Are You Setting Up WordPress For SEO Success?

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

He is talking about WordPress, yes?

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...

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.

Clear up some confusion about WordPress terminologyExplain that WordPress, being a dynamic CMS, is built on relationships (as in "relational database") - and explain those relationshipsShow you some hands on, practical tips for setting up your WordPress site with an SEO focusGive you a few ways to cross check SEOmoz's crawler diagnostics with other sourcesGet 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?!

Explanation of some of the most common terms

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.

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:

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.

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

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

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" sectionIf a dentist, say a page about "dental implants" describing your service.If a restaurant, your Menu Page.Directions pageFees page etc.

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.

You can put the same tag on many posts.

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).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.

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.

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"!)

This chart is showing you what page types should be accessible to the user and to the search engines.So unless otherwise noted, the page type can be indexed and followed.

This is the general rule of thumb I follow for deciding what links to put where. In general

I put pages and categories in main menusI put categories, recent/popular posts, dated archives, and maybe tags in the sidebar/widget.

URL control can be confusing, because some are set in odd places, or called "slugs".

Page and Posts URLs get set within the page/post editorCategory and tag URLs get set in their respective menus under "slug"Author URLs are the "username"

If you've got everything set up correctly, it should be EASY to get your titles and descriptions in check.

Title and description templates get set in YoastTitles and descriptions at the individual page/post level are set in that page/post editor with Yoast.Need help writing a title? Use this post I did about writing titles.

This is where things get tricky, because a lot of themes tend to break perfectly good WordPress install. Or they try to handle SEO stuff when they shouldn't. Or, you get a theme, and a plugin and WordPress all handling title tags and it becomes a mess.

DO use themes for design elements;

ColorsFonts,Page layoutHeadersFootersBasic social media button stuff

Do NOT use themes for SEO stuff, such as

IndexationAnalytics codesTitles and descriptionsRSS feedsMenu structure (ideally this is done with WordPress Custom Menus)

Let the Yost SEO plugin handle this stuff! Shut off / do not use these types of SEO functions within the themes. 

There are two plugins I always install right away for pure SEO stuff;

I often see other plugins that try to set SEO settings - so be sure you're only managing SEO with one thing!

Yoast SEO has the ability to assign a title and description template for every possible page, post and archive - so I advise using Yoast to manage all title and description templates.

As noted: Don't forget to update your header.php file to include the correct title code;

A note about the 'sitename' variable - this is the site title under settings>general

This follows all of the best practice procedure from above. Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed.Please note: Want to reiterate - this is what I typically use for a standard WordPress setup - one author, standard blogging format, or a business website with a blog inside etc. You may find yourself in a different circumstance if you have multiple authors, ecommerce etc.Also - if your blog has already existed for some time, and you've been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn't just go deindexing them. Look in analytics, see how much traffic they might be bringing you, if that traffic is quality, and make a well thought out decision about if/how to move away from indexing tags.

Since running a single author blog, disabling the author archives 301 redirects them back to the blog homepage. This is good for the engines AND the user since they look exactly the same.I like letting users browse posts in the dated archivesNot best practice to add noodp/noydir to every page - but the plugin allows you to do it for individual pages/posts in the editor.

Make sure you don't have any other plugins or your theme handling the sitemap.Check off what you don't want included in the XML sitemap. (This is usually the same as what you are NOT indexing).

One thing I LOVE about Yoast's plugin - you can strip /category/ off the folder structure for categories. AWESOME! You should definitely do this. If the site has already been indexed with /category/ redirects are automatically created.You could redirect images to their parent post or page. I usually don't but it won't do any harm if you do.Unless you're running something with https (secure pages) you can just leave canonical settings as default.

This is THE most common question we get in Q&A. Duplicate content issues. Basically I want to give you guys some extra tools and resources for checking duplicate content issues re: WordPress and the Moz crawl report.

A lot of folks get concerned when they see "47 duplicate page titles found" etc, and with understanding!

If you've set everything up as above correctly, there isn't a whole lot of room for error. But sometimes things happen and stuff breaks or we miss something.

And most times, no matter the issue, ensuring you have things setup as described above in the post, will fix things.

Check webmaster tools. If they are not reporting duplicate page titles or descriptions, you probably have little to worry about. Moz might have picked up on pages that were crawlable but not being indexed. But definitely check back in with webmaster tools in a week or so (its healthy to check webmaster tools once a week anyway!)

