Managing Canonical Pages for your WordPress Site

Whether you are a beginner or an established brand, you know how important SEO is for a website, its advantages when nurtured, and its ill effects when ignored. Among all the SEO enhancing tools, canonicalization seems to face a bemused look. It is the least considered option among WordPress users because of the lack of understanding. So, to make it simpler let us tell you what exactly a canonical page is. It is like a master key of your house among all the duplicate keys.

When you have a set of pages with similar content, this page acts like a main page. For example, depending on the filters set one commodity of your ecommerce site might appear several times depending on the features that are searched for. To avoid terming these pages as duplicate and to make it a part of a larger faction, it is necessary to mark a canonical page to where all these pages are linked. Many search engines eliminate the duplicate pages from the results. So marking canonical pages is like giving it instructions that the pages are not duplicate but is a piece of the master page.

When setting it up, you have to first decide whether you would want your page to be visible through http:// or http://www by changing it in General Settings. WordPress will fix a 301 redirect and if anyone tries to access the duplicate pages they will be automatically redirected to your canonical site. Your next step would be to insert your URLs on the Webmaster Tools account. Then go to configuration-settings and select the preferred domain.

Finally, you will have to download a good SEO plugin that supports canonical links or a special WordPress canonical link Plugin to support your site. The most preferred plugin is All in One SEO Plugin (http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ ). It optimizes your WordPress blog/site for SEO. It has advanced canonical URL, Google Analytics Support, XML site map support. It automatically optimizes your titles for Google and generates META tags automatically. It is very useful especially for beginners. After installing, go to settings and tick on the canonical URLs checkbox. Here you are done. Now enjoy enhanced uninterrupted SEO for your WordPress site.