Book Image

WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization

Book Image

WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization

Overview of this book

WordPress is a powerful platform for creating feature-rich and attractive websites and blogs; but with a little extra tweaking and effort your WordPress site can dominate the search engines and bring thousands of new customers to your blog or business. WordPress3.0 Search Engine Optimization will show you the secrets that professional SEO companies use to take websites to the top of search results and proliferate their business. You'll be able to take your WordPress blog/site to the next level, as well as brush aside even the stiffest competition with this book in hand. We'll begin with a typical WordPress installation and with a variety of simple techniques, turn it into a powerful website that search engines will reward with high rankings. We'll go further: with advanced plug-ins we'll connect your WordPress site to popular social media sites and expand the reach of your site to bring more visitors. You'll learn about dozens of free online tools to accomplish everything from keyword research to monitoring your ranking progress. WordPress is a great start for building search-friendly sites. However, with the tools in this book, you'll get your website/blog noticed by numerous new users/customers or your target audience.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The ultimate WordPress robots.txt file


We learned in Chapter 2, Customizing WordPress Settings for SEO, that WordPress generates archive, tag, comment, and category pages that raise duplicate content issues. We can signal to search engines to ignore these duplicate content pages with a robots.txt file. In this section, we'll kill a few birds with one ultimate robots.txt file. We'll tell search engines to ignore our duplicated pages. We'll go further: we'll instruct search engines not to index our admin area and not to index non-essential folders on our server. As an option, we can also ask bad bots not to index any pages on our site, though they tend to usually do as they wish.

You can create a robots.txt file in any text editor. Place the file in the root directory/folder of your website (not the WordPress template folder) and the search engines will find it automatically.

The following robots.txt is quite simple, but can accomplish much in a few lines:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow...