Analyzing Kothapally Arun’s SEO For WordPress 3.0 Blogs

I’ve been taking a look @ Kothapally Arun’s free e-book Search Engine Optimization for WordPress 3.0 blogs and with over 500 retweets and counting, it seems quite a popular e-book.

I’ll be airing a few opinions of mine with respect to the topics discussed in the report

Step 6 of the report deals with modifying wordpress post title tags. Arun makes a good point that the H1 tag is the most important of all tags in a wordpress theme and thus all post title tags should be enclosed in the H1 tag.  This advice suddenly goes wrong when he suggests making the change to the post title tags on your index.php file i.e your blog’s front page.

With the little I know from reading loads of SEO posts especially those by Google’s own Matt Cutts, on a proper wordpress theme, the H1 tag is supposed to be used once on any page. Following Arun’s suggestion, applying the H1 tag to the post title tags on the front page of your blog (index.php) would mean that you’d be having more than one H1 tag on the front page and this is so not ideal for the search engines.

By default the only HI tag on the front page of a wordpress site should be the around the BLOG HEADER ONLY!

If you’re going to change your post title’s tag to H1, it’s recommended you do it on single.php not index.php. Even at that, you’d have to modify your blog header’s tag in such a way that on the front page, it’s enclosed in the H1 tag while on other pages across the site, it has a different tag.

NOTE: Changing your post title’s tag could affect the default design of your post title. You would need skills in editing a stylesheet (style.css) to fix this should such a scenario present itself.

Step 7 is all about setting an Ideal Permalink Structure for your blog.

Arun recommends using the structure http://www.yoursitename.com/year/month/date/postname. It’s a great suggestion but when you take things like making database queries faster and less CPU intensive into consideration, having the post id in the permalink structure is even better. This way, the wordpress system goes straight to the post with the specific post id instead of rummaging through all the posts posted on a particular date so as to find the exact one that belongs to the link that was just clicked.

Here’s my own ideal permalink structure http://www.yoursitename.com/post-name/post-id or http://www.yoursitename.com/post-id/post-name. WordPress’ default permalink uses the post or page-id only and I’m guessing it’s all in a bid to increase performance and speed .

In Step 12 Arun makes a great suggestion about increasing site speed with the use of WP Super Cache plug-in but he does fail to mention that there might be server issues if his settings are used on a shared hosting server.

Please take note that most shared hosting servers don’t support gzip @ all.  Here’s Hostgator’s recommended settings for WP Super Cache on their shared hosting plans.

Finally for some reason, Arun is of the opinion that installing wordpress in a subdirectory could bring about duplicate content issues. If for example you install wordpress @ www.yoursite.com/blog, Arun says both www.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com/blog will display the same content.

That’s quite strange to me as www.strictlyonlinebiz.com and www.strictlyonlinebiz.com/blog are showing different content.

Overall the report makes an excellent SEO read for any wordpress beginner. It’s really worth taking a look at for sure .

Download Search Engine Optimization for WordPress 3.0 Blogs.

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