SEO: You’d be crazy if you didn’t _____

I don’t use any sort of SEO plugin, I just modified my own theme to include all the bit I wanted. I suppose those plugins are quicker, but they’re less precise, in my experience.

IMO, Technorati sucks. Big time. It never works properly, and it’s basically useless when it is working. Don’t bother.

Pretty permalinks are nice, but I don’t think they help SEO in particular. Maybe a little, but very little.

The most important thing of all:
MAKE YOUR SITE VALIDATE!
No question about it. Valid sites get such a huge boost it is unbelievable. Valid sites parse easier, index better, and generally work better all around.

If you’re “close” to valid, then that’s okay too… but if it is possible to fix a validation problem, then do it. It can’t always be done though. Imagemaps are a problem (there’s no valid way that works in all cases for them), and I use the embed tag in XHTML because it works better on certain browsers, but other than that, all my sites are wholly valid.

Second biggest thing you can do: Use semantic markup. Headers should be in H1-H6’s, not styled DIV’s or P’s. Main text should be in P’s. Lists of things should be in UL or OL’s (and a sidebar of boxes is a LIST, even if you don’t think it is… So is a navigation bar going horizontally… describe the items, worry about positioning them correctly later). That sort of thing. Stuff works way better when you use tags for what they were meant for.

A corollary of this is: If you want to change how something looks, then you edit the CSS. If you ever edit the HTML to change the LOOK of the page, then you’re doing it wrong. Hell, if you use *style* attributes anywhere in the HTML, then you’re probably doing it wrong (certain exceptions are okay). If you have class names like “red” or “bold” or even “center”, then you’re doing it wrong.

The (X)HTML markup should make total sense without any styling applied to it at all. Every classname, every id should identify the thing it contains, not anything *about* the thing it contains. Save the looks for the stylesheets.

Third most important thing: Have good original content. Only you can write content. Do it well.

Do those right, and you’re well on your way to high pagerank.

Thanks Otto. Didn’t know validating pages were so important.

Almost forgot: Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold

https://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

Great plugin, one of the most useful I’ve used.

Almost forgot: Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold

Got a question on that one.

It creates a robots.txt file that redirects to the XML sitemap.

# BEGIN XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
Sitemap: https://wendelbrume.com/sitemap.xml
# END XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN

I see a lot of discussion on the web about all the nofollows and whatnot that should be in the robots.txt file. But since there’s now a redirect to the XML sitemap, is that all that is needed? Aren’t I only concerned with making sure the sitemap only includes those pages I WANT crawled, rather than modifiying robots.txt to say what I don’t?

Thanks,

TW

MBW, AFAIK, you can ignore your concern as long as you don’t have pages you want excluded.

If you do have pages you want excluded, I’m sure there’s a way to have both a sitemap XML file and a robots.txt file. I would guess that you’d take the redirect out of robots.txt, put the requisite exclude code in, and sign up for a Google Webmaster account and manually point the XML sitemap pick up to your sitemap URL.

Oddly, I don’t have a robots.txt file as part of my Google XML Sitemaps install, or otherwise.

Third most important thing: Have good original content. Only you can write content. Do it well.

I absolutely hate sites like Technorati. Most of what you come across are links to the same articles scraped and rehashed over and over again. One person goes to the trouble of creating something original, then hundreds or thousands of parasitic bloggers link to it to draw traffic to their own sites.

You’d be crazy if you don’t:

Add the Sociable plug in .

This plug-in makes it so easy for people visiting your blog to add it to their Facebook/Myspace/etc. pages.

While people can easily post the address of your link to their FB/MS/etc. page, not everyone knows how to, or they may post the link to your blog, rather than to the post. And having the icons at the bottom of each post is a nice reminder “Hey, tell your friends about this.”