I honestly love the Moz crawl report. Its turned up some important things to fix for me at times. Yet I think its just smart with ANY tool to cross check, especially if it involves a big error like duplicate content.

Use the free version of Screaming Frog to crawl up to 500 pages (and the paid version is unlimited).

Crawl the siteClick on titlesSelect DuplicatesYou'll see a report like this:

In this case we can clearly see subpages are causing a lot of the duplicate title issues. 

Just because a crawler like Screaming Frog or the SEOmoz crawler crawls pages, does not mean they are indexed. Check Google's index to find out with these queries.

site:mydomain.com/blog - check for blog indexationsite:mydomain.com/category - check for category indexation (unless you've stripped from folder structure)site:mydomain.com/tag - check to see what tags are indexedsite:mydomain.com/author - check to see if author archives are indexedsite:mydomain.com/2012 - check to see what dated archives from 2012site:mydomain.com/ inurl:page - check for subpages being indexed (see example below)

If you also find errors in webmaster tools, screaming frog, or Google's index:

Identify which page type it is (category, tag, dated archive, author archive, or subpages)Determine if the page should be indexed to begin with.If it should be indexed, make sure you have a setting in WordPress to generate unique titles/descriptions from the template.If it should NOT be indexed, block it using Yoast and be sure you don't have to do any 301 redirects

I know that's a little overly simplistic - it'd be tough to cover every possible variation of errors within this post - but that general framework is what I would advise to follow.

No seriously. I know WordPress can be challenging - but I hope this guide has helped give you a better understanding of its different functions, and how to resolve some common issues on your own.

Got questions? If you lead them with "What chu talkin' bout!?" I'll answer (within reason - only short 3-4 sentence answers possible here). NO specific site questions here please, just general concept questions.

Please take any detailed or site-specific questions on over to the Moz Q&A.

Or... ask me questions at MozCon! That's right, I'll be at MozCon, as an attendee, so if you're there you can track me down and ask away!

Thhhannnnnks!

View the original article here

Setting Up Actionable SEO Dashboards in the New Google Analytics

There have been many mixed reviews about the latest Google Analytics UI. Putting the frustration of having to learn a new UI aside (here's a great guide to navigating the new Google Analytics interface), the new Google Analytics actually brings to the table great customization options. One of my favorites being custom dashboards.

Both the old and new interfaces offer a standard dashboard that acts as an overview of your analytics profile. But where the new UI has its advantage is with your ability to create your own dashboard - in fact, you can create up to 20 of them for each profile.

The first thing we'll want to do is click the "+ New Dashboard" link on the left navigation of your profile's Home tab. Google will then ask you to name the dashboard and to choose either a "Blank Canvas" or a "Starter Dashboard." The Starter Dashboard is just like the default dashboard you already have in Google Analytics, so let's choose "Blank Canvas." Now it's time to populate your dashboard with widgets.

There are two ways you can customize your new dashboard:

Use the "Add Widget" feature on your dashboardNavigate to the view you want in Google Analytics and click the "Add to Dashboard" link.

When you use the "Add Widget" feature, there are four types of widgets you can choose from:

Metric - This will show you a single metric as well as a "sparkline" for that metric (which is basically a tiny line graph)Pie - Displays a breakdown of various metrics in pie chart formTimeline - A graph (only) of any metric (or compare two metrics) over any period of timeTable - Your traditional Google Analytics table, but it can be customized to only display what you've setup (including filters)

You build each widget the same way you would segment/filter data in Google Analytics normally. The key here is saving the view to your dashboard so you can quickly login and review performance without having to set everything up again.

As you add more widgets to your custom dashboard, you can easily drag, drop and rearrange your widgets into one of the three dashboard columns.

Now that we know how to setup dashboards, let's take a look at some useful SEO dashboards you should consider creating.

The purpose of this dashboard is simple: a quick look into the health of your SEO campaign.

With this metric/timeline widget, we're simply wanting to look at our total number of organic, non-branded search traffic. Remember, with the metric widget, you can only look at a single metric. If you only want to see the total number of visits, add a metric widget. However, if you'd like to see the total visit count broken out over the selected date range, you'll want to add it as a timeline widget.

For this widget, we'll add a Metric/Timeline with the following dimensions:

In this widget we're looking to get a snapshot of just how many total conversions (or transactions) that have been generated by our non-branded organic keyword referrals.

