There are countless WordPress Plugins which provide control over every little detail of your site content related to SEO, but many experts agree that a misunderstanding or overuse of SEO metadata can even hurt the ranking of your site. So, ProPhoto has simplified the confusion and automatically handles SEO for you – enabled by default and already set up for great search results.
Customize aspects of your blog’s search engine optimization in “ProPhoto > Settings > Advanced > SEO. If looking for how to rank higher in search, see our SEO FAQ page.
WordPress does a good job of structuring the ‘behind-the-scenes’ code of your site so it is easy for search engines to discover your site content. But many times, greater control over your site ‘searchability’ is desired.
However, since ProPhoto is all about customization, if you have a special circumstance, you can use these settings to modify the searchable content on your site. Just remember that the best approach may be to let your site speak for itself to avoid the “duplicate content” penalty mentioned below.
'Title Tag' Text
A webpage’s title tag can be found in the “<head>” area of the source code:
and is typically seen by site visitors in their browser’s window along the top or in the tab.
(It can also used when a visitor creates a bookmark or ‘favorite’ of one of your sites pages.) But more importantly, the title tag is also critical for search engine optimization since it is used to create the ‘title’ text which shows up in search results.
You can use these various boxes to add to/delete/modify this info for various areas and page types on your site.
The meta description is a brief sentence or two describing succinctly the content and purpose of your page. If this area is left blank, ProPhoto will use your site’s “Tagline”, which is set under “Settings > General” in your WordPress admin area.
The meta description is often (but not always) used as the brief subtext in search engine results pages – therefore, it doesn’t help your site rank higher, but can help you get more visits if it helps people determine that your site has what they’re searching for.
Some people like to add a list of comma-separated keywords in their “meta keyword” tag for SEO reasons. This is not something to spend much (read: any) time on, because search engines like Google have not used meta keywords for search rankings for a long time. See Matt Cutts from Google mention this here. (at 2:52)
But if it helps you sleep better to put them in, just add them here. It should be a list like this:
new york, wedding, photography, bride, senior, portrait, photojournalism
Search engines may penalize you for what is perceived as “duplicate content” on your site – this can actually cause your pages to rank lower than normal. A common negative practice is to ‘spam’ your own site with keywords to boost search results. Search engines will attempt to look for these patterns of repeated content.
Blogs are prone to having duplicate content because Posts can be seen on the homepage, archive page, category page, etc. Use this ProPhoto option to block search engines from indexing certain types of pages to reduce your risk of ‘duplicate content’ penalty. Please note that doing this can make it harder for the search spiders to do a thorough crawl of your site, so it is probably best not to use this feature unless you have a reason to — for example, you display the full content of posts instead of using excerpts on your date archive and category archive pages.
