To help you on your way with using sunPress, we asked Joost de Valk (yoast.com, orangevalley.nl) to provide some expert guidance. Below is the first of two guest blog posts by Joost, this first one dealing with additional plugins you should add to get the best out of sunPress in the search engines.
Chris Clarkson and myself met at A4UExpo, where some of you might have heard me speak about WordPress optimisation. Chris was very enthusiastic about their release of sunPress and wanted to show it to me. While I’m not very easily impressed, as I’ve seen a lot of WordPress related stuff, sunPress was well thought out and pretty well implemented, and I could do nothing but compliment Chris and his team for their outstanding efforts.
After that though, the team of sunshine.co.uk and myself have been working on improving the sunPress themes even more, resulting in the new release that just came out. After that falls upon me the humble task to tell you how to further optimise your sunPress installation.
The travel sector will, even in these times of economic turmoil, remain a very competitive one. Especially as more people move out of paid search and into organic search optimisation, because they think they can cut costs that way. Because of this heavy competition, you can’t really afford to do anything wrong.
The combination of WordPress and the sunPress plugin and themes provide you with a great chance of competing in this sector nonetheless, as you don’t have to worry about stuff like template optimisation, as that’s been done for you. It now falls upon you to follow the steps below and optimise your WordPress, and after that, there’s just one job left: writing unique and great content, teasing descriptions and well optimised and even more teasing titles.
Plugins for optimisation
Those of you who’ve attended my session at A4UExpo will not read many a new thing here, but I do encourage you to implement all of it. We’ll work our way down from top to bottom through a page.
Titles and descriptions
Titles are the single most important variable in optimising a site for the search engines. First make sure the tag in your header.php that outputs the title is written like this:
<title><?php wp_title('') ?></title>
Now you’ve got full control over your title, you can install the HeadSpace2 plugin. This plugin will take care of your titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords. Install it, and in the settings of the plugin, set how you want each post or page title to look. On a hotel page, the structure of your title should be something like this:
XYZ Hotel Benidorm - Hotels Benidorm - TravelIsFun
Most importantly, the hotel name has to be the first term in the title. If you’ve got a category page for Hotels in Benidorm, the first part of your title should be: Hotels Benidorm, and nothing else.
You can also use HeadSpace to write your meta descriptions and you should make sure that you do this for each and every page you create. If you do it while you’re writing the content, it’s only a small effort, and it can have huge gains. As writing meta description is an art in itself, I’d like to refer you to SEOmoz to read up on it a bit more.
You can also use the HeadSpace plugin to insert your tracking script for for instance Google Analytics, Mint and services like Crazy Egg. I would highly recommend trying a tool like Crazy Egg to see where your users click, and to try and improve your pages for better conversion.
Other meta tags
There are loads of other meta tags and most of them are bullshit, tags like revisit-after and friends are remnants of a long time ago, and are probably best forgotten about. There is an exception to the rule. All the three big search engines now have webmaster tools that can give you very valuable data to work with:
For all three of them, one of the ways of authenticating yourself as the owner of the site is by placing a meta tag with a certain value in the <head> section of your homepage. To make it even easier, my own robots meta plugin allows you to just enter those three keys in the admin of your WordPress install and it will automatically add them to the head section of just your front page.
You can also, at a later stage, use this plugin to disable certain taxonomies on your blog, should you decide not to use those, and to noindex (aka: prevent the search engines from indexing) your blogs search results.
Breadcrumbs
You can’t really make a travel website without going several levels deep, to make it easier for both users and search engines to spider such a site, you should create breadcrumbs. These usually look something like this:
Home » Hotels Benidorm » XYZ Hotel Benidorm
There are several plugins that can help you do this in a very simple way, the two I think are most suited are Breadcrumbs XT and my own Yoast Breadcrumbs.
Paging
By default themes show an “« older entries” link only, and this causes very old entries to disappear from the index. While this might work very well for your blog as it makes sure that old offers disappear automatically, but it won’t work for your pages, as you’ve spend a lot of time writing that unique content, haven’t you?
So you should a plugin like WP Page Numbers to make sure that the paging on your blog is done with nice links like this:
XML Sitemaps
To make sure your content is spidered as fast as it should be, you should be using XML sitemaps. As of WordPress 2.7, to be released somewhere in the coming weeks, these will be included by default. If you’re using an older version of WordPress, you’ll need to install the XML Sitemaps plugin.
It’s default settings aren’t too shabby, but you should make sure it can actually write to the sitemap.xml or the sitemap.xml.gz file.
Conclusion
Implemented all of the above? Then you should be ready to rock in the search engines. The only thing that remains is writing awesome content, and (probably the hardest part) gathering links. I can only wish you the best of luck in doing that!
Filed under: sunPress
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