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Basement In The Sky

Blog and online resume of John Smithe; Cloud Solutions Architect, currently based in Manchester, UK.

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How-To SEO Optimise Your WordPress Blog

Basement In The Sky Posted on July 8, 2019 by john smitheJuly 8, 2019

So you’ve set up your shiny new WordPress blog and it looks fantastic! there’s just one problem… No-one can see it. You’re searches on Google come up empty. Why is this? You haven’t told Google how to find it, silly! And that’s where a SEO optimisation comes in. Optimising your site for Search Engines is the process of making the site both visible and as attractive as possible so that it not only appears on google but appears at the top of the search rankings. Here’s how you go about it.

1. Make Your Blog Visible to Search Engine

Once you have completed setup of your new wordpress site navigate: Settings > Reading and uncheck the box next to Discourage search engines from indexing this site. This makes the site visible to the search crawler robots used by Google and other search engines.

2. Alter Permalink Structure

Navigate Settings > Permalinks and change the link structure to one that includes the Post Title in the link. In this way you will include your title keywords in the posts URL as well as it’s meta-data.

3. Install Google XML Sitemaps

A sitemap tells google where it can find all the pages that make up your site. Google XML Sitemaps is a WordPress plugin that generates a Sitemap submits it to google for you and automatically updates it every time you update the site.

4. Install An SEO Plugin

There are a number of good SEO plugins available for WordPress. What these plugins do, when properly configured, is attach additional metadata to your posts and pages which make them more visible and more attractive to search engines. I favour All In One SEO because of the broad range of options it offers from keyword optimisation to Google Analytics integration but you can use whichever plugin you are most familiar with.

5. Set a Nofollow Flag On Untrusted Links

The rel=”nofollow” attribute on a link tells search engines that the linked page may be unreliable. It also prevents the link from improving the PageRank of the linked page.
You can get easy-to-use control over the NoFollow attribute of links on your site by installing a plugin called Ultimate NoFollow. If you’ve followed my previous How-To on securing your comments section against spam then you have already done this. This plugin will let you set any untrusted links or links unrelated to the subject of your blog to NoFollow. Google has some useful guidelines to best practice here.

6. NoIndex Duplicate Pages

As your blog gets older and larger you will increasingly find you have mutiple pages and posts with duplicate names. This is an artifact of the tags and categories system which WordPress uses to organise content and is undesirable from an SEO perspective as it causes search engines to record large ammounts of irrelevant data from your site making finding your relevant content more difficult.

To prevent this you can set all the pages on your blog, other than those hosting relevant content, to NoIndex causing search engines to ignore those pages. The easiest way to do this is to use one of the functions of All In One SEO which, if you are following my advice, you installed in step 4.

7. Install a Caching Plugin

One component of how attractive your site is to search engines is how fast your pages load. You can improve this by adding a caching plugin to your site which will pre-load regularly used pieces of content like site banners and background graphics. The plugin I use is called W3 Total Cache because it offers plenty of user control over precisely which types of data will be cached and it also has some handy minification functions to shrink the ammount of data stored on the server.

8. Add Social Media Sharing to Your Site

Posts that receive Shares and Follows on social media like Facebook and Twitter rank higher in searches so you want to do everything you can to encourage your readers to share your posts. Installing a sharing widget can do a lot to promote this kind of desired behavior. There are a number of good sharing Plugins available so you can tak eyour pick. The one I use is AddToAny Share Buttons because it has a huge range of pre-defined Share buttons for different social media sites that can be added to your site with a single click and it allows easy injection of custom CSS to alter exactly how and where the buttons display on your pae to match your overal theme.

So thats it, 8 steps to improving your sites SEO. beyond this it’s up to you to make sure your tags are well chosen, your title is keyword rich and your posts are long and full of interesting and relevant content. If you can do all of that then your blog should soon begin to climb towards that covetted spot at the top of the google search rankings.

Posted in Posts, WordPress | Tagged Blog, Hints & Tips, How-to, Plugins, SEO, WordPress | Leave a reply

How to Spam Proof your Blog Comments

Basement In The Sky Posted on July 1, 2019 by john smitheJuly 8, 2019  

So here it is, the first post on what is now the fourth incarnation of Basement in the Sky since I purchased the domain name way bake in 2011. Since this blog is mostly going to to deal with the ups, downs and side to sides of my working life as an IT Consultant it seems appropriate that the first few posts be about how I configured and optimised this WordPress site incase anyone out there wants to follow in my footsteps. What follows is three easy steps to secure your WordPress Blogs comments section against spam.

1. Use Akismet
No, seriously! It should be the first plugin you install. There’s a reason it comes bundled with the WordPress installer. It’s very easy to set up. All you need do is click on the ‘Sign up for an API key’ link and request a personal key on the Akismet website which you then input into the Akismet Settings menu and you’re secure from the majority of spam.

2. Use Cookies for Comments
This handy little plugin basically removes the need for a Captcha by forcing a cookie on any browser that views your webpage. a bot will lack this cookie and so will be denied commenting privileges and its comment will be sent to your spam folder.

3. Use Ultimate NoFollow
Finally, this plugin will allow you to set a NoFollow flag automatically on links embedded in comments thus improving your SEO performance and preserving your pagerank at the same time. Amazing huh?

Do you know any other good methods for preventing spam posts in your comments section? let me know in the comments section below.

Posted in Posts, WordPress | Tagged Blog, Comments, Hints & Tips, How-to, Plugins, Spam, WordPress | Leave a reply

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