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I’m currently experimenting with a couple of SEO plugins for Wordpress. The first is All in One SEO Pack from Uberdose.

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This nifty addition adds meta tags to each post. I know all the SEO experts will tell you that meta tags are long dead and buried but we aren’t using them here to gain ranking, but to give the search engines a nice user-friendly title and description.

The second plugin is Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

I had a very bad experience with XML sitemaps when they were first introduced. It wasn’t that Google ignored my sitemap. Quite the contrary. It came calling hard and fast. Only trouble was I had built one of those grey-hat sites (dark grey) with about 800,000 pages. It was a long time ago when bandwidth was measured in megabytes and it got very expensive very quickly. Since then I’ve been shy of generating them, although I’m a reformed character now and only use purely white hat techniques. Honest.

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. As well as generating the sitemap it calculates a priority for each post based on the number of comments and notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and Yahoo via ping.

Obviously you can also submit the sitemap via Google webmaster console to monitor its progress.

One of the criteria that search engines use in deciding how relevant your page is to a specific keyword is the URL itself including any page names.

For example:

mystampcollectiondomain.com/stampcollecting.html

is better than:

somefreehosting.com/fred/index.html

for a stamp collecting site.  MSN especially seems to like the keyword in the URL but all search engines, including Google, will also show these SE friendly URLs page higher in the SERPs.

Which brings us to the default Permalink URL in Wordpress. This is number-based and something like mydomain.com/?p=123.  Not SEO friendly at all. 

Permalinks are very necessary for any blog and are a way of referencing a specific post.  They are nothing more then a URL that will always point to the target post, even as it moves down the page and into the archives. Unfortunately, Permalinks are just that. Permanent. Pick the wrong structure and you can cause yourself problems down the line.

Luckily there is an option to change the Permalink structure from number-based to name-based via wp-admin -> Options -> Permalinks.  Just select the “Date and name based” option but don’t press “Update” quite yet.  You will also have to include some mod-rewrite code in your .htaccess file.  This isn’t as scary as it sounds as Wordpress will do this for you as long as your .htaccess file is writable.  If it isn’t, then they give you the code to include at the bottom of the page.  Personally I don’t like the security implications of making .htaccess writable, so I do this manually.  If you do this via an editor, don’t mess with anything else in the file or you will likely send your site crashing in an unpleasant manner.

As a compromise, go to your server control panel and change .htaccess permissions to 666, allow Wordpress to change the file, then immediately change the permissions back to 644 or even 640.

Your Permalink URL will now be name-based of the form:

mydomain.com/2006/10/27/how-to-choose-a-stamp-album/

The date shown within the URL isn’t really necessary for the search engines and it might be better to use custom code of the form:

/index.php/%category/%postname%/

Unfortunately there have been some problems with certain versions of mod_rewrite in Apache which prevent the %category% from working properly.  In this case, you can  use something like:

/index.php/archives/%postname%/ 

I generally stick with the dated version since I like to see when I added the post from the URL.

It’s NOT advisable to use just:

/index.php/%postname%/

since mod_rewrite can get confused when looking for .css files or even your wp-admin folder.

One word of warning is that if pages of your blog are already indexed under the old format, e.g. mydomain.com/?p=123 then visits to the page using the old URL will result in a 404 error page.  If you know your way around mod_rewrite then you can use a  RedirectMatch 301 to sent visitors to the correct page, but if the thought of learning mod_rewrite brings you out in a cold sweat, there’s a Permalink Redirect Plugin  that will handle most conversions for you.  I’ve never used this plugin, so please verify that it meets your needs before breaking your blog.

Disturbing report on a possible Wordpress exploit - Host Overflow Application eXception.

It’s a hoax of course but it gave me a moments pause :)

Should you use Blogger or Wordpress?  Ok, I know there are a million and one other blog hosting services out there, but I have the most experence with these two.

I generally prefer Wordpress hosted on my own domain but I’ve been noticing some neat new features on Blogger including Labels Management for Blogger , Make Money with your Beta Blog and Post to Blogger from Picasa

I’m not convinced there’s much to choose between them in regard to getting traffic but I think I may just try an experiment between the two.  Stay tuned.