WP search engine visibility ?

  • Hi

    I’m a newb to WP and would like to ask about it’s search engine visibility out of the box. I have an OsCommerece site (PHP based) and know that certain plugins have to be installed in order to get good or better visibilty for search engine spiders and bots.

    So far i’ve only changed the URL display to /%postname%/
    I understand that this causes problems for Awstats etc , in so far that it will not function, but the url looks better.

    Is this the same for WP ?

    What plugins should i use ? and are there any other things i should do to make it more search engine friendly in terms of spiders from google , yahoo etc ?

    Many thanks

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • WP is quite SE friendly out of the box. The rest is up to you – adding lots of relevant content, keeping the site updated, keeping your navigational structure clean, that sort of thing.

    And as far as URLs go – most SE’s don’t pay much attention to them at all anymore. So in order to save yourself the headaches of using just %postname%, I’d recommend using /%category%/%postname%/ – still “pretty” and ultimately functional.

    There are plugins available for tagging, meta tags (which also aren’t given much weight anymore), and all sorts of things. It’s up to you whether you use them or not… personally, in over a year, I haven’t seen the need to use them for better results. (And I do SEO for a living!)

    Here’s a great comprehensive list of plugins:
    https://codex.www.ads-software.com/User:Matt/2.0_Plugin_Compatibility

    Thread Starter andytc

    (@andytc)

    Thanks for the advice , Very much appreciated.

    I’ve changed my URL’s to /%category%/%postname%/ and will look through the Plug-in list to see if anything looks useful.

    You’re welcome!

    Bottom line – get the content up to par and you won’t have to worry. ?? Everything else will fall into place naturally!

    Thread Starter andytc

    (@andytc)

    “Bottom line – get the content up to par and you won’t have to worry. :)”

    Yes ! , I beleive this is very true ?? , it’s so easy to get side tracked into SEO stuff that you forget the number 1 ….CONTENT !!

    I’m putting it all on the back burner and getting on the content

    What a releif ??

    Can anyone expalin this log entry to me?

    wp/index.php/%22https://forms.theregister.co.uk/register/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1&PHPSESSID=207
    Http Code: 404 Date: Jul 20 07:06:40 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 7388
    Referer: –
    Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +https://www.google.com/bot.html)

    I have a few hundred of these 404’s each day from google in my server log. The source IP is google. What is google looking for here? I don’t understand the URL.

    speaking – looks to me like you might’ve done a site redesign, or used to have the site in HTML or something, and google’s spidering for the old pages, but coming up with 404’s…

    (note, it might’ve been the person who had the domain before you did that had the old HTML site or whatever too – so there’s a lot that depends on this result)

    google does not looke at static links (abs/exampple.html) different from dynamice links (abs?page=example) anymore.

    Best thing you can do to imporve visibility in my opinion is get the google sitemap plug in.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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