Wordpress: Creating An SEO Friendly Blog!

On site SEO is often over­looked by those new to Word­Press. In this arti­cle I will cover many areas that can help you get noticed by search engines and poten­tial vis­i­tors alike. I hope this post to be a good resource for those new to Word­Press and a check-list for every­body else. Although I will cover most aspects regard­ing the ini­tial set up of Word­Press (for SEO) that I per­son­ally use I am sure many oth­ers may dis­agree with areas that I dis­cuss, these are my own views. It is quite pos­si­ble to use other sim­i­lar plu­g­ins or ser­vices to achieve the same effect. If you have sug­ges­tions that have not been men­tioned within my arti­cle please feel free to dis­cuss them in the com­ments sec­tion below.

As soon as Word­Press is installed it is time to start alter­ing the blog set up from the admin­is­tra­tion panel. Many of the changes that will help your sites rank­ings can be made before you have even thought about your first post. Fan­tas­tico Deluxe may install the CMS soft­ware in under 1 minute but it is the cus­tomiza­tions that will make your blog bet­ter than oth­ers in your niche. I have listed below a num­ber of cus­tomiza­tions that I will make to all my blogs (with­out exception);

Pema­links

Perma­link cus­tomiza­tion is a hot topic on the web mainly due to peo­ples con­flict­ing views on how they should be cus­tomized. I have read many end­less posts on this sub­ject alone and have cho­sen the perma­link struc­ture that suits me, and i believe it to be the most effective.

The default perma­link struc­ture is ugly and should imme­di­ately be changed. The link struc­ture gives no indi­ca­tion as to the posts con­tent and there­fore pro­vides no SEO based on key­words within the URL. Chang­ing this struc­ture on a blog that is a going con­cern can cause you to lose traf­fic, but is still rec­om­mended for longevity.

The default word­press perma­link struc­ture - domain.com/?p=15

Now it is at this point that con­flict­ing view come in to play. Many blog­gers opt to have (click on these for exam­ple argu­ments)  domain.com/category/postname/, i per­son­ally opt instead for domain.com/postname/. Dis­re­gard­ing the cat­e­gory enables you to change or edit post cat­e­gories with a lot more ease as it will not affect your arti­cle links.

To change your perma­link struc­ture:  Log in to administration/settings/permalinks, click on cus­tom and enter /%postname%/ (as shown below).

Your posts will now have the pret­tier Perma­link Structure.

Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

Sitemaps inform search engines when your blog has been updated and attempts to ensure that all your pages get indexed on a reg­u­lar basis. It is a fact that a reg­u­larly updated site will out­per­form an iden­ti­cal sta­tic site that is not. This plu­gin ensures that the search engines are noti­fied of such updates, it will also help search engines find pages that have not already been crawled.

If you require help with installing the plu­gin please click here.

Once the plu­gin has been installed and acti­vated it is time to cre­ate your sitemap; click settings/xml-sitemap, then at the top of the page under ‘sta­tus’ click cre­ate sitemap. This will then cre­ate your sitemap and update your sitemap with every updated or new post.

I would strongly advise hav­ing a link to your sitemap from your Word­Press Site, i per­son­ally add this as a link on my side­bar using the link or blogroll wid­get within the admin­is­tra­tion panel, how­ever a link from your footer would work just as well.

All In One SEO

This plu­gin is a must for any­body want­ing to blog seri­ously and has a few fea­tures that quite sim­ply you cant afford to live with­out. This plu­gin will opti­mize your titles, auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ate META tags, avoid the dupli­cate con­tent issue asso­ci­ated with blogs, and a lot more besides. Once uploaded you will have to acti­vate and enable this plu­gin from the appro­pri­ate field under settings.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

This plu­gin is great for boost­ing older posts traf­fic rank. It shows a list of related posts under each post and there­fore pro­vides a some­times needed boost to those older articles.

Only Wire

Although this is a plu­gin it relates to the onlywire.com ser­vice. Only Wire enables you to log all your social book­mark­ing sites user­names and pass­words and with this plu­gin sub­mit your new posts to all these book­mark­ing sites with only a sin­gle click. The set up of the plu­gin is rel­a­tively easy, how­ever the hours required to apply for each social book­mark­ing site is not. The plu­gin is well worth the effort and has recently spawned other plu­g­ins that enable you to sub­mit the posts through a num­ber of Only Wire accounts and there­fore acquire a much big­ger reach with a sin­gle click.

I have sumarised my ini­tial Word­Press setup above and from this point you are ready to blog. I am con­fi­dent that many peo­ple using dif­fer­ent setup tech­niques may ques­tion deci­sions i have made, how­ever i have found these to work well for me. I am always happy to learn of new tech­niques and plu­g­ins so please feel free to com­ment, i may or may not have tried them and if they are really good please dont be shy!!

I will try and cover other aspects of SEO in the near future but until then the above ini­tial setup even at its most basic level is more than enough to get you started.