Promoting the Israeli independent blogosphere - the Wordpress SEO review project
By fiLi • May 28th, 2007 • Category: SEO, WordpressGot a blog? Need a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) review for your Wordpress blog? This post is a studycase showing an overall SEO analysis for 
selected Wordpress blogs.
Dakar, a blogger who’s leading the Wordpress based community in Israel, started to offer a blog review service for Israeli bloggers, focusing on design (reviews done so far - Mekashkeshim, Things.co.il, Little things, Bath Lizard). I offered my help with some reviews on SEO/M.
The first blog is of things.co.il (codename - TCI), a bi-lingual blogger who writes a Wordpress blog in both English and Hebrew. The second is Little Things (codename - LT), a Hebrew Wordpress blog. The third is a somewhat limited capabilities blog running on a fixed Wordpress MU - Mekashkeshim (codename - MKS). The forth blog is the Bath Lizard (codename - BL), a Hebrew Wordpress blog. The last one is the design reviewer, Dakar (codename - DK), running a Wordpress blog in Hebrew.
Here’s the quick SEO review for all of them, based of tips mentioned across this blog, indicated with the codename the section applies to :
- Duplicate content (TCI, LT, MKS, DK, BL) :
- www no-www: http://www.things.co.il and http://thing.co.il lead to the same URL. Choose one type of URL structure and redirect from the other.
- Backslash duplication: http://things.co.il/416/ (with backslash) and http://things.co.il/416 (without backslash) leads to the same URL. Choose one type of URL structure with or without backslash and redirect from the other.
- Robots.txt : Either robots.txt doesn’t exist at all (LT), it has something that does nothing (MKS), or it’s useless (TCI). Use robots.txt to avoid content duplication.
- Feeds: Take care of the duplicate issue with the full Feedburner feed (only DK, TCI, LT).
- Make an excerpt opening page (only DK, MKS, TCI, LT):
Turn your index, categories and archives pages into excerpt, or don’t index them at all.
- URLs (TCI, LT, MKS, and half BL) : Change URLs names so that they’ll be meaningful for search engines.
- Metatags : Keywords and description Metatags are the same on all posts (TCI), or they just don’t exist (LT, MKS, DK, BL). The keywords should be there, and should represent something about the content of that post.
- Theme design (LT, TCI, MKS, BL) : There are a few tweaks that can be done to optimize the theme, like presented in "Optimize your blog theme’s Headings (H1, H2, H3)".
- Page-titles : Some might need general page title optimization to avoid static phrases (MKS - "blog archive"), and most need to maybe try giving the posts more relevant less clever post names (MKS, LT). Take a look at howto "Optimize the Wordpress Page Titles".
If you found any of this helpful, and you can share a little of your own personal experience on how SEO improved/destroyed your blog, then I’d appreciate it if you’ll take a few minutes to write a reply post and trackback/pingback here.
Good luck.
Wow!
Thanks for putting all this effort. I’m grateful.
I think that I’ll leave the URLs as they are now. I like them short.
Other than that, I think that I’ll adopt your remarks.
You give me lots of homework…
WOW. THANKS! Impressive stuff, and extremely valuable feedback!
I’m with Yohay on the URLs (especially since the Hebrew worded URLs are horrible, and are therefore meaningless to humans).
The same goes for the post titles, I suppose. My blog is fairly personal, and as such, I’m a little more interested in people than in google (altho yeah, google brings in new people, even if they don’t read blogs).
A large chunk of my traffic comes from the various public aggregators, and I find that I prefer to focus on the NOW aspect - using an interesting title on my posts (and the post summaries) to draw people into the blog from these places, than focus on the long term effects that these things might have.
But yeah, like Yohay said - lots and lots of homework! despite what I said - there’s a ton of stuff I can and should fix up in my blog, to improve it SEO-wise, and I intend to!
Hey.
Thanks for the effort.
Already started to adopt the changes.
One remark, regarding excerpt - I’m using a different technique then you suggested. I’ve got most of the posts on the index page as excerpt but the first two (was 4 changed it to 2 today). considering that I write almost everyday and it takes google a while to crawl the new posts this looks like a good comprmise between readability and SEO.
Another thing - please explain your remark at the end - didn’t quite get it.
Okay… whatever works for you.
It might have been too late yesterday and I was tired, but I just didn’t see an archives section that I can navigate through your posts with. Since you put this project reviews in different categories, it was very hard to follow with the next-previous one-post navigation.
That’s all…
Could you share a little traffic stats of what’s been happening with your blog ever since the SEO changes you’ve made about a month or so ago? I think a lot of us are curious. Alexa shows that you’re doing much better, but Alexa’s not that reliable with Israeli websites.
Ok, got your point. will try to create tag page in the next few days for easier navigation
As for traffic, I’m not a great fan of stats so I don’t have very accurate information on this. but as it seems I have now about 300-400 visitors per day.
2-3 month ago it was more like 200 a day.
I’m sure the SEO helped here, pretty much sure the writing focus and the posting frequency affects this.
That’s wonderful …
Good job.
I’ve had similar results with my blog and some of my friends’. I believe it’s even better in the long run.
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Gimme some love please
Well, I’ve adopted most of your remarks. Maybe I’ll put some more effort in my theme next week. I promise to share statistics in a few months, and I’m sure they’ll show a rise in SE traffic.
Thanks again!
Ahalan,
Nice initiative.
When you have the time, i would be happy if you can review Avirtualexit.com
Bye,
Gili
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Thanks for the great coverage =)
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