SEO for WordPress - Page Sculpting

When I was starting this blog I made my choice of using WordPress based on a lot of research.

One of the areas WordPress really shines in, apart from ease of use, is it’s built in SEO support. You can not neglect impact of Search Engine Optimization today. Even small businesses and large corporations rely on SEO to get traffic to their sites.

Although I designed this blog as a snapshot of things going through my life, that hopefully would be interesting for me to read one day, I have soon realized that blogging offers so much more then that. Like the opportunity to link with other people throughout the world and share thoughts with them.

And in order for that to become possible you need to get noticed. One way to do that is by creating useful things like for example WordPress plugins.

The other way involves using SEO techniques to turn the odds of others finding you in your favor. In this article I will be covering the SEO technique called Page Rank Sculpting, but let’s first find out what is Page rank.

Relative page relevance

Page Rank is a Google invention made to describe the relevance of a given page within a Google index. Page rank ranges from 0 to 10 with 10 being best.

Page rank is mainly gained by incoming links. Like in the books where you have credits, and then usually knowledgeable sources are cited. Google used this approach and based their patented algorithm on the same principle. Whenever a source is credited (linked) it’s Page Rank rises, more or less depending of relative relevance of a page giving the link.

Higher ranked pages mean to Google more relevance for the topic they are describing and are more likely to appear in the search results for the same topic. And being high in search results means free visitors.

You can observe page rank easily with a browser add-on (check Firefox 3 Add-ons) or a Google toolbar . For example my blog homepage has currently page rank of 3 (only! but that’s how I wanted it read on..).

Page Rank Sculpting

Page rank flows from one page of the site to another, with inbound links to the page adding to PR and outbound links ‘leaking’ it. By structuring the links on your pages, you can have influence on how the PR is spread on your site. This is called Page Rank Sculpting.

I have designed my blog theme, Amazing Grace , with this in mind. I wanted to give most importance to my posts and pages and less to the home page, archives and categories. Reason is that the home page articles come and go, and I do not want to try and make it relevant for terms that appear there. That’s wasting resources and effort.

What I wanted is that my single pages receive the most of page rank so they would rank higher for the keywords they are about. Since they are static and unchangeable they would become highly relevant for the given keywords.

For example I have 10 pages with PR 5 (which is around 15% of all of my pages).I have also around 20 pages with PR 4.

This gives those pages a lot of relevance for keywords that are found on them, resulting in good rankings in search engines which is what you ultimately want.

You can bulk check page rank (multiple pages at once) on your blog using this free tool.

How is Page Rank Sculpting Achieved?

One way is to have nofollow attribute added to the links you see as not important.

Here is a quote from Matt Cutts, Google’s employee:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify Page Rank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

You want to put nofollow attribute to links to those pages that are not important on your blog, especially if those links appear on most of your pages (like header, footer and sidebar placed links). In practical terms, I have used nofollow attribute to filter out links going to my Home, About, Contact, Guestbook pages then archives, categories, social bookmarking, RSS feed.

Here is an example:

a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/about”

One other way of page rank sculpting is having important links on most of your pages. That is why I write my most important content as WordPress pages, as this way they get automatically listed on the sidebar, insuring presence on all of my blog pages.

I have then even linked to some of the most popular posts on the sidebar, giving them more attention.

SEO Siloing

Another technique is called SEO siloing. It is called this way because you are ’stuffing’ one page with links coming from a lot of other pages. Best example is naming categories according to the keywords you want to rank for, and then create a static category landing page that contains an article and also acts like a mini sitemap for all posts in that category. With all posts linking back to this page it gets a lot of Page Rank. There is a handy WordPress plugin for SEO siliong available here.

Amazing Grace theme supports this technique but I obviously haven’t used it as my categories are Blogging, Adventure etc.. which are too general terms. In this case I wanted to use something simple and more visitor friendly - and not all SEO friendly techniques are user friendly. And always remember, that the users are still the most valuable asset of your blog.

Controlling Page Rank with Comment Sculpting

Another useful trick is what I call the comment sculpting. Since page rank is achieved by getting inbound links and lost with outbound links, if one could control somehow these links they could influence the strength of the page.

Blogs have a feature that makes it easy to implement this kind of control and that is comments. Each comment usually has a date of the comment which servers as a link to the same page. With the increasing number of comments the number of outbound links is nullified by many inbound links coming from the comments.

So a page without any comments would equally spread it’s incoming page rank to let’s say 20 links in your header, sidebar and footer. But if that page has 50 comments, the effects of losing page rank will be much less because 50 of 70 links take the page rank back to the same page. This means that the pages with more comments have the potential to keep the incoming page rank better. Which is logical in human terms as well, those pages will probably be having something interesting to offer.

Hot Tip - Google Site Search

It’s not actually SEO connected but it can help you improve your blog’s usability. If you are using Google Analytics to track visitors to your site (and you should cause it’s extra easy to setup and use) you can use a feature called Google Site Search.

It will work on a WordPress blog and allows you to have information about what did users coming to your site type in the search box (almost every WordPress theme has a search box).

Setting it up is super easy. Go to your main screen of Google Analytics, click Edit settings for the site you want to enable it. Then select Do Track Site Search  and enter ’s’ as Query Parameter. See the picture below.

You can then monitor are visitors searching for on your site, or what they expect to find. This can be also a hint of the information that is not clearly accessible so you may want to rearrange links in your sidebar for example.

I have found out that one user searched for ‘coal mining’ on my blog. Maybe I am missing a niche here?