How to SEO for WordPress Blogs ?

I wrote a post on how to SEO a blogger blog and my web analytic tells me that it is one of the most popular posts on my blog. Also through the comments on that post and the mails that I have received in reference to that post I have been asked a lot about WordPress blogs and how to do SEO for WordPress blogs. There are various WP Plug ins that are extremely useful and makes it really easy to SEO any WordPress blog without much of technical complexity. While any SEO enthusiast WP blogger can easily find about the plugins here are few tips that would also come handy for anyone looking to optimize their WordPress Blog.

So here are some tips to SEO your WordPress Blog..

a) SEO Friendly Permalinks – One of the key steps in optimizing your WP Blog. the default structure of WordPress Blog URLs are like www.yourblog.com/?p=5. You need to change it to a SEO friendly format. Go to Options > Permalinks. Chose the option “Custom” and put in /%category%/%postname%/ Your URL structure becomes www.yourblog.com/category/this-is-your-post-title . Isn’t that simple ?

b) Page Title Optimization – As with any other websites Page Title also plays a key role when you SEO a blog. The default page Title structure for a WordPress Blog is “Blog Title – Page Title”. While this is not bad, it can be much better if you have it as “Page Title – Blog Title”. As your post specific keywords are expected to be in your Post title it becomes really helpful for SEO.
OR Use this Plugin to optimize your page title and meta tags as you want

c) Optimize Category Names – This is a very simple thing that we often miss. In point (a) we have mentioned about including the category name in URL, so using keyword rich category names can actually enrich your URL. For example, in this SEO Blog if I am to create an category for Misc. for all my non-SEO posts instead of naming it as Misc or Miscellaneous I might as well call it Non-SEO or Other Than SEO.

d) Make your Post Titles Click-able – Yes, some WordPress themes comes with this customization, some of them don’t . It is pretty easy to do and is really helpful in making your WordPress blog SEO friendly. In your main template and the Page template you should be able to find the code

[h2][?php the_title(); ?][/h2]

Replace this with

[h2][a href=”[?php the_permalink() ?]” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to [?php the_title(); ?]“][?php the_title(); ?][/a][/h2]

* note: We have used [] instead of used in the actual code.

e) Related Posts – Yes, here you would need a plug in and trust me the Word Press Related Posts plug in is a gem. Just install it and insert the code snippet in a suitable location ( generally after the post), you are done ! Related posts would start showing up against each post, this would not just enhance your internal site navigation but also add value for your visitors as they would be able to find al posts about the same topic in one place.

f) Site Map – Again it is advisable you use a Sitemap Plug in. If your theme is well planned and you have a few back links to your WordPress Blog, you should not have trouble getting your posts crawled, however, having a sitemap would cause no harm. Try using the WordPress Google Site Map Generator Plug in.

g) Content – This is probably the most important factor in optimizing your blog. Post regularly and ensure that you are sneaking in your targeted keywords within your posts wherever applicable. make sure your post titles have your keywords. Having said all that, a word of caution – Do not over do. If you would like read Characteristics of good website content writing.

There can be much more that you can do to SEO your WordPress Blog, however, if you are following the above tips you should be pretty set. Just build a few good back links and your WordPress blog should be well optimized.

In case you have any other SEO tips that you think would help optimizing a WordPress blog please feel free to add in comments.