For this widget, we'll add a Metric/Timeline with the following dimensions:

Just like before, if you'd prefer to see this over time you can change this widget to be a timeline instead of a metric widget.

This widget filters out your branded search keyword referrals so you can get right to the keywords you're most interested in. You may also consider adding an additional filter to remove (not provided) if it takes up a significant number of the results.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

You'll notice that I didn't choose any goals for the secondary metric. We'll cover that in the next widget. For now, we want to get a good understanding of what keywords are driving

In this widget we're looking to get a quick look at our top converting/transaction keywords. Once again, I recommend filtering out your branded search terms. Depending on how many important conversion points you want to keep track of, you may need to add more than one widget of this type because you can only view two metrics in each Table widget.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

You'll find it easier to navigate to this report in the Standard Reporting section of Google Analytics (Audience > Social > Pages) and adding the widget using the top navigation bar in Google Analytics. The goal of this particular widget is to quickly see which content on your site is getting shared the most in social media. That way you'll know what content topics have the best chance of going viral.

By default Google will show you information for only Google+, in a future post I'll walk you through how to get other sites like Twitter and Facebook setup on here, too.

If your blog content lives under a /blog/ subfolder, you may want to consider filtering the report to only look at that content.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

After I added the widget to our SEO Monitoring dashboard, I went back and edited it to also include total visits as well.

In addition to knowing what content is getting shared the most, I like to keep an eye on what blog content is getting the most traffic and conversions.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Don't forget to filter in just your blog content if that is the area you want to focus on.

I like to keep an eye on which search engines are sending me traffic and how it changes over time. The best way to get a snapshot of this is to add a pie chart widget.

For this widget, we'll add a Pie with the following dimensions:

I chose to only look at the top three organic search engine referrals, but you can select up to six for your pie chart.

We also need to keep an eye on any pages that are loading slow. We can actually setup the widget to only look at organic traffic page load speeds, although it would be in your best interest to look at all your content, not just that just with organic visits.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

The above table shows you your top ten slowest loading landing pages, and also includes how many visits that pages receives. You can sort by either, but it's probably best to tackle the pages with the slowest load time first.

The final piece to our monitoring puzzle: a list of keywords being searched for the most on our internal site search. This is a great way to generate new keyword ideas and to find new usability ideas (more on that later).

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

I also like to add conversions as a dimension to this widget so I can not only keep an eye on which terms are getting searched for the most, but also which lead to the most conversions.

So it's time for the dreaded redesign process. You have a pretty good idea of what's ahead: long nights, lots of frustration and hopefully, a great looking website not too far down the line. With this dashboard you can quickly gain insight into what changes you should be making in the upcoming redesign to help out your SEO campaign.

You might also consider renaming this dashboard to be a Usability dashboard so you can frequently check-in on how well your site is performing for your visitors.

We'll be borrowing a few of the widgets in our SEO Monitoring dashboard, but also adding a few. Let's first look at which widgets we should be re-adding to this new dashboard:

A website redesign offers a great opportunity for keyword inclusion throughout our site's architecture (navigation, URLs, etc.) With this widget we can keep an eye on which keywords we should be focusing these optimization efforts on.

Which social networks are engaging the most with your content? What pages are getting the most engagements? Answering these questions will help you create a user experience that is not only tailored to your top social network traffic drivers, but that also encourages social sharing.

You'll also want to look closely at what makes the content in this report so shareable. Is it because of the way they are laid out? The images they use? These insights can really help you carry that experience throughout your new site.

Just like with the top social action content, you want to keep an eye on the content that is working best (and worst). This will allow you to duplicate your successes and (hopefully) eliminate your failures.

The redesign is the perfect time to address page load speed problems. Take a look at the slowest rendering pages in this table and determine what the common problems are that are slowing the load speed down.

Site search is great for finding new keywords, it's also a great way to figure out what problems people are having navigating your site. With this widget you can quickly see the types of content people are expecting to find on your site - but aren't able to.

On to our new widgets!

Is it time to consider translating your site for a new geographic audience? This type of change will definitely need your attention as an SEO. It's also an opportunity for you to branch out your link building into new languages.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

The organic traffic filter I have in place is definitely optional. I think it helps keep the data set you're looking at more consistent by restricting it to organic visits only like the other widgets are set to.

For the Language widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

You'll note that I also filtered out all non-organic traffic here, too.

