SEO for WordPress

If you run your own website with WordPress as the choice of your CMS or Blog you want it to rank well don't you?

Well, the first thing you need to do is to change your "permalink" setting.
If you are on a normla shared hosting provider, you should be able to work with your own .htaccess file.

Oke, not everybody has heard about .htaccess and if you have herad form it, you think its is really difficult and technical stuff way beyond your reach.
Well, I can tell you its not!

Here is the most easy way to change your permalink to a much better option.
First create an empty file with Notepad or any Non-Wysiswig editor (So don't use Microsoft Word) and save it as htaccess.txt.
Upload that file via FTP to your WordPress installation directory.
Once uploaded change the permissions to 7o7 or Read Wrtie by the System and Public.

Now just change the name of the file to .htaccess insted of htaccess.txt.
On must FTP programs the file will disappear.... unless you have the view set to display "hidden files".
Don't worry about it, its still there!

No login to your WordPress administrator panel and go to the Permalinks option.
Choose "Custom Structure" and write down it that field /%postname%/

If you are on a windows hosting service (or testing it on your WAMMP based Windows PC) you need to include index.php, so that would be /index.php/%postname%/
The index.php will stay in your URL between the sitename and the posttitle.


Hit Save and your are done!
WordPress will fill the .htaccess file for you and in about 98% of all cases it will work right away.

If your now look at the posts in your site they will have trasformed from ?p=1 to /hello-world/ which is a lot better for both your visitors and search engine robots.

Want to use /%category%/%postname%/? You can, but I advice you not to, keep the URLs short and simple for the best results.

If you want to take the extra mile, install a plugin called SEO Slugs that will take out short stopwords out of the URL.
So the URL from "easy-how-to-do-wordpress-seo" will become "easy-wordpress-seo" which is even beter and done automaticly.

There is more to WordPress then this, so read more on this blog on how to get more advice on how to improve your Blog for search engines.

Here is my shortlist of WordPress Plugins that really work well for Search Engine Optimization:

1. Headspace2
   Headspace gives you the oppertunity to change the HTML Title tag, add keywords and keyword descriptions for each post.
2. Robots Meta
   This Plugin will help you to prevent duplicate content issues by Blocking some type of pages for Search Engine Spiders
   
3. RSS Footer
   If the your RSS feed of you site is scraped, this will add a back-link to every post in your Rss feed articles
   
4. Simple Tags
   Adding tags will give a better structure and works for LSI if done right...
   
5. Google XML Sitemaps
   A sitemap.xml file will help the SE robots to prioritize and find all your website content
   
6. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
   Give an extra link to older articles and finds your links with the right Keywords
   
7. Clean SEO Slugs
   Slugs, or URLs often have stop words like "or","if","then" etc, this plugin strips those terms from your URLs.
   
8. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
   A must for every website, if the sitemap.xml is not working for SEO, this one will. Its also better for your readers.
   
9. WP Super cache
   Super cache will really speed up your site, also one of the factors in SEO now.
   
10. Subscripe to Comments
    Keep people informed on the comments on a specific post they commented on, the will keep coming back which is also an indication for Search Engines that your site is relevant.

That is it for now, get some rest... there will be more as I will write on each and every one of these plugins and af course some other tips and tricks to improve your WordPress Blog for SEO

Image via CrunchBaseIt is not that strange, since I also have some Blogs on WordPres.com.
Only thing is that you cannot do some things in WordPress.com that you can do on Blogger.com

Here I can have my own choice of free templates, my javascripts work and I could sell some advertising if I want too.

But WordPress is really great whan it comes to Search Engine Optimization, although you really want to host it on your own domain if you want to get all the best options going.