Using Headspace WordPress Plugin for SEO
Part 1 in a Series on using the HeadSpace plugin for WordPress for maximum SEO impact. This article gives an overview of HeadSpace’s comprehensive features. Next up, we’ll look at SEO tactics using the plugin.
by Scott Frangos, Managing Editor for WebHelperMagazine.com
If you’re a WordPress BlogMaster, or developer who uses WordPress as a Content Management System or blog, you can’t overlook the importance of the “HeadSpace” plugin, by UrbanGiraffe, for SEO… and a variety of other uses including page specific themes, and RSS management.
View the above illustrations (screenshots of the software) by clicking for a larger view.
I both write for this magazine, and also develop WordPress CMS websites for clients, so like most WebMasters and BlogMasters, I stay pretty busy. That’s another reason I like the Headspace plugin — it provides a lot of time saving automation like mass editing, and dynamic data extraction features. We’ll see how those features can help you, below. Remember to support the development of this plugin — donate to its fine author, John Godley at the above link (UrbanGiraffe).
Go get the plugin. We’ll take a look at Five administration controls in HeadSpace, then finish up with some thoughts about SEO for your WordPress CMS website.
Global Settings…
Above, under OPTIONS > HeadSpace > Page Settings, are a number of settings for different types of pages in your WordPress CMS website. Under each, you can enter a Tile, Description, and Keywords that will be placed in the MetaTags for that page. The program uses a “Nesting Concept” which means that it looks at the “Global Settings” found here first, and applies that to every page, unless page specific tags have been set elsewhere.
Page Modules…
Next there are some drag & drop modules that you can add to your page/post editing screen by dragging a module under “Disabled” (far right above), to either the “Simple” column (far left), or the “Advanced” column (middle). If you drag a module you wish to activate to the Simple column, that module will always appear when you edit a post or page. If you drag it to the middle, “Advance” column, the module options will only appear after you click on the “advanced” link under “Headspace Meta Data” (see below).
Site Modules…
Above, underneath “Page Modules” you’ll find the “Site Modules”. As shown, I’ve turned on Google Analytics, CrazyEgg (another way to analyze site stats), Frame Breaker (prevents other sites from using your content on its site in a Frame), and WordPress Widgets (allows you to specify widgets for individual pages) — CAUTION: If you enable “WordPress Widgets” under “Site Modules”, your sidebar widget set-up will be changed — mine lost 6 sidebar widgets until I turned off this option.
When you activate a module (by simply click the check box next to its name), you then have the opportunity to change settings which affect the behavior of your WordPress site. For example, if I click on “Page Counts”, it becomes active, then I can click on the Edit icon (at right) and I get the options for this module:
Above, the Page Counts option allows you to choose how many excerpts will be shown on Archives pages, and in Search results. Note that the pop-down also offers an option to display the full posts.
Individual Post Tags & Meta Data…
Above, one of the most helpful features of HeadSpace is that it makes it quick and easy to add “Suggested tags” to your posts for SEO purposes — just click on a tag to add it in the “Tags” field. Note that the program suggests an initial list of tags, and you can also click on “Yahoo” to get more related tags to add to your story. If you are on an older version of WordPress, you may not see the “Tags” field shown — this feature is a major reason to upgrade (WordPress 2.3 screenshots shown here).
Notice just under the Suggested Tags, that HeadSpace has “HeadSpace Meta Data” fields for Page Title, and Description. If you’re in to SEO, you know that even today, a well written Page Title and Description can still help you with search engine ranking. The “advanced” link (bottom right), when clicked, reveals additional page modules which you may have added in the previous step.
Mass Management…
Let’s say you run a site with quite a few posts that are archived. It would take a long time to go back and individually change tags and meta data for each post, right? Well, HeadSpace has that covered, as well, using Mass Management:
To take advantage of HeadSpace’s Mass Management feature, you first navigate to Manage > Meta Tags, then a list of all of your pages and posts appears. There you can manage, change, and edit not only tags and keywords (shown), but also pate titles, slugs, site description and name, page description and more text for each and every post and page in your WordPress site. Wow. How powerful is that?
