Search Engine Optimization Resources
While WordPress comes ready for search engines, the following are more resources and information you may want to know about preparing and maintaining your site for search engines’ robots and crawlers.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags contain information that describes your site’s purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. The meta tags are stored within the head of your header.php template file. By default, they are not included in WordPress, but you can manually include them and the article on Meta Tags in WordPress takes you through the process of adding meta tags to your WordPress site.
The WordPress Custom Fields option can also be used to include keywords and descriptions for posts and Pages. There are also several WordPress Plugins that can also help you to add meta tags and keyword descriptions to your site found within the Official WordPress Plugin Directory.
Robots.txt Optimization
Search Engines read a file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt to get information on what they should and shouldn’t check.
Adding entries to robots.txt to help SEO is popular misconception. Google says you are welcome to use robots.txt to block parts of your site but these days prefers you don’t. Use page-level noindex tags instead, to tackle low-quality parts of your site. Since 2009, Google has been evermore vocal in its advice to avoid blocking JS & CSS files, and Google’s Search Quality Team has been evermore active in promoting a policy of transparency by webmasters, to help Google verify we’re not “cloaking” or linking to unsightly spam on blocked pages. Therefore the ideal robots file disallows nothing whatsoever, and may link to an XML Sitemap if an accurate one has been constructed (which itself is rare though!).
WordPress by default only blocks a couple of JS files but is nearly compliant with Google’s guidance here.
