Congratulations you finally have your new website built on WordPress. The website looks awesome, the images are perfect and the content perfectly describes your niche market. Because you are using WordPress you added a few plugins and your website is now search engine optimized. Think again.

After years of analyzing WordPress websites that have been search engine optimized, I felt it was time to share 5 killer WordPress SEO tips you may be missing.

Robot.txt File

The robots.txt file is a text file telling search engines and web crawlers what they can and cannot crawl on your website. There may be files you do not want Google to index online.

Enter your URL this way to see your robots.txt files: www.mysite.com/robots.txt.

If you see this:

Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

You need to change it to this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

How to change it:

• It’s easy!!  Just download this plugin http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-robots-txt/ and edit the file.

Time Zone

WordPress uses a default UTC time zone. If your WordPress account is defaulted to the wrong time zone, Google may not recognize your fresh content. Google uses the date you set on your WordPress blog (not the date and time it actually went live) to determine when a blog was published.

NY uses a UTC time code of UTC-5:00. Wikipedia has a great list of UTC time offsets in case you do not know your time zone.

How to change it:

• Go to settings > General and you will see the Timezone field.

 

 

 

 

 

Update Services

Update services automatically notify bookmarking sites, search engines, RSS feeds, and blog directories when you update your blog.

• By default WordPress comes with ping-o-matic which is owned by WordPress parent company Automatic. The problem with Ping-O-Matic is it does not ping all of the update services available. There is a way to modify this and add more update services which will amount to a lot more traffic and backlinks to your website.

How to change it:

On the backend of WordPress, go to settings > writing > scroll down to update services and paste the latest Update Service list.

*Make sure you add the WordPress Ping Optimizer. It saves your blog from getting tagged as ping spammer

 

 

 

 

 

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets can make your website stand out on the search engine results page. With it you can add

• Star ratings
• Embedded photos or videos
• Author photos and links
• Addresses and phone numbers
• Recipe cooking times
• Event dates, times, and locations

 

 

 

 

There are many plugins you can use to add the rich snippets. Below are just a few:

• WP Rich Snippets…More info
• WP Social SEO booster…More Info
• All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets…More Info

HTML Sitemap 

Why make it so difficult for visitors to navigate through your website. Another advantage….it will find pages which were forgotten. (notice the example below there was a sample page we found) Download the HTML Page Sitemap and it will easily create a sitemap once you add this code to the HTML sitemap page.  [html_sitemap]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are many other things you will need to do to properly optimize your website. They include using custom permalinks, keywords, unique title tags on every page, meta descriptions on every page and a whole lot more.

Share what you are doing to your WordPress Site to make sure it is properly search engine optimized?

If you already have a site, we encourage you to check your SEO score.