Optimizing Your Blog under the Hood

Some optimization concepts really happen “under the hood” — you can't readily see these adjustments on your page, but they have an impact on how search engines deal with your content.

Metadata

The metadata on a Web site contains the information that describes to search engines what your site is about. Additionally, the information often contained in the metadata shows up as the actual search engine results in Google. The search engine pulls the page title and page description that appear in search results from the header of your blog. If you do nothing to control this information, Google and other search engines often pull their description from the page title and the first few sentences of a blog post.

Although the title and the first few sentences sound good in principle, they probably don't represent what your blog post is actually about. You probably don't sum up your post topic in the first two sentences of that post. Those first few lines likely aren't the best ad copy or the most enticing information. Thankfully, some plugins (such as the WordPress All in One SEO Pack plugin found in the WordPress plugin directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack) allow you to control these details on a post and page level. Additionally, theme frameworks (see Book VI, Chapter 7) like Genesis or Thesis offer you more control over your SEO information.

Include descriptive page titles, descriptions, and targeted keywords for each post via these plugins or frameworks: This information has an impact on your results and often helps people decide to click the link to your Web site.

Robots.txt

When a search engine goes to your Web site, it first looks at your robots.txt file to get the information about what it should and shouldn't be looking for, and where to look.

You can alter your robots.txt file to direct search engines to the information that they should crawl and to give specific content priority over other content. Several plugins allow you to configure your robots.txt file, which we cover in Book V, Chapter 5.