For this particular widget, we're once again trying to identify problem pages. Any pages that have a high exit/bounce rate should get a close review to see if the cause for people leaving can easily be identified.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

It's important that we filter out any blog content that naturally creates high bounce rates. If you also have an event like a Account Login on your site, you may wish to use Google's Event Tracking to filter out those visits as well.

Which mobile devices are your visitors using to access your site? Are you getting a substantial number of visits? Do you anticipate it growing during the life of the next site design? More than likely this will be an area of focus for your redesign. It's important that you know exactly which devices your consumers are using to view your site so you can ensure compatibility.

For this widget, we'll add a Pie with the following dimensions:

Finally, I like to take a look into what browser our visitors are using most, and what their conversion rate currently is. We all say we test all browsers for compatibility, but there are always pages that were rushed or that just fell through the cracks that might not be presenting themselves the way you had hoped.

For this widget, we'll add a Pie with the following dimensions:

It's no secret that to succeed in today's online marketing world you need to be doing more than just SEO. Not just from the sense that other marketing efforts can help drive in new leads, but because it helps your SEO campaign succeed.

This dashboard highlights how your PPC and social media efforts are performing, so you can take that information and apply it to your SEO campaigns.

This widget will allow us to keep track of what types of content are performing best from a social perspective.

Within this report we'll be able to quickly see which social networks are the most profitable in terms of conversions and/or actual transactions. This is a great way to see which social networks respond well to your offering, and that you should be investing more time in.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Ideally you'll want to setup a filter to only look at social networks. If you're good about tagging your URLs with custom variables, then you can change the filter to look at the medium and enter the medium value you use for social URLs (example: social).

Ever since the (not provided) update, we've all lost out on valuable keyword data. But just as Google hoped we would, we can get this information from our PPC spend. With this widget we'll look at the keywords that are driving the most conversions/transactions for our PPC marketing, so we can look into targeting them in our SEO marketing, too.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Just like with our previous keyword widget, I also like to look at the top performing ad groups. This is a good way to know what top level topics are performing the best for your paid search campaigns, so you can prioritize them in your SEO campaigns.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

If you're not using custom landing pages for your paid search campaigns, this is a great way to see which keywords are working best for the various pages on your site. I like to run these types of tests before I commit to any keywords for SEO.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

That's just three of the 20 dashboards you could setup in Google Analytics. What are you adding to your dashboards to make them more actionable?

View the original article here

Are You Setting Up WordPress For SEO Success?

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

He is talking about WordPress, yes?

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...

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.

Clear up some confusion about WordPress terminologyExplain that WordPress, being a dynamic CMS, is built on relationships (as in "relational database") - and explain those relationshipsShow you some hands on, practical tips for setting up your WordPress site with an SEO focusGive you a few ways to cross check SEOmoz's crawler diagnostics with other sourcesGet 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?!

Explanation of some of the most common terms

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.

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:

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.

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

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

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" sectionIf a dentist, say a page about "dental implants" describing your service.If a restaurant, your Menu Page.Directions pageFees page etc.

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.

You can put the same tag on many posts.

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).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.

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.

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"!)

This chart is showing you what page types should be accessible to the user and to the search engines.So unless otherwise noted, the page type can be indexed and followed.

This is the general rule of thumb I follow for deciding what links to put where. In general

I put pages and categories in main menusI put categories, recent/popular posts, dated archives, and maybe tags in the sidebar/widget.

URL control can be confusing, because some are set in odd places, or called "slugs".

Page and Posts URLs get set within the page/post editorCategory and tag URLs get set in their respective menus under "slug"Author URLs are the "username"

If you've got everything set up correctly, it should be EASY to get your titles and descriptions in check.

Title and description templates get set in YoastTitles and descriptions at the individual page/post level are set in that page/post editor with Yoast.Need help writing a title? Use this post I did about writing titles.

This is where things get tricky, because a lot of themes tend to break perfectly good WordPress install. Or they try to handle SEO stuff when they shouldn't. Or, you get a theme, and a plugin and WordPress all handling title tags and it becomes a mess.

DO use themes for design elements;

ColorsFonts,Page layoutHeadersFootersBasic social media button stuff

Do NOT use themes for SEO stuff, such as

IndexationAnalytics codesTitles and descriptionsRSS feedsMenu structure (ideally this is done with WordPress Custom Menus)

Let the Yost SEO plugin handle this stuff! Shut off / do not use these types of SEO functions within the themes. 

