Wordpress Seo For Your Blog: Part 1

Well been doing more and more blogs with wordpress version 2.0+ and it is still the most flexible and seo prepped blogging platform I have used. I really enjoy the use of tags, conditionals and a standardized css system to style with.

If your blog is wordpress here are 10 things you can do pretty simply to get you blog to rank and appear better in the search results.

1. Turn permalink structure on which utilizes Mod rewrite to create much more search engine appealing url's. I would suggest using %postname% somwhere in the structure which creates a hyphenated version of the post title. This will make you choice of titles critical to ranking but is a powerful leg up. I would also suggest the optional custom prefix for any keyword that is extremely important to your rankings. You can see the use of the %postname% on our blog here http://blog.freehits.com/05/how-much-for-a-link-on-your-website/ and the use of the optional prefix "web" here: http://blog.freehits.com/web/online-marketing/.

2. Fix your titles, as wordpress puts the blog name in every page, which is overkill and dilutes each page's specific draw. You can use conditional tags to make it exactly as you want it. I would suggest something like this, it will give you a custom homepage and the page title on all others. This goes in the templates/header.php file at the top over the old title:

<?php
if (is_home()) {
?>
<title>The Title For Your Homepage</title>
<?php
}else{ ?>
<title><?php wp_title('', display); ?></title>
<?php }
?>

3. Latest posts are user and spider friendly. Use this in your sidebar: <?php get_archives('postbypost', '10', 'custom', '', ''); ?>, it will give you the 10 latest posts with a linebreak.

Read part 2 of SEO for wordpress here:
Part 2