WordPress is by default very search engine friendly. However it does not all come by default, and you might not know what is best when it comes to choosing a template and setting the right options in your wordpress blog. So here are some of the basic rules that you can follow to make sure that your wordpress blog is search engine friendly.

1. Optimize WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks are very important for SEO purposes as Google gives weight on keywords found within a link. So a search engine friendly permalink structure MUST includes the post title (%postname%) which will eventually contain the keywords related to your page/post. To change your permalink structure, simply go to your WP admin panel, click on the “Permalinks” link under the Settings section, and choose the custom permalinks structure option. Personally I feel having your title on the permalink is good enough, but some may want to put in the category as well. So your ideal permalink structure would be – /%category%/%postname%/

2. Optimize WordPress Post Titles

Changing your permalink structure is not enough if you are not writing good post titles. The post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling blog post title will help them decide if they really want to read your post or not. From a search engine’s perspective, the title of the post is the primary determinant of what the rest of the content is all about. So you should always think of keywords or phrases people might type into a search engine to find your content and use them organically in your post title.

3. Write a robots.txt file

The robots.txt file is essentially used to instruct a crawler about which pages of your blog should be crawled and indexed and which part should be blocked. There are tons of wordpress blogs out there which doesn’t use a robots.txt file, thus the same content is indexed in the search engine in different ways. So creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation a lot as in a robots.txt file you can specify your sitemap and also tell the engine which folders/directories you don’t want it to index. The ideal strategy is to have robots.txt file that prevents the engines to index the same content in multiple ways.

4. Optimizing your Meta Tags

Even though many people say that meta tags aren’t important anymore – it’s not entirely true. Majority of the time, a search engine uses your Meta description tag as your search snippet. Having some of your keywords in your Meta description tag can really help you to catch the searchers attention and also can help you to boost your search rankings. For wordpress, using a plug-in like All-in-one-SEO would be very easy way to put unique Meta tags on each of your blog post.

5. Use Sitemaps

Sitemaps is a very simple and straightforward way of submitting all yours URLs to a search engine. Sometimes even a search engine finds it difficult to discover really deep links, thus having a sitemap makes it really easy for the engine to find all those deep pages that you have on your blog. There are some cool wordpress sitemap plugins out there which can really make your job a lot easier by automatically updating your sitemaps as you write new posts.

6. Use Related Posts

I’m sure you have noticed that many blogs nowadays shows a list of related posts at the bottom of every post. Other than having the obvious advantage of increasing the stickiness of your blog, it also has some SEO benefits. Showing related posts on each of your post actually helps you to create a very solid internal link structure throughout your blog, which makes it easier for the search engines to find and index and rank some of your older blog posts.

7. Write link worthy posts

Links from good websites are still one of the most important factors that determine your Google Page Rank which ultimately helps you in your search rankings. If you are not producing quality content, it is not likely for anyone to link to your article / blog post. So you should always write content that you feel is link worthy, even if it takes a bit of extra effort or time from your end.

8. Update your blog frequently

This is probably one of the most overlooked areas when it comes to optimizing a blog. SEO is a very dynamic process, and if you run a blog which you update only once every month then you really shouldn’t expect much from it. Updating your blog frequently and also consistently is very important as the crawler sort of makes it a habit of coming back to your site again and again for fresh content.
SEO is not rocket science! If you follow some of these simple steps you can be rest assured that you are going towards the right direction. Once you see some search traffic coming in your way, you can slowly concentrate on some of the more advanced search engine optimization techniques.

Tags: Web Design & SEO, wordpress