SEO and your WordPress CMS Website…
Search Engine Optimization… how important is it? Tags are recognized by search engines — they are treated like keywords, and so increase your page rankings over time. Most small businesses do not have the resources to spend on SEO. That’s where a plugin like HeadSpace comes in.
Even if you don’t know a lot about SEO, you should realize that keywords, titles, site descriptions, and other important text items that your CMS generates are all a part of the formula a search engine uses to rank your site… and move it up in the search returns. Google “SEO Strategies” and spend a couple of hours reading up. Then, wrap your head around HeadSpace and spend another 3-5 hours inputing SEO rich keywords and phrases into the search data for your site. That 5-10 hours should pay off bigtime in site traffic.
There’s more to tagging than just SEO. This concept is simple — tags are another way to make navigation, around your own site when using the WordPress tagging system, more easy. Some BlogMasters use Technocrati tags — their tags link visitors over to Technocrati. Is this a good idea… to send your visitors off of your own website? I’ll let you be the judge of that, but when you have a content rich site… the answer is obvious — give them links to related content on your site. That’s another strength of the WordPress tagging system that HeadSpace helps facilitate.
About the Author: Scott Frangos is a web developer, college instructor and graphic designer. He is Managing Partner at WebFadds.com, a web development firm specializing in WordPress Content Management Websites. He lives in Portland, Oregon with wife and partner, Pepper, and their three dogs: Wisdom, Spirit, & Steggman.
Written by: Scott Frangos
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under Blogging Help, Online Business, WordPress CMS Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 25th, 2007 at 5:39 am
Hi Scott,
That’s a great a review and it seems pretty much spot-on (other than a spelling mistake - Diabled!). The widget module actually lets you disable widgets, so what you are seeing is exactly what is supposed to happen. You can either disable the module (causing WordPress to run as default with all widgets), or you can enable it and then configure the module to set individual widgets. The reason for the module is to remove unused widgets from your site, cleaning up the widget interface and giving a (small) performance boost. I will reword the module slightly so there’s no confusion.
I’ve added a link to this page from the HeadSpace page as further reading.
Thanks
October 25th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Hi John — Good to hear from you, and thanks for reading so closely that you caught a typo. I think you are right to include a very helpful widget module, but that other BlogMasters may get caught by surprise if they’ve spent some time configuring their existing widgets, and they just disappear. Your rewording should clear it up. Thanks!
November 8th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I installed this plug-in earlier this morning and found your article very useful. Thank you! You’re right - Headspace is a terrific plug-in and deserves a look-see from every WP blogger.
November 8th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Glad you enjoyed the article, Brad. It is a great plugin, and your thoughts and comments count — note that the plugin author was first to comment on the article and plans to make a tweak based on what we learned. We are all in this together. - Scott
November 8th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
[...] Using Headspace WordPress Plugin for SEO [...]
December 15th, 2007 at 10:16 am
great little info piece here Scott… I’m using Headspace2 on my blog and I’m wondering if you have any insight into why it will automagically break affiliate marketing link cloaking?
I’m trying out some affiliate linking to generate revenue for some specialized sites, and headspace just seems to make the link cloaking plugin break. I don’t really want huge long links with my affiliate id to be visible and strippable in the clear. Not because there is any intention to misdirect the surfer, the place they will be directed to is very clear, but because if they strip out my affiliate link I don’t get credit for sending them to the sponsor.
the plugin is Hidden Affiliates Link plugin http://patchlog.com/wordpress/hidden-affiliate-links/
any insight you can provide would be great.
thanks in advance.
