Optimizing WordPress For Search Engines

Posted on 03. Aug, 2008 by Julius.

These days more and more people are blogging on the internet. A lot of these people have free blogs, e.g. hosted on Blogger.com. Most people use them because they are free and easy to set up. WordPress is harder to set up and you usually need your own domain (except for WordPress.com). For that reason it is surprising that WordPress is by far the most popular blogging software. Since WordPress is so well-known and used by many reputable bloggers there is a great need for optimizing WordPress blogs for search engines.

SEO For WordPress
Because of this need people have built SEO plug-ins for WordPress. One great plug-in is All in one SEO Pack. It is easy to use and you do not need to change most of the default settings. You should of course enter a description, a title, and a number of keywords. These are automatically added to the pages and help search engines to determine the relevancy of your web site.

Optimize Permalink Structure
Another way you can optimize WordPress for search engines is to change the permalinks structure. The permalinks structure defines the way the URL of your articles look like. Since search engines also use the URL to decide whether you web site is relevant you should consider changing the default URL structure. The default URL looks something like this http://andbreak.com/?p=12 . Notice that the structure is bad since there aren’t any keywords included. Further you couldn’t know just by taking a look at the URL that the article behind the URL is about making money. So to improve this change the permalink structure to “Month and Name.” Now the URL would look something like this http://andbreak.com/2008/08/making-money/. Here the keyword “making money” is included in the URL which makes it more valuable for search engines.

1. Fastest Way To Get Ranked By Search Engines