Writing a WordPress blog should be easy – but it genuinely takes about ten or so plugins to start actually doing things in a SEO-sensible way. A basic list I’d recommend would look like:-
- Akismet
- All In One SEO Pack
- CSS Compress
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Robots Meta
- SEO Friendly Images
- WordPress Tweaks
- WordPress Automatic Upgrade
- WP Super Cache
- WP Security Scan
…though I have to admit I have a further 17 plugins currently active (far too many to list).
For a programming junkie technophile such as myself, the temptation to start twiddling with PHP source code is hard to resist. The dinky little ‘Edit‘ button beside each plugin seems to magnetically pull my mouse pointer towards it, particularly strongly for those ones which haven’t been updated in over a year and don’t quite do what I originally hoped they would.
What’s more, Wordpress ‘themes’ (backgrounds) are more often driven by eye-candiness than SEO-friendliness – dwindlingly few of them have a variable-width three-column layout, which I think is the absolute minimum standard. Though I’ve already twiddled Sajith M.’s “Zen In Grey” theme a thousand times (to use CSS sprites, new graphics, etc etc), I’m still not 100% happy with it: and I probably never will be. But maybe that’s how it works.
Right now, I’m in the middle of coding up a load of small changes to the infrastructure, such as removing the post-category links on list-pages, and the whole new drop-down “[Page 1]” page-selection boxes on multi-page lists (such as on the Cipher Mysteries front-page). This was driven by the shock of finding out that I had ended up with over 130 links on the front page (Google allegedly penalizes pages with more than 100 links), and so needed stripping back.
Incidentally, I don’t really understand why Cipher Mysteries dropped from 10th in Google (in searches for “Voynich”) to about 130th a while back: though it has now clawed its way back to about 20th, the whole thing remains a bit of a mystery to me. Google Blogsearch also temporarily dropped my blog like a hot stone a few weeks ago: this seems to have been triggered by my “cryptography vs -ology vs -analysis” post, which presumably triggered some kind of dictionary-based spam test, purely on the title. Oh well!
Enough of the Internet minutiae – time to crawl back under my rock! 🙂