Once again, I want to tell you to not blindly trust theme authors when they say their theme is SEO friendly. “SEO friendly” is just a label they put on their theme and since most of their customers don’t know what to look for to see if it’s actually true, yet know that it’s important, it helps “sell” themes.
Sounds like he’s describing me and I bet a lot of other people as well. Overall, good advice from Joost de Valk with a little bit of self promotion at the end.
Congratulations to Michael Torbert as the All In One SEO Plugin recently reached the 10 million downloads milestone. That’s a heck of a lot of downloads with Akismet being about 1.24 million away from reaching the same milestone. By the way, All In One SEO reached one million downloads around January 27th, 2009.
While this is a cool achievement, I must admit that I think the AIO SEO plugin has somewhat lost the battle of being the best SEO plugin for WordPress, at least that’s my perception. Based on the people I follow on Twitter who I consider to be influential within the WordPress community and the various articles I’ve read, it seems as though the WordPress SEO By Yoast plugin is currently the one to use. Recently, the only mentions of AIO that I’ve seen are from people looking for comparisons between the two. That doesn’t detract from AIO being a useful plugin, but those are the observations I’ve made over the past few months.
Are you using either of these plugins? I don’t use them and I don’t know much about the innards of SEO so I’ll have to take your word for which is better.
Alex Denning of WPShout.com has published his thoughts on SEO and I tend to agree with all of them. I laugh at those who spend every waking moment optimizing everything they can simply to please those spiders that crawl over content. I consider some aspects of SEO to just be common sense. I use some of that common sense on WPTavern.com by using the Google XML sitemaps plugin because it makes it easier to index articles across the site. This is the only SEO specific plugin I use. As for pretty permalinks, I use %postname% not so much for SEO purposes, but because it keeps the URL short and human readable. When I write content, I do so in a way that comes natural. I don’t use certain words over others because they taste better to the spiders. I write as a human for other humans. The tags are just words that I’ve used in the article to help create some sort of relevance between articles around the same topic. I don’t treat them as meta keywords. As for the theme that I use, Hybrid News has a few different options on Meta information and indexing that I use but I don’t even understand what the options do.
I don’t dismiss everything around SEO as junk, I just think it’s better for everyone, including Google if humans come first before spiders. This site has a page rank of 5, an Alexa Ranking below 30,000 and has a devoted fan base all accomplished without any SEO trickery. Search engines also make up a bulk of the traffic this site receives. This must mean I’m doing something right as Google and other search engines have no problem pointing searchers to WordPress articles on WPTavern that are relevant to their search query. My general advice for SEO is to do a few little things to get started but write for people first, SEO will follow.
This is a guest blog post written by Ryan Hellyer, who operates PixoPoint.com. While you’re there, check out his WordPress Menu PluginUnlike blogging software like WordPress which usually feature good on-site SEO even from a default install, forum software typically has never featured good on-site SEO features. Default themes with nested, non-semantical tables, inappropriate use of headings, lack of any real attempt to use semantical code and appalling use of permalinks are standard features of off-the-shelf forum software.
The bbPress.org support forum demonstrating the pretty permalinks available in a default bbPress installation.
However, unlike it’s more bloated counterparts, bbPress has extraordinarily good SEO features straight out of the box. The only other forum software I know of which is capable of doing Pretty URL’s/permalinks straight out of the box is Vanilla. There is a free MOD available for SMF which accomplishes this, but for vBulletin this requires a paid MOD.
The simplemachines.org support forum demonstrating the the standard SMF URLs. Note how the bbPress URLs describe the content whereas the SMF ones are simply a number.
Another major SEO feature which a default installation of bbPress is capable of is pingbacks/trackbacks. No other software is able to do this by default. There is no MOD currently available for SMF to do this and (again) vBulletin requires a paid MOD to to add the same feature that bbPress can do by default.
The default bbPress theme (Kakumei) features fairly semantical code which has led to most of the bbPress themes available featuring a high level of on-site SEO in comparison to their larger competitors.
bbPress is much maligned by it’s competitors and the average Joe web developer seems to dismiss it as being too basic and “not really useful for anything”. However they are missing the real point of bbPress. It may be a super simple forum system, but although it is lacking in whizz bang features which it’s larger more bloated competitors have, it does include extra more complex features under the bonnet which many do not realise are there.
Having said all this, I actually use SMF myself. Both my support forum and my site about Hockey in New Zealand run SMF. The reason I don’t use bbPress for either of these forums is because it would require too many plugins and the workload required to create a custom theme of high enough quality is simply not worth it. Some basic features I would like to have available in my forums are not currently possible with bbPress without considerable effort.
In this special Saturday edition of WordPress Weekly, David and I had the chance to interview Joost De Valk of Yoast.com. During the interview, we discussed plugin development, WordPress SEO, why Joost has not created his own SEO plugin, his thoughts on some of the WordPress Google Summer Of Code projects for 2009 and much more. Joost sounded great from across the pond considering he had a 20mb up/down connection. Wow!
This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by, WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios is a website development company specializing in WordPress support and development services. Contact them today for help with your WordPress powered website.
Next Episode: Friday April 3rd, 2009 8P.M. EST
Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe
Length Of Episode: 43 Minutes
Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode48.mp3
Listen To Episode #48:
Just wanted to give a quick congratulations to Michael Torbert also known as hallsofmontezuma as the All In One SEO Pack has reached over 1,000,000 downloads. While Michael can’t lay claim to every single one of those downloads considering he picked up development for the plugin not too long ago, reaching one million downloads is still quite a milestone.
Image courtesy of semperfiwebdesign
You would think that by now, WordPress would have added most of the functionality provided by the plugin into the core. But so far, that hasn’t happened yet and I’d like for it to stay that way. I think the AIO SEO Pack serves the needs of SEO perfectly fine as a plugin rather than being bundled into the core of WordPress.