Wordpress and Google

by Stuart Robertson on December 7th, 2005 | designmeme

After moving the blog to Wordpress there have been a couple of steps involved in trying to get Google to index the site the way it had been with the old system. I’ve noticed quite a few blogs running with the basic install, which gives you confusing URLs and page descriptions in search results. If you’re still running a default Wordpress blog, these two tips might be helpful.

The first thing you should do is setup the Permalinks for your blog. This is under Options > Permalinks, and unless you have a reason to do otherwise you might as well go with the suggested structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

This will change the URLs for your posts from something like this:

http://www.designmeme.com/?p=40

to this:

http://www.designmeme.com/2005/11/29/firefox-15/

Much better for search engines, bookmarks and putting into email.

After Google had reindexed the site I noticed the next problem—every page had the same description metadata, which meant every search result for this site listed the same text. That certainly wasn’t ideal.

I tried a few plugins and settled on using Head Meta Description, which automatically generates a meta tag based on the content of your posts. After Google once again reindexed the blog the search results changed from this:

Design Meme » Firefox 1.5
News, information and tips for designers, developers, and independent media artists.

to this:

Design Meme » Firefox 1.5
Firefox Version 1.5 came out today. If you’re not using it already, you really
should give it a try. Pages …

Again much better for people finding the content they’re looking for on this site.

The next thing I need to consider is the Optimal placement of the blog name in page titles and links.

Would this be better: Firefox 1.5 » Design Meme?