Many of you know I’m a big fan of WordPress, and many of you are using or are considering using WordPress as part of your university web presence. In this post we continue a short series on search engine optimization tips for WordPress blogs. These may have been covered elsewhere in your travels (some of them, in one form or another, on this blog), but this one and the next seem rather obscure and worth repeating. I’ve had success with these on a variety of WP installations.

Herewith, tip #2 in the series on optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines. Note that these tips are not necessarily options on Wordpress.com hosted blogs.

Tip 2 - Optimal Title

Optimal Title is a WP plugin that places your blog post title first in the HTML title (the thing that appears in your web browser’s top-most bar), followed by the blog name. The default WP setting is to place the blog title first. In some cases, this helps search engines distinguish among pages on your website, which can lead to your site being better represented in search engines and reduce the number of posts that are treated as “duplicate” or “similar” content. You’ve worked hard on those posts, now get the credit you deserve!

Here’s the difference:

Before plugin:

Peterson’s - a Nelnet Company- Syndication for Higher Ed >> Babson RSS feed image - Update!

After plugin:

Babson RSS feed image - Update! >> Peterson’s - a Nelnet Company - Syndication for Higher Ed

The free WordPress software is a popular choice on university campuses and in the business world as well. It’s commonly considered a blogging platform, but it can also be used as a lightweight and flexible content management system, e.g. for standalone department websites. I’ve been working with WP for quite a while now, and have done countless installations in a variety of contexts.

Some of the more interesting and useful customizations I’ve encountered are aimed at getting the most out of your blog in search engines, which is why I’m sharing this brief series of search engine-related tips. Of course these are a few of the many things you can do to optimize your WP blog for search engines. It starts with good content and great titles, but these tips can take you even further. Caveats: 1) Not all of these tips are implemented on this blog, which is a WordPress blog; 2) These tips apply to installed version of WordPress, not to WordPress.com hosted instances.

Tip 1 - Permalinks

We’ll start out with a basic one that many of you may know already. Consider it a warm-up exercise.

A permalink is a URL that identifies a particular bit of content on the web indefinitely. In a WordPress blog, a permalink is automatically generated for each post and each page. Clicking on the title of a post from a blog home page will usually take you to the individual post, and this is where you can see the post’s permalink in the browser address bar.

From the perspective of search engines, not all permalinks are created equal. Static permalinks (versus ones that have variables in them) can get preference in search engine results. Permalinks that contain key terms from the content on the particular page can also get preference for related searches.

WordPress offers some options here. Under Options/Permalinks with your WP admin interface, make sure you’re set to use terms from the title of the post in the URL. This will enable you to make the most of your well-researched post titles. (You are doing a bit of keyword research prior to writing your titles, aren’t you?) Karine shared a form of this tip with me some time ago, and it’s often the first one I recommend to others.

Changing this setting has the following effect on your URLs.

Before:

http://syndicateblog.petersons.com/wordpress/?p=230

After:

http://syndicateblog.petersons.com/wordpress/index.php/tips-for-optimizing-your-wordpress-blog-for-search-engines

Note the screenshots below from the admin interfaces of WP 1.5 and 2.0, respectively, showing setting options for permalinks.

Caution: If you’re using WP 1.5, note that changing this setting could render existing posts unreachable, but there are fixes for this, too. WP 2.0 seems to handle the switchover more gracefully.
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Screenshot from WP 1.5:

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Screenshot from WP 2.0

Macquarie University has a new multimedia site (reviewed nicely at Animatty.com) called MQtv.

There is a lot to praise about this effort, and Animatty.com has covered the points well. Individual pages are easy to read - lots of white space. The videos, based on multi-camera shoots, are crisp and nicely produced - far better than the fare you see on YouTube these days. The range of content should make the PR department’s job easier far as it illustrates the gamut academic and research achievements.

I guess in general I find it a bit too “multi-media” oriented (is that an outdated term, or is it just me?), which is to say, too focused on the media itself, while — perhaps — in need of ways to help new audiences access the content. I would love to see them add RSS feeds for videos and mp3s, perhaps organized into topical channels so that people could subscribe based on individual interests, e.g. Admissions, Athletics, Business Management. More and more journalists are finding story ideas via RSS - so why not make it easy for them? (Regular readers of this blog know that how insistent I am; if I can’t add your site to my RSS reader, chances are I won’t visit it again!) From an SEO perspective, I would also suggest unique HTML page titles and URLs containing keywords found in the content of the page. Google and other search engines sometimes treat pages with the same page titles as the same page - even if the URL is different - meaning the site won’t be as well represented in search engines as it could be.

Anyway, this is, of course, just my 2 U.S. cents on improving a site that’s very much headed in the right direction and will serve its audience well, to be sure. I’ve already enjoyed a number of the videos and mp3s. This is very much the kind of diverse, pointed, and quality content we’ll begin seeing from universities globe-wide. If you’re a university PR director interested in some of these new forms, this is a site to study in depth.

(Via Animatty.com)

I reported earlier about the cool and content-rich Babson feed, and how I wished the images came through the feed into my Sage reader. Well I’m happy to report they’re now flowing through. (See image below - this is what the feed looks like in my Sage reader for Firefox.) Perhaps Dimitri’s comments helped?