Promoting the Israeli independent blogosphere – the WordPress SEO review project

Got 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 :

1. Duplicate content (TCI, LT, MKS, DK, BL) :
   1. 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.
   2. 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.
   3. 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.
   4. Feeds: Take care of the duplicate issue with the full Feedburner feed (only DK, TCI, LT).
   5. 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.

2. URLs (TCI, LT, MKS, and half BL) : Change URLs names so that they'll be meaningful for search engines.
3. 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.
4. 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)".
5. 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.