Three simple tweaks to your WordPress blog for better SEO

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 8:52 am

There are three easy things you can do to improve the optimization of your WordPress blog. You will want to do this because it will improve the speed your blog gets indexed and help you to rank higher for your keywords. The first is adding the proper plug-ins, the second is to change the permalinks, and the third is to claim your blog.

Adding plug-ins

There are a couple plug-ins that you should use on every WordPress blog. One of them is All-In-One-SEO.. You also need to add the Google-XML-Sitemap plug-in along with a tagging plugin. There are multiple tagging plugins and the pluses and minuses of each would be a complete article by themselves.

All-In-One-SEO plug-in allows you to change the title tags for each post. Individual title tags will cause a huge improvement in your rankings over the default WordPress uses of using the same title tag across the whole blog. The site map plug-in creates a compliant site map and updates it automatically for easier indexing on all of the major search engines. Finally proper use of tags will allow you to categorize your posts and get multiple rankings within the search engine rankings..

Change Permalinks

It is easy to change the permalinks on a WordPress blog. Login to your dashboard, click settings, click on permalinks. This will allow you to change your permalinks from a URL of http://yourdomain.com/?p=123 to something more SEO friendly, Using a URL like http://yourdomain.com/category(with your keyword)/post title(again with your keywords there). You can do this by using the custom url with these tags ” /%category%/%postname%/”.There are also other tags available to allow you to create what works best for you.

Google Webmaster Tools and Technorati

You should be using both Google Webmaster Tools and Technorati. Make sure that you submit your blog through the Google Webmaster tools and claim it properly per their instructions. This will be done either by FTPing a special file or creating a special post. Google will now tell you any problems they have indexing your blog when you check back.

Claiming your blog at Technorati also is important. This will allow you to link your tags to Technorati and have them show in your account. This allows you another way to track any problems with the way your blog is being indexed.

In summary, these three steps can improve the optimization of your blog for all on page factors. For me personally, these simple changes have sped up the indexing of my blog significantly and have helped to improve the ranking of the posts too.

Mike Paetzold

About the Author: Mike Paetzold is an avid blogger and recognized expert on using WordPress. You can find even more tips on making your WordPress blog search engine friendly in “7 Tips To Make Your WordPress Blog Search Engine Friendly” or at his blog WordPress Made Easy.

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