning it! Gary Coleman has been there. But this post is an opportunity to move on from that...

Let's Wipe That Gary Coleman Look Off Your Face!

There's a lot of well meaning yet misguided info out there. After over two years of battling with (umm...using...) WordPress, I know it can be tricky and frustrating at times, and so I wanted to create a guide that might help clear some of this up.

I'm not here to get into every single little detail and variation, but rather to spend time on the core WordPress features and give special focus on SEO related WordPress issues.

Five Goals of This Post

1. Clear up some confusion about WordPress terminology
2. Explain that WordPress, being a dynamic CMS, is built on relationships (as in "relational database") - and explain those relationships
3. Show you some hands on, practical tips for setting up your WordPress site with an SEO focus
4. Give you a few ways to cross check SEOmoz's crawler diagnostics with other sources
5. Get rid of that 'ol Gary Coleman look!

For This Post, Let's Assume

• We're running wordpress.org  (the self hosted version)
• This is a single author site (to keep it simple, although not hard to extend the concepts to multi-author)
• We're not doing any ecommerce, photo galleries, or anything else you'd find in a more custom application of WordPress.
• We're using Yoast's SEO for WordPress plugin .

Alright. Everyone ready? LET'S GO!! ....What Chu TALKIN' Bout WordPress?!

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Part 1 - WordPress Terminology

• Explanation of some of the most common terms

Regular Web "Page" vs. WordPress "Page"

Let's get really basic here for a minute, hope you don't mind. But I think a lot of people may confuse/interchange a WordPress page with a Web Page.

A web page is a single HTML document that exists at a unique URL. Even if the extension is .php or .asp. The underlying source code is still HTML. This is a WEB page. It does not matter HOW it was created - it loads in your browser as an HTML document and that's all you need to know. And for the rest of this post, when I say "web page" I'm talking about any HTML document existing at a URL.

But a WordPress page is WordPress's version of a "static" page. In fact, anytime you're talking about a page in the context of WordPress, put the word "static" before "page" = "static page" and it will always make more sense.

Pages vs. Posts

This is the second thing people either usually confuse, or have a hard time grasping. To your credit, I think it's confusing that they're put side by side in documentation, as if they're somehow similar. They're not at all!

Note that pages and posts differ entirely in how they function.

• A post is dated and "time-sensitive" and a page is not.
• A post can belong to categories, tags, dates and authors and a page can not.
• You can access a post from multiple pages - its category, tag, date or author.
• A page is only accessible from where ever you link to it.

Some additional references about pages vs. posts:

• wordpress.com documentation  (although not the self hosted version, still applies)
• wordpress codex about pages 
• wordpress codex "the dynamic nature of pages" 

Categories vs. Tags

Ah. Another sticky point for folks. Some may argue, but I think Yoast  would agree. Categories are for your main 5-7 "buckets" of topics that your posts fall into. Tags are there to fine-tune categories, and are usually much more specific that categories.

• Also, you should NOT have a category that is the same as a tag or vice versa. Categories should all be unique from tags.
• And, categories can have hierarchy and tags have no hierarchy.

Author Archives

• Simple. Me like .

Dated Archives

• Easy. Good.

Pagination (Subpages)

Yeah... why is this confusing? The only thing that doesn't paginate... are PAGES!! ....WHAT CHU TALKIN' BOUT??' 

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Part 2 - Relationships In WordPress

• This part will show you how the different elements within WordPress relate and interact with one another.

Pages - They're Static

Not much to 'splain here (I hope by now!).

• Pages are like regular, non-blog pages on a website.
• They can have a hierarchy.
• They will not go into the RSS feed.

Use Pages For The Following Types Of Content

• An "About Us" section
• If a dentist, say a page about "dental implants" describing your service.
• If a restaurant, your Menu Page.
• Directions page
• Fees page etc.

Posts->Categories

Think of "Many To Many" relationships in databases.

• You can put a post in many categories. And of course a category can hold many posts.

Posts->Tags

• You can put the same tag on many posts.

Date & Author Archives

• Dates are simple. If you view a date archive by month, all the posts from that month appear within that date archive.
• For our single author blog setup, since every single posts is by the same author, that's what you'd get when viewing that archive (which is why we 301 redirect it to the blog homepage).

Accessing Posts

• This is showing you, you can arrive at the same post from multiple places.

• And this is showing you, for the most recent posts, or popular posts, sometimes there is a link in the sidebar - and of course the blog home IS a feed of the most recent posts.

Don't Forget Pagination (Subpages)!

• All of these web pages can have subpages off of them.

Bonus - For the Truly Geeky

I found this awesome template of the hierarchy  within WordPress and loading a page. Not necessary to know for what we're doing here, and not 100% relevant either, but I found it really useful, especially if you like to know more about what's going on behind the scenes.

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Part 3 - Best Practice Configuration

Any Decisions I Need To Make Up Front?

This is sort of a "I wish I knew then" chart. Things that would be useful to know up front, such as;

• Decide your categories at the beginning.
• Decide what you want the homepage of your blog to be early on.
• When you create a user account, choose the username wisely, because this is the URL and can not be changed afterwards (don't get stuck with "admin"!)