SEO for WordPress blogs 

Primarily, there are some simple things you can do from your wordpress controls if you are thinking about optimising your word press blog for better search engine placement. Unfortunately they do not happen as default, but the changes are quick and easy to initiate. Some of the techniques mentioned in this article are best performed when you first create your blog. Changing things like permalinks and blog urls after your blog has been established may have the reverse effect than the desired one, so, its best to get it right when you first set up your blog.

The first thing to do is optimise your “permalinks”. The aim here is to insert keywords into the permalink structures and remove the rest which is user and search engine “unfriendly”. In the “options” sections under “permalinks” you can control how the urls of your blog are formed. By default they are formed like this http://www.sem-studio.co.uk/?p=123. This is not particularly search engine friendly, and it is much better for search engine rankings to have keywords in the url’s. Stay clear of having the following structure too: http://www.sem-studio.co.uk/2007/11/02/sample-post/ For me, having the date in the permalink structure is pointless and it dilutes the effect of the keywords. Instead I suggest you use a “custom” structure, in the form of: /%postname%/ . This way your permalink structures are formed like this: http://www.sem-studio.co.uk/post-title (which should be keyword rich)…perfect!!

Second thing to think about is: “WordPress address (URL)” & “Blog address (URL)” found under “options”> “general”. Basically (if your blog is on the main domain) you need to make sure that these are set to: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk . The reason being that Search Engines see http://www.yourdomain.co.uk and http://yourdoamin.co.uk as different domains. If people link to your sites with the http://www.yourdomain.co.uk (as they normally do) and you site resides at http://yourdoamin.co.uk the “juice” passed on from the links pointing to http://www.yourdomain.com will be lost. There is a way of making sure search engines index and pass on all link juice from both versions of your url through .htaccess. I won’t go into that now but it is next on my list of posts to make. In the mean time, make the easy changes above and you will find that most of the value coming in from links to your site goes to the right place.

Post titles are very important too. Keep them as short as possible but make the relevant and readable and definitely include your main keywords. Don’t forget that your post titles will form the Page titles and URL’s too, so the longer they are the more diluted the keywords become in the following areas: post title, page title, url, anchor text.

Internal Links: All posts and pages have a navigation link from either  the “pages” nav or “posts” nav. A very simple thing to do (but is sometimes looked over) is linking between posts too. If one post relates to another use a keyword anchor text link. The anchor text pointing to a page has a high ranking factor so this is a simple technique that will bennefit the page being linked too.

Plugins: There are some great seo plugins for wordpress blogs. I suggest using the “All in One SEO Pack” download it here. This cool little plugin allows you to set unique page titles, meta description and meta keywords for each page. (although most search engines ignore the keywords tag) This is the best option in order to target each page towards as many keywords/variations of keywords as possible. If you do go for a generic page title the actual post title should be integrated into the generic page title like this: %page_title% | %blog_title% This will put the post title at the beginning of the page title. It is my opinion that keywords at the start of the page title hold greater ranking influence than keywords beyong the first word/phrase. …this should set them up nicely.

Another plugin that might prove beneficial is a social bookmarking plugin. There are plenty of these around, just do a google search. These allow visitors of your site to bookmark your posts and pages on social bookmarking sites, creating all important one way inbound links. Many also allow users to send links to there friends via email which may well increase the readership of your blog.

article written by Jon Dunn