I verified my site in Google Webmaster Tools and tried to submit a sitemap. In the webmaster tools panel, it informed me that my robots.txt file was blocking Google from grabbing my sitemap.

This confused me, as I know I would never knowingly make a robots.txt file to block search engines.

Read on to find out what the problem was, how to fix it, and how it happened in the first place…

The Problem

I checked out my robots.txt file and saw the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

As if disallowing all bots wasn’t enough, I saw all the pages of my site had the following meta tag in it.

Okay, so now my SEO was killed on two different levels – search engines can’t index or follow links, if they could somehow first get past the robots.txt.
The Fix

How did I remedy this crucial mistake? It’s a simple fix.

WordPress SEO Visible

I navigated to my privacy settings in the WordPress administration panel and selected I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.
Prevention

When installing WordPress, make sure you don’t deselect the checkbox that reads: Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati.
Conclusion

You should always verify your site(s) in Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any problems with indexing. I hope you found this quick WordPress tip informative, because although this is a simple mistake, it’s something to be aware of when SEO’ing WordPress sites.

[via Themelab]

Share on Facebook

1. Upgrade your WordPress. Hate the thought of saying goodbye to WordPress 2.6? Don’t. You need upgrade to the latest WP version, and you need to do it now. Don’t worry; it’s easy. Just look for the Upgrade button in Tools or your dashboard.

2. Update your plugins. Anything old is a security risk. Keep your plugin versions up-to-date.

3. Delete the default user. In this case, it’s Admin so bin this. Replace it with a new user (naturally, this user has admin rights) and create a nickname for this user. That way, the username on public display is not the same as yours.

4. Limit the access to wp-admin. This restricts .htaccess of your wp-admin to your IP. The downside to this security measure, though, is that you will need to update the .htaccess folder whenever you move to another area. You may need another website walkthrough for this; but obviously, this step is out of the question for you if your IP address is dynamic.

5. Install the plugin Login Lockdown. This plugin records the time stamp and IP address whenever someone tries to log in to WordPress and fails. It works great at preventing attempts to discover your password through brute force attacks. If attempts to log in by one IP range exceed the maximum number of tries allowed, the plugin automatically disables the login function.

Of course, there are many more ways you can make your blog hack-proof. This website walkthrough only covers the basics and the ones that are easiest to do. Feel free to look for more! When it comes to website security, it’s better to go over-protect than be sorry.

Share on Facebook

WordPress is flexible: With WordPress you can choose whether to use a post or a page to promote a product. You can also choose to enable comments on your product pages in order to solicit user-generated content on your website in the form of reader reviews. It also allows further customization by choosing whether to have a static front page (rather than a long page of posts) so you can highlight particular products or your mailing list.

WordPress supports themes: There’s a saying that you only have once chance to make a good first impression. Designing and testing a new look every other week for a traditional site is time-consuming, but with WordPress, it’s as simple as picking out a theme you like, uploading it, and clicking a button. WordPress’ theme capabilities make modifying the look of a site based on whether someone is looking at the homepage, a category page, or a single entry page a reality. That means you can better optimize each area of your website for higher conversion rates.

WordPress can be extended with plugins: Being a lightweight software application, WordPress doesn’t come with every capability under the sun right out of the box, but that doesn’t mean you can’t add that capability. With plugins, you can have WordPress do a number of things such as maintain a mailing list, create shortened affiliate links and track their clicks, or even import affiliate product feeds directly into your website.

WordPress has built-in author management: One part of growing an affiliate marketing business is learning when and how to delegate. Since WordPress allows for multiple authors, you can easily have other people create and add content to your website without giving out your personal admin information or giving them too much power over your website, only enough to get the job done.

The WordPress community is huge: Since WordPress is so widespread, there are many volunteers who develop themes, plugins, and understand the intricate workings of the software and can offer help should you encounter a problem. There are also a number of guides and books to help you get started installing and using WordPress. Basically, if you ever get stuck on something, there is most likely someone right around the bend that has an answer.

It should be more than clear that WordPress isn’t just for blogging anymore. Use the software to help manage your entire affiliate website and watch your productivity go through the roof.

Share on Facebook

1. All in One SEO Pack

This wordpress plugin helps you to prepare the basics of SEO for your blog. You can have metatags for your entire blog or different sets for each different page.

2. Redirection

There may be changes to your permalink URL of a particular page of a blog. You may have updated it, may have shifted hosts, or have renamed the link URL. What happens is the user comes to the URL which was there before, but doesn’t find it, resulting in loss of traffic and goodwill. Redirection takes care of this and automatically redirects the user to the
Updated page resulting in lower loss of traffic, it is a very useful wordpress plugin for SEO.

3. Robots Meta

Search engines entire sites by default, and sometimes that result in penalty due to duplicate content present in different pages. Proper SEO should take care of this, and robots meta helps this by telling engines which areas of site to crawl and which not to crawl. Robots Meta is a good wordpress plugin for this. Good for SEO and hence good for traffic on your wordpress blog too.

4. SEO Smart Links

Internal link structure is one of the key issues of SEO. Search engines give more importance to pages that are linked again and again from a site, giving that page more importance than the others. Doing that manually would take hours and would be a continual task. SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘traffic’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word traffic appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.

5. SEO Friendly Images

For good SEO, image should be tagged properly and meaningfully. SEO friendly images do just that. If you are keen to use images in your wordpress blog, you should be keen to use this wordpress plugin as well.

6. Google Positioner

Know what the users are searching for, instead of guessing what they could search for and building accordingly. This application gives you the group of keywords users used to get to you, so that you can position your pages accordingly. Cool, isn’t it?

7. Permalinks Moved Permanently

This works like the redirect plugin, only in a simpler and better way.

8. Nofollow Case by Case

The nofollow is used so that no pagerank value is given to comment links. However, a new blogger may want to give away that juice to attract new users, who gets value for their posts. This wordpress plugin does exactly that.

9. SEO Slugs

Stop words are ignored by search engines, but they are indispensable in post titles. Suppose you have a title like “What can you do in SEO for higher Wordpress traffic”. Your permlink will be “what-can-you-do-for-higher-Wordpress-traffic” but what you want is “higher-worpress-traffic”. The wordpress plugin automatically removes stop words from the permalink, helping you to rank better.

Share on Facebook