There are two plugins I always install right away for pure SEO stuff;

I often see other plugins that try to set SEO settings - so be sure you're only managing SEO with one thing!

Yoast SEO has the ability to assign a title and description template for every possible page, post and archive - so I advise using Yoast to manage all title and description templates.

As noted: Don't forget to update your header.php file to include the correct title code;

A note about the 'sitename' variable - this is the site title under settings>general

This follows all of the best practice procedure from above. Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed.Please note: Want to reiterate - this is what I typically use for a standard WordPress setup - one author, standard blogging format, or a business website with a blog inside etc. You may find yourself in a different circumstance if you have multiple authors, ecommerce etc.Also - if your blog has already existed for some time, and you've been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn't just go deindexing them. Look in analytics, see how much traffic they might be bringing you, if that traffic is quality, and make a well thought out decision about if/how to move away from indexing tags.

Since running a single author blog, disabling the author archives 301 redirects them back to the blog homepage. This is good for the engines AND the user since they look exactly the same.I like letting users browse posts in the dated archivesNot best practice to add noodp/noydir to every page - but the plugin allows you to do it for individual pages/posts in the editor.

Make sure you don't have any other plugins or your theme handling the sitemap.Check off what you don't want included in the XML sitemap. (This is usually the same as what you are NOT indexing).

One thing I LOVE about Yoast's plugin - you can strip /category/ off the folder structure for categories. AWESOME! You should definitely do this. If the site has already been indexed with /category/ redirects are automatically created.You could redirect images to their parent post or page. I usually don't but it won't do any harm if you do.Unless you're running something with https (secure pages) you can just leave canonical settings as default.

This is THE most common question we get in Q&A. Duplicate content issues. Basically I want to give you guys some extra tools and resources for checking duplicate content issues re: WordPress and the Moz crawl report.

A lot of folks get concerned when they see "47 duplicate page titles found" etc, and with understanding!

If you've set everything up as above correctly, there isn't a whole lot of room for error. But sometimes things happen and stuff breaks or we miss something.

And most times, no matter the issue, ensuring you have things setup as described above in the post, will fix things.

Check webmaster tools. If they are not reporting duplicate page titles or descriptions, you probably have little to worry about. Moz might have picked up on pages that were crawlable but not being indexed. But definitely check back in with webmaster tools in a week or so (its healthy to check webmaster tools once a week anyway!)

I honestly love the Moz crawl report. Its turned up some important things to fix for me at times. Yet I think its just smart with ANY tool to cross check, especially if it involves a big error like duplicate content.

Use the free version of Screaming Frog to crawl up to 500 pages (and the paid version is unlimited).

Crawl the siteClick on titlesSelect DuplicatesYou'll see a report like this:

In this case we can clearly see subpages are causing a lot of the duplicate title issues. 

Just because a crawler like Screaming Frog or the SEOmoz crawler crawls pages, does not mean they are indexed. Check Google's index to find out with these queries.

site:mydomain.com/blog - check for blog indexationsite:mydomain.com/category - check for category indexation (unless you've stripped from folder structure)site:mydomain.com/tag - check to see what tags are indexedsite:mydomain.com/author - check to see if author archives are indexedsite:mydomain.com/2012 - check to see what dated archives from 2012site:mydomain.com/ inurl:page - check for subpages being indexed (see example below)

If you also find errors in webmaster tools, screaming frog, or Google's index:

Identify which page type it is (category, tag, dated archive, author archive, or subpages)Determine if the page should be indexed to begin with.If it should be indexed, make sure you have a setting in WordPress to generate unique titles/descriptions from the template.If it should NOT be indexed, block it using Yoast and be sure you don't have to do any 301 redirects

I know that's a little overly simplistic - it'd be tough to cover every possible variation of errors within this post - but that general framework is what I would advise to follow.

No seriously. I know WordPress can be challenging - but I hope this guide has helped give you a better understanding of its different functions, and how to resolve some common issues on your own.

Got questions? If you lead them with "What chu talkin' bout!?" I'll answer (within reason - only short 3-4 sentence answers possible here). NO specific site questions here please, just general concept questions.

Please take any detailed or site-specific questions on over to the Moz Q&A.

Or... ask me questions at MozCon! That's right, I'll be at MozCon, as an attendee, so if you're there you can track me down and ask away!

Thhhannnnnks!

View the original article here