Search Engine Optimization applies to all webpages but you can do some special SEO work with WordPress CMS and blogs. Take advantage of the great seo benefits of proper wordpress seo!

Improving Your WordPress SEO

WordPress has several built-in features