SEO and WordPress

One great thing about WordPress is that it uses PHP and CSS files you can modify freely yourself and not have to change (much) from version to version. Generally speaking, if you don’t have any problems when you upgrade to a newer version of WordPress you don’t have to change the index.php or wp-layout.css file, so your layout/structure stays intact.

default template rox for me on search engines. ?? but no one is stopping u from making any changes!
and u dont need to replace the index file when u upgrade.

well… as for this last update (1.02 -> 1.2) the index file was significantly different…
I know I can edit it, but its the fact that i’ll have to do it again and again every major update… ?? Guess I should just stop complaining…
I’m doing really good in search engines so far – like I have a PR of 5 without mod_rewrite and pretty much standard template. So i’m just imagining with a PR of 5 – possibly higher later, and changing the H1 around – that I and anybody else with modded WP will be doing lots better…

i have 6 but i am using a totally customise template. i dont really customise for search engines. but it sure helps to have a search engine friendly page structure.

This might seem a little pedantic but… PR (as opposed to the wider SEO term) and issues like use of H1 are unrelated.
PR reflects the ranking and number of URI’s pointing to your URI.
H1 tags influence relevance ie the relationship between search term and what gets returned. It is very important. You will find if you look at the top 20 listings for many given search terms that the listings are often not in PR order.
The suggestion of making date H3 and title H1 makes a lot of sense to me, especially if you chose your titles carefully. It may also help visits to individual pages.
Andrew

Google conforms to us, not the other way around. You’ll never know how their algorithm is operating today unless you work at Google. So much energy is wasted trying to predict the impossible–it’s pathetic and greedy. There’s serious money to be made in reverse-engineering Google–likewise they are very secretive about how it works. IMHO: Forget Google. You have a blog! Worry more about blog indexing from the likes of feedster, blogpulse, and blogshares.
I wouldn’t worry too much about WordPress. They are definitely spidering WordPress blogs. I see my blog posts indexed daily–it’s fantastic! Trust me–Google wants to index WordPress correctly if they have any brains at all. WordPress is #1 When I surf the web–all I hear about is WordPress this and WordPress that. Lots of bot traffic in my logs already, Google included. Good times!

google loves wp blog for sure. it consumes megs load of bandwidth on mine… :p but the downside is that blogs are corrupting google. u get blogs for most search keywords and since blogs are personal opinions mostly, its not a good thing afterall.

ryno:
I made extensive changes to my layout a few weeks back, when I realized this same issue. I now use H1 on pages where it properly should be an H1, same with H2, etc. While it is unknown exactly how it affects google/bot indexing, having the ‘best’ stuff on the page in higher headers should make some difference.
-d

Thanks guys – just cool to get others opinions.
H1 ‘s do rank a little more importance from my experience with seo and the google seminars i’ve been too. I’ll make the changes to mine eventually – but i’m really looking at the mod_rewrite issue to get some seo friendly urls.
thanks!

What’s wrong with the existing URL’s ryno?
Andrew

well, in my experience the rewrite rulez dont necessarily do much better than old style URIs… but google knows better!

I haven’t noticed any problems with ‘non-nice urls’ affecting SE performance. Site is spidered just fine. They don’t like >3 parameters, or session tags in the url, but otherwise they do just fine. The problems with parameters was an old, old issue.
-d

true thomas true..
My site spidered pretty good with the URL’s and because I con’t get the mod_rewrite working yet… I’ll leave it alone ??
thanks

I have been wondering whether it is possible to dynamically generate the headers using php to build a list of the post titles.

uh… you mean like nice archives?? search for “narchives” and you’ll find it…