search engine optimization

I’m just going over my whole WordPress setup for this site in case anyone is interested or wants to give advice. If you know anything about WordPress and see me doing something stupid, please go ahead and write a “Hey dumbass” response to this post or my previous post about the wordpress plugins I use.

I use the Inanis Glass theme, basically because I couldn’t find anything better. Most of the free themes look like crap. I’m not a designer by any means, but I know enough to say that most of the wordpress themes I could find just don’t look good, especially for a science-fiction themed website. I did a search for “best SEO wordpress themes” and came up with this site: http://wphacks.com/best-search-engine-optimized-seo-wordpress-themes/ and this one: http://www.seohosting.com/blog/blogging-tips/5-free-seo-wordpress-themes/. Both sites list a bunch of wordpress themes that they claimed were well-optimized for search engine optimization (SEO), but only one or two of the ones listed actually existed when I searched for them in the theme listing in my dashboard.

However, based on their lists of criteria for a good SEO theme, Inanis Glass seemed decent. It’s got the content at the top and seems to come close to validating for properly formatted HTML, though I’m not sure why that’s relevant. I did make a couple changes though, like changing the <H1> tag at the top to show the name of the post instead of the blog title, since I’ve read that’s really important to SEO to have your keyword rich title at the top instead of the site title. I still need to figure out my tagline.

I also almost completely removed the footer where it had a little windows style start menu with search and login features and stuff, as well as some popup menus that didn’t look very good. The pages seem to load a little faster since getting rid of that.

If you have any suggestions for a better theme or other theme-alterations I could make (particularly SEO related), I would greatly appreciate it.

I’ve been spending my evenings lately just working through all the ins and outs of this WordPress thing, studying Search Engine Optimization (SEO), link sharing and pouring through a multitude of WordPress plugins. I thought I would list off the plugins I have mostly decided on and describe some of my SEO strategies for this site in case anyone wanted to make some comments or give me advice, or if I happen to hire a WordPress SEO consultant to point out all the mistakes I’m making.

These are the plugins I use.

Add RSS – not totally sure what this does. I think it gives certain browsers some kind of access to my site’s RSS feeds, like if someone has their feed reader turned on within the browser.

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – the button in the upper right of the sidebar that gives the sharing menu

All in One SEO Pack – I use this to write my own descriptions, keywords and title tags, and because it has the feature of changing the link names in the sidebar because I don’t like multi-lined links but the real titles often need to be slightly longer than what will fit on  a line. SEO Ultimate, which I use for a few other things, doesn’t have this feature.

AWS Easy Page Link – adds a list of pages in the add link tool in the editor so I can easily make table of contents pages. I wish it added blog posts and scheduled pages/posts as well.

Breadcrumb NavXT – adds the breadcrumbs at the top of the posts, which is supposedly good if my content gets scraped (automatically plagairized) and suppedly helps search engines figure out my site architecture. I wonder if I should add them to the bottom of pages too, since some of my pages can be quite long.

cbnet Ping Optimizer – I tend to edit posts a lot so I needed a plugin that would make it only ping on the first post, so I don’t get marked as a spam. Also for the ping log so I can make sure they aren’t blocking me for whatever reason.

Contact Form 7 – just a simple email form on my contact page.

Contextual Related Posts – supposedly good for getting people back from scraped pages – adds a list of ‘related’ posts at the bottom of my posts and pages. Sometimes they don’t seem quite so ‘related’ so I named them ‘random pages’.

Full Text Feed – no idea what this does. I read that I need it to prevent the ‘more text’ thing coming up. I’ve never liked having to click on a more link when I go to blogs. Do I actually need this?

Global Translator – plugs into google translator and gives me the flag cloud in the sidebar – I wonder if the translated pages get indexed by search engines like my english pages do… I also wonder how accurate the translation is. Suppose I will never know since I only speak English

Google XML Sitemaps – supposedly helps search engines find their way around the site. I think I just turn this on and leave it. Don’t need to link to it or submit it or anything… at least, that’s my understanding.

JR_Compression – Apparantly pages can be zipped, then sent to the client and the browser automatically unzips and shows them, which decreases load times. I think I understand this correctly.

RSS Includes Pages – adds my pages (since the pages are the most important part of my site) into my RSS feeds.

SEO Ultimate – I use this for some of its peripheral features (canonicalizer, slug optimizer, 404 monitor) but use All In One SEO for the actual keyword/description stuff. Thankfully I can disable individual features of SEO Ultimate.

SexyBookmarks – creates the sharing functionity – similar to AddToAny button – to the bottom of every page and post. They claim that the pretty, animated nature encourages more interaction.

Simple Tags – I still need to figure out a good tagging strategy. Still need to explore this plugin a bit more. But since pages are more important on this site, I need pages to be included in the whole tagging system. Would like to be able to put pages into categories as well.

Ultimate Google Analytics – for my site statistics. Is this a good plugin for this? There sure are a lot to choose from.

WordPress Database Backup – absolutely necessary for those times when I do something stupid and overwrite my database.

WP Smush.it – to optimize my images without losing any quality. Not sure if this is necessary since most of my images I do myself through Photoshop or Gimp.

WP Super Cache – for server-side caching . How can I tell if this is working? Not all of my pages seem to be listed in the cached files and I always get a new file whenever I hit refresh.