December 15th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Hi there Bonafide -
Hey… this is the first time I have heard of that conflict, but I have experienced conflicts between other plugins before. You might want to use your web hosting controls to create URL forwarding for those affiliate links, as a temporary work-around. That way you could disable the Affiliate link plugin until it is revised. I don’t know about that plugin (the affiliate plugin), but the author of the Headspace2 plugin is very approachable (he posted here above), and I suggest you write to him and the other author about your issue. We sometimes link to affiliated companies, and have placed a notification of that at the bottom of all pages on our site. I think that linking to affiliate companies is fine if you have used their products/services and believe in them, and if you notify readers that you sometimes do so. Good luck. - Scott
December 18th, 2007 at 9:27 am
[...] stylesheets and other goodies (take a good look at the “other goodies”). See the Overview Tutorial for more on this comprehensive program. Above, a global meta description and tags setting for all [...]
December 20th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Scott,
Do you know of anyway to make the tags invisible on the pages? They show up at the bottom of each and it doesn’t look professional. Is there an option to turn it off? Thank you so much!
December 20th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Hi Shama -
One way I know of to do what you are asking is to open the “single.php” page in your template folder, and look for the code that places the tags after posts, and remove it, or better, “comment it out.” See this link about commenting out code: http://codex.wordpress.org/Commenting_Code
You will find that snippet of code by looking for “?php the_tags” after the code for the post.
- Yours, Scott
January 15th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
[...] stylesheets and other goodies (take a good look at the “other goodies”). See the Overview Tutorial for more on this comprehensive program. Above, a global meta description and tags setting for all [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
[...] stylesheets and other goodies (take a good look at the “other goodies”). See the Overview Tutorial for more on this comprehensive program. Above, a global meta description and tags setting for all [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
[...] (bottom of screen), the "Headspace" plugin, by UrbanGiraffe, a comprehensive SEO addition for WordPress, allows for a custom "Page Title" for each of [...]
January 20th, 2008 at 8:39 am
The headspace2 plugin is not working. Am I missing something in the installation?? I have installed the headspace2 plugin. The “Headspace” section at the end of the every page and post appears but the details of the title and description entered and saved does not show up in the actual post. My posts and page show the default titles like the category, main blog title etc. Any suggestions please??
Here’s what I did to install:
Moved the entire headspace directory into plugins directory.
Activated the Headspace plugin.
Checked for the call in header.php. It is there inside the section of the header.php.
Am I missing something??
January 20th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Hello Lokesh - It looks like you installed the program correctly. It may be that your browser did not refresh (it has a cache that you must empty from time to time), and if you are using a specific WordPress Cache program, that could also be showing you an older version of your pages. After you check that, I suggest you head on over to the author’s page at http://urbangiraffe.com/. John is very helpful and will troubleshoot with you. - Scott
January 20th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Looks like my previous post did not show up. Anyway, I brought out new browser to go to this URL. It works now. But for the home page it picks up the title from the blog details page instead of the headspace. For the blog post, the title from Headspace shows up. I’ll add more Pages and see if it works.
Thanks!
January 20th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Hello again, Lokesh — depending on the theme you are using, you may have to do some editing to your Header file to remove some code that calls in your Blog title, etc. - Scott [Ed.]
January 25th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
WOW, never heard of this plugin before. I will be checking into this soon. THANKS!
February 6th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Great WP plug-in and excellent review. It can be challenging to find and setup everything that this one plug-in can do for bloggers. Your review made the features much easier to grasp. Thanks!
February 6th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Headspace2 is working great for me! I am currently using the default Modules and I am happy with it. Unless, there is huge advantage in using custom Modules, I will probably stick with the default settings.
February 29th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I am very pleased to have found this article. Headspace2 certainly looks interesting.
I am a member of Authority sites centre and I will bring the subject of Headspace2 up at tonights meeting.
ASC blogs use a variety of plugins to aid with SEO but Headspace2 is not currently one of them.
Looks excellent.
Thanks,
CJ
February 29th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Hi CJ -
Glad you liked the article. Tell us more about the Authority Sites Centre. - Scott [Ed.]
June 14th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
[...] plugin page. In addition, WebHelperMagazine has published two great posts that you can read here1 and [...]
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Awesome Post!I definitely learned something new today! Thanks Again!
August 28th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Wow great write up. Thanks, for explaining it… when i opened the panel I was like WOW, Ill never be able to figure it out… and here you have it. Thanks again!
-Chimbles