This guest post was written by Matt of MattDunlap.org, where he writes about how to increase your conversion rates with a smarter blog. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been focusing on traffic building, link building and SEO on my WordPress blog. All three of these website strategies go hand in hand and all build on each other.  In this post I will discussing how to make sure your WordPress blog is running efficiently.

WordPress does a lot of cool things in the background to make your website run smoothly. Have you ever noticed that when you change a blog post from one category to another, somehow, someway, you always arrive at the new location?  That’s WordPress doing it’s magic!  Unfortunately, Humans interact with a blog differently than search engine spiders, so while your permalinks might look nice and organized, the search engine spiders might see problems.

The best place to start is with a blog audit. If your WordPress blog is not using Google Webmaster Tools, this is a great place to start.  Google Webmaster tools will not only show you how Google sees your website, but also recommend tips to improve the crawling of your site.

I just did a blog audit and found a couple problems. My sitemap was not getting generated anymore due to permission problems. Even worse the old sitemap had many bad links. Using webmaster tools I could see that Google received 80 posts from me, but only indexed 4. OUCH!  Of course I have many more links in Google from other websites. The sitemap is only a recommendation to Google, but I highly recommend keeping up to date. I used the the Google XML Sitemap plugin.

I also had a duplicate content problem. To me, this is really frustrating, because again, as a human, I see my blog a certain way and it looks fine. Then looking at my website from the search engine spider’s point of view, I see many of my posts repeated as many as 5 times.

You might think that is great… 1 post, 5 entries in Google. Well, it’s not because instead of having one powerful link to your website, you have 5 at 20% power. Try cooking a potato at 20% power, it’s a waste of time.

How does this happen? I was using All-in-One SEO plugin and that is suppose to have canonical links, but I still have duplicate content.

So like any hacker, I built a simple Googlebot tracker to see how Google spiders my site… Wow, not what I expected. There is so much I’m learning from the Googlebot tracker, I will have many posts on this little bot, but for now let’s just say, I bet you are wasting Google’s time with your WordPress blog!

The Googlebot doesn’t just come into your website and spider all your content. In my case it comes and grabs one page and leaves. It’s doing this every couple minutes for a total of about 200-300 per day. Webmaster tools will show you how many times you get spidered, but will not show you what pages get indexed.

I was horrified to see that I was wasting Google juice on tags and categories. If Google is only going to hit your website 100 times a day, you better try to give Google 100 different blog posts. If you have 10 tags per post, you might be giving Google 1 blog post with 10 different links. Google then has to choose which page is the highest priority. You can see how 100 blog posts, can easily turn to 10 blog posts because we all love to tag our stuff.

How do you solve this. First of all it takes time. you have many links in Google and the Googlebot will continue to follow them, which isn’t bad… Don’t try to shut off the Googlebot, just make changes for the future of your website.

1. Make sure you have canonical link set up. This tells Google where the main blog post, and that all the links from categories and tags really are just pointers to the main blog post.
2. Make sure you nofollow internal links to categories, tags, archive, sitemap, etc… Your goal is to drive search engine spiders to your blog posts, not to a category page full of links. There are a few plugins that do this, but I manually did it to my menu and sidebar widgets.
3. If you change you permalinks, make sure you provide Google with 301 redirect messages pointing to the new link.  For this I use permalink redirect plugin.
4. Make sure you sitemap is up-to-date. Not only does the Google XML sitemap plugin update your sitemap, but it also pings Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask every time you post.
5. Audit your website often. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find mistakes and keep you blog running smoothly.
6. Use analytic software to track visitors to your site.  A free service like Google Analytics will do this well.

Please don’t just read this post as another SEO article. Put these tips into action and start with an SEO audit… If you see anything funny, post a comment below and we’ll see if we can help!

This guest post was written by John of WordPress Expert, where he provides WordPress tips, tutorials, news, plugins, and more. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

When searching the web with Google, have you ever noticed that certain webpages with product reviews have a little star-rating and additional info that appears underneath the title?

For example…

Notice the additions under the hyperlinked title. These eye-catching additions are called “rich snippets.” Rich snippets give additional prominence to your review pages when they appear in search results and could help garner additional search engine traffic for your site.

You can ask Google to show this sort of data for your review posts by adding hReview code to your WordPress blog. This process has been covered in other tutorials before, but previous methods required you to edit your theme’s code and fiddle with custom fields to get it to work. Not anymore — here’s the easier, plugin-only method:

1. Install the SEO Ultimate plugin. (You can download the zip file here or you can go to the SEO Ultimate homepage and enter your blog’s URL in the Auto Installer field.) Activate the plugin once it’s installed. SEO Ultimate has many other SEO features besides rich snippets, but if you just want to use the rich snippet functionality, you can disable everything else under the “Modules” section of the plugin’s “SEO” menu.
2. In the WordPress administration interface, find a post that you’d like to mark as a review and open it in the WordPress editor.
3. In the “SEO Settings” box under the content editor, select “Review” from the “Rich Snippet Type” drop-down. (If your post has a category or tag called “Review” or “Reviews,” SEO Ultimate will pre-select the “Review” option automatically.)
4. If you gave a rating to the product you reviewed in your post, select the most-applicable star rating from the drop-down.
5. Click “Save Changes” to save your post. All done! If you want, you can put your post URL through Google’s testing tool to see a preview of your new rich snippets.

Following these steps will tell SEO Ultimate to add the hReview code to your reviews. (Obviously, only add the code to posts in which you actually review something.)

Note that according to Google’s FAQ, adding the code by itself won’t guarantee that Google will show rich snippets for your site. However, you can request that Google display rich snippets for your site using this form. Even if Google doesn’t show your rich snippets right away, having the code on your site ahead of time will help ensure you’re ahead of the game if/when Google rolls out rich snippets on a wider scale.

Enjoy your rich snippets!

A few months ago I switched my Feedburner account over to Google in order to try out their AdSense for feeds program (not on the WP Hacks feed, but only on a few sites I run that convert well with AdSense).  At the time, doing so was strictly voluntary.  According to a few reports I’ve been reading around the blogosphere the past couple days, it looks like everyone who hasn’t already moved their feeds to Google will be prompted to do so in the very near future.

Is this a good thing?  I suppose there are some advantages to having your feeds on your Google account.   So far the only problem I’ve run into since making the switch to Google’s Feedburner is the Feedcount WordPress plugin I was using, which no longer works with the new setup.  I went in and hacked the plugin code a bit to try to get it work, but it still wasn’t working with the new setup.

Anyone else having any problems since switching your Feedburner account to Google?

If your WordPress blog gets a lot of referral traffic, there is a WordPress plugin you may want to check out called Greet Box. This plugin actually looks at where referral traffic is coming from and displays an appropriate greeting message to your readers.

A popular example is Digg.  If visitors come from Digg.com, they will see a message reminding them to Digg the post!   If you have a Twitter account, you can also setup a custom message to show people visiting from Twitter reminding them to “Tweet” your post or to follow you on Twitter.  This plugin also works for visitors via Google search, etc.

For everyone else, you have the option of setting a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Greet Box Plugin Features:

• Compatible with various WordPress cache plugins so you do not have to sacrifice speed.
• Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
• Detect the visitor’s search keywords and use those keywords to display related posts.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have JavaScript enabled.
• AJAX greeting message in the front-end makes it compatible with caching plugins and WPMU.
• AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
• Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
• Ability to setup regular expression rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages.
• Ultra customizable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prepend/append HTML around the greeting message box.
• Currently the following traffic referrers are in Greet Box by default (you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list):
  1. Delicious
  2. Digg
  3. Google
  4. Yahoo
  5. StumbleUpon
  6. Technorati
  7. Twitter

You can download Greet Box here.   If you’d like to check out some of the other WordPress plugins we’ve featured in the past, you can check out our WordPress Plugins page.

One of the things that has always made SEO so tricky is that Google doesn’t really comment much about search engine optimization techniques and they are always changing their algorithm, leaving testing as the only way to figure out what SEO techniques work.

Well, in case any of our readers missed it, Google has released an official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF).  It doesn’t release any of Google’s algorithm secrets, but it does cover Google’s best practices for title tags, meta tags, URL structure, navigation, content, anchor text, headers, images and of course, Robots.txt, making this a good way to review the basics and make sure you have that stuff down correctly.