September 26, 2007

7 Wordpress plugins for better indexing

Written by Brian Turner

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Wordpress offers a potentially great solution for building a CMS.

However, as the site grows, ensuring that search engines and human users can properly find your content can become a challenge.

Luckily, there are a couple of great Wordpress Plugins already available which can help resolve this issue.

When implemented, they should be able to help improve your site architecture in a number of different ways:

1. Allow cross-linking of relevant posts, to help general indexing
2. Display latest posts, to help search engines find the latest content
3. Highlight your most popular posts, to help promote them further to traffic

The overall result should be a much better site architecture, which clearly establishes relationships between relevant content, helps new content get indexed faster, and pushes link juice into most popular topics.

While there are a number of plugins available, how you actually implement them is up to you - with the ability to customise your navigation structure in a way that suits your site best:

1. Latest posts

What it does: Republishes Latest Posts with linked titles.

Description: Latest Posts is something pretty essential to a large number of installs. There are actually a few different ways you can achieve this, either by using the Wordpress Widgets set up, a Wordpress plugin, or else a simple PHP script. The more adventurous can republish different categories as required, such as to an index page.

Placement: This runs great in a side navigation area. At a glance, human users can see your latest content, and so can search engines. This can also be used to show on a page only basis below posts, either in the comments.php file, or else using a conditional.

Source and instructions: As above, there are a few different ways to achieve this:
1. Wordpress Templates > Widgets
2. WP Plugin: Today Posts
3. WP Plugin: Previous Posts
4. I prefer to use my own code, which will publish the titles from all items in the feed. You can download that here [Publish Latest Posts script] and just edit and copy/paste as required, else read the general article on publishing RSS feeds I wrote earlier.

2. Erwin’s Related Posts Link

What it does: Publishes Related Posts, based on keywords in the post title.

Description: Related posts is an oldie and goodie Wordpress Plugin, that normally works fine with WP 2.0 - though I have had a few issues on it on a couple of installs.

Placement: The most natural place for this is in your comments.php file, usually above the actual comments code, as it makes it easier for human readers to reference it - though I’ve seen some sites nicely implement this in a little box floated to the side of the post.

Warning: This plugin traditionally does not like the “gzip files if browser requests” checkbox, to be found in Wordpress Admin > Options > Reading

Source and instructions: Related Posts

3. Alleba’s Daily Top 10 Posts

What it does: Most read posts of all time; Most read posts today

Description: Daily Top Ten is an absolutely superb plugin and highly recommended. It offers two complementary features - one is to publish links to the most viewed posts to date; the other publishes links to most viewed posts today.

Most read to date is a great feature to use, because it helps reinforce the popularity of these posts by directing human users to them, as well as pushing your link juice into them.

Additionally, Most read today is a superb features for webmasters to get a live and simple idea of how popular any individual post is that day, as well as the above benefits.

Placement: Placed in the site navigation is a simple and effective place, though if you’re worried about gumming up an existing navigation, simply use the if(is_single()) conditional to publish it only on individual pages.

Source and instructions: Wordpress Plugin: Daily Top 10 Posts

4. Latest Post from each Category

What it does: This publishes a list of latest posts from each category, with a variety of customisations available for republishing the format.

Description:: This is another powerful plugin for helping with indexing and user attention, and offers serious flexibility with a range of different variables you can modify.

Placement: This plugin can work very well in either the site navigation, or else in individual posts. Because of the flexibility involved, this is a plugin you may need to expressly plan for in your site design and presentation, rather than simply add in an ad hoc manner to get the most out of it.

Source and instructions: Latest Post from each Category plugin for WordPress

5. Customizable Post Listings

What it does: Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts.

Description: This is another very flexible plugin, that allows you to work with a range of different variables to set up links to featured posts in a very customisable manner. What strikes out is how focused this plugin is on the human user experience, with its attempts to draw in reader attention to discussions on a specific basis. Still, the search engine benefits should be pretty obvious in trying to direct your own link juice to the most active and updated posts on your site.

Placement: One that probably works best in the site navigation, though again, you can look to use it on individual posts with a conditional. If you want to get really adventurous, you could consider setting up the different features of this plugin in different include files, then call them up randomly so that users see a different feature on every page refresh - just for fun. :)

Lorelle actually has a pretty nice write up on how to use it more to your advantage here: Customizable Post Listings WordPress Plugin

Source and instructions: Plugin: Customizable Post Listings

6. Top posts by category

What it does: Displays most popular posts by category, according to visits or number of comments.

Description: This is a plugin that allows you to display the most popular posts by category, and also allows you to set the indicator of popularity by visits or comments. I haven’t used this one yet, but in theory it certainly offers a potentially very useful drill down for search engines to deeper posts, and human users who may be looking for more information posted on a particular category area.

Placement: This can be added within the post body, but again, its potential is probably better explored by making this a part of your standard site navigation.

Source and instructions: WordPress Plugin: Top Posts by Category

7. Alex King’s articles page

What it does: Creates a customised sitemap for human and search engine visitors alike.

Description: This is a more specialised plugin, as it’s effectively for creating a shop window of particular posts you’d like to draw attention to, pretty much like a customised sitemap.

Placement: This is something you’re not likely able to include in your navigation or individual posts without creating serious information overload. However, the ability to create a dedicated sitemap page relatively simply and easily is certainly appealing, especially by the manner in which it will auto-update if you assign posts to it as you compose them.

Source and instructions: Alex King Wordpress Plugins: Articles

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