I started writing my beginner's guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It's time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.
If you're more of a visual type, try this WordPress SEO video. It's an hour long presentation I gave at A4UExpo London, that covers most of what's in here too.
As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices. If you don't have the time to do this kind of optimization yourself, consider hiring us to do it, check out our WordPress consulting services.
Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there's a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.
1.1. Permalinks
The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.5, you'll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=
To include the category, you change it to /%category%/%postname%/.
Once you've done that, you'll want to install the Redirection plugin, and make sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, making sure both URL Monitoring select boxes are set to "Modified posts". Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO'd permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.
WWW vs non-WWW
Another good thing to configure now you're on that screen anyway is the Root domain: Add WWW / Strip WWW one. Make a choice, and set it here, don't enable both, some search engines still can't handle that. And enable the redirect index.php/index.html one too, it won't hurt you, and might even do your WordPress SEO some good.
URL stopwords
The last thing you'll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is install the SEO Slugs plugin, this will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won't get those ugly long URL's when you do a sentence style post title.
Optimize your Titles for SEO
By default, the title for your blog posts is "Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title". For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:
Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank
3. Find related blogs, and work them
If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you'll need to rank is to be a part of the community.
source:WordPress SEO
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