SEO For WordPress
August 2nd, 2010 . by HenryWordPress is the most popular blogging platform right now, and for good reason. The self-hosted version of WordPress is very flexible and very easy to use. But don’t let its simplicity fool you. WordPress is a powerful tool which you can use to build your CMS from.
As far as search engine optimisation goes, an out-of-the-box WordPress installation already has the basics taken care of. However, there are a few things WordPress needs to improve on, and fortunately for you, everyone’s favorite blogging platform makes it easy.
Prettify your permalinks
After installing WordPress, you’d see your posts’ permalinks have this URL format:
http://example.com/?p=123
Change this right away. That’s just a bunch of numbers appended to your blog’s URL – doesn’t say anything about the content, and it won’t provide search engines with search keywords. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and go to Settings > Permalinks and change it to something more search engine readable.
Search Engine-Friendly Post Titles
Some WordPress themes have search engine unfriendly titles. If you check out some WordPress blogs, you’d see that some of them have the “John’s Blog » Blog Archive » This is the title of my blog post” format. Search engines give importance to the first few words of a page’s title, and having a title with a format like that will just get ignored. WordPress 3.0 fixes that problem already, but older themes are still around. To fix this, just go to header.php and switch the elements of your title tag yourself.
Those are just a few ways to improve your WordPress blog’s search engine optimisation. You can also see if you want to keep the www prefix of your blog, or if you think installing more SEO plugins are going to be worth it. Either way, you can expect to see a huge spike in traffic if you’ve played your cards right. Good luck!
