Top 3 Best SEO Tips You’ll Ever Hear

Before I made some simple changes to Nusuni.com it got crap traffic from Google. It was embarrassing, this blog got hardly anything, but my other blogs were getting something nuts like 90% of their traffic from SEs (mostly Google). Although this still gets nowhere near that amount, I managed to increase its SE traffic by over 300% literally overnight (alright, it took a couple of weeks for stuff to take effect, but still…)

The answers were so obvious I felt like screaming:

Use Extra Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are by far one of the best things to be created this decade.

There are some solutions that let you automatically create them. However, you may still need to do some “manual labor” to use them 100%. By default the WordPress plugin that most people use for sitemaps does not put “/page/*” pages into the sitemap (like http://www.nusuni.com/blog/page/3/).

All I did was make another sitemap file (manually created) and put in the /page/… pages. You can view mine here, in case you want an example. After that I created a sitemap index file and included both sitemaps in it and submitted that to Google, Yahoo, etc.

Ok… well.. I did write up a quick 20 second javascript to make this a bit easier. Eventually I may write a plugin or something to do it right from WordPress, unless someone else wants to tackle that challenge.

To use the script simply type in the url (eg: http://www.nusuni.com/blog/page/, you can also do categories like that) then the starting page number (1) and the last page (in my case, 69, it’s a bit of a guessing game to find it, just keep increasing until you hit 404 errors in your browser) and click Make Sitemap. It will display a URL list that you can copy and paste into your sitemap.

This change definitely made the biggest difference, as explained at the end of this post.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to update that sitemap once a month at least, otherwise you’ll run into the same problem again.

Edited Meta Tags For Archive Pages

The next thing I did was put this code into the header.php file for my theme:

if(!is_paged() && (is_page() || is_single() || is_home())) {
	//only allow single pages, static pages, and the home page to be indexed
	print "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index,follow\" />\n";
}
else {
	//archives won't be indexed, but the links will be followed
	print "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex,follow\" />\n";
}

I think there is a plugin that does something similar, but I can’t think of the name.

This simply makes it so the archive and category pages are not indexed, but all links are followed. Who cares if the content gets indexed (that’s bad actually, duplicate content in a way), the links going to your individual post pages are what matter.

Don’t Let Your Feeds Get Indexed!

Feeds can also cause some huge issues with duplicate content, don’t let the SEs look at ‘em! The same is true with the trackback URL — they will think that is different from the post’s normal permalink URL. I handle these issues with the following entry in my robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */trackback/

Why Does This Work?

I have a small theory. Mr. Search Bot will go and look at a wordpress blog and index the posts correctly, but as soon as the posts get kicked off the homepage they will have little if any links pointing to them (unless it is a super popular blog that gets links to every single post, and chances are not all of your /page/ pages are indexed either). Because there are no links the search bot won’t think the individual posts are very important, thus the rankings will drop instantly.

By making a sitemap that includes all of the archive pages (…/page/…), the search engine will index them then realize those posts actually do have links to them, so it will give them good rankings again. Another way to acheive this would be to simply stop posting for a month and let the SE find your archive pages naturally… but time is money, right?

Of course that is just a theory. All I know for an absolute fact is I sure as heck didn’t get this much Google traffic before these changes:

As with any tips, experiment and record your results, experiment and record your results, etc. If you find any more great ways to get a lot more traffic from the SEs, feel free to share ‘em. And if these tips helped you out, please drop a comment. It’s always nice hearing other people’s experiences.

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