WordPress has constantly gained popularity in the past years. This is mainly because the blogging platform is really easy to use and you do not need too much HTML knowledge to make changes with some of the new themes while writing articles and uploading them on your site becomes really easy. The problem is that most webmasters have forgotten about the fact that they also need SEO for their blogs.
WordPress SEO Facts
The truth is that WordPress was not designed with SEO in mind. However, it is still much better than most of the HTML websites taht you are going to manually create. The webmaster can do a lot of things and there are numerous plugins that are going to help out a lot. Let us think about the basic things that need to be done whenever you are launching a new site and you are using the WordPress platform.
Permalinks Settings
By default, when you install WordPress the links are going to be created under a structure that is not very good for search engine optimization. Your links will be like “http://www.clubseo.co.uk/?p=123″. Now compare this link with a good SEO one like “http://www.clubseo.co.uk/search-engine-optimization/google-sandbox-effect-avoid/”. It is obvious that the second one is much better.
To change your permalinks settings you will need to go to “Settings” and then “Permalinks” in your WordPress sidebar. There are different ways in which you can customize your new link structure but we recommend that you use “Custom Structure” with this setting: “/%category%/%postname%/”
Optimizing Titles
Now that we changed the Permalinks structure, it would be a shame if we wouldn’t also make sure that every single title we use is good. Whenever writing a new post make sure that your main covered keyword is included.
Optimizing Descriptions
This is something that most people forget. The descriptions can add a lot to the overall SEO score of one web page. Make sure that all posts that you write will include a description and that you set descriptions for Images.
The bottom line is that there are many things that you can do whenever optimizing your WordPress blogs for search engine rankings. What we mentioned above is just the most important aspect but there are many others things that you can do. Fortunately there are many WordPress SEO plugins that we can use to make our job a whole lot easier. We recommend:
- All in One SEO Pack
- Google Sitemap Generator – build the sitemap and then submit it to Google Webmasters Tool.
- SEO Smart Links
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