Setting up Wordpress for SEO – Part 2
Wordpress Meta Tags and a Robots.txt file
Continuing on from my previous post Wordpress SEO Part 1 here is what you need to do to make sure Search engine robots find what they are looking for.
Meta Tags in Wordpress
When Wordpress was first released, you had to be quite technical to SEO it. This was because no Meta content was added by Wordpress itself. If you wanted Meta Tags you had to manually code them in. While there are still some uses to that, now with Wordpress 2.8 it is much easier.
In Wordpress, go to Current Theme Options from here you will now be able to enter Meta Description and Meta Keywords. These two fields form the homepage Meta tags of your blog. Choose wisely, and focus on keywords that appear frequently on the page and in posts – not just terms you want to rank high for.
I’ll cover Meta Tags in more detail later, for now you will be able to give the search engines some general information about your blog by using these Wordpress Meta Tags.
Wordpress Robots.txt file
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-contentSitemap: http://architectwebdesign.co.uk/sitemap.xml
Above is the current Robots.txt file for Architect Web Design. This .txt file (Plain Text created using Notepad) is placed in the root folder of a domain and is a web standard telling search engine robots and spiders which pages they can/cannot look at and index.
So you can better understand my Robots.txt I will explain what each line means. Remember the ‘Disallow’ command means to skip this location:
User Agent: * = This command tells the robots to look at all the pages of your website
Disallow: /cgi-bin = The CGI bin of your web server usually contains scripts that your server runs in the background, no need for the search engines to look in here
Disallow: /wp-admin, /wp-includes, /wp-content = These folders make up Wordpress, but should not be indexed. The admin folder is excluded for obvious reasons but the other two folders need to be stopped from being indexed as if they are read by the search engines your ranking will drop due to duplicate content. Search engines hate duplicate content as they see this as spam – you could even disappear from search engines because of this!
And finally the last line of your Robots.txt file should be pointing to your XML sitemap. Haven’t got a XML sitemap? Don’t worry, I’ll cover that in a later post – the important thing to remember is to stop search engines indexing pages that they shouldn’t. This will keep your SEO good, your rankings high and make sure you aren’t labelled a spammer.
More on Setting up Wordpress for SEO next time including: Post titles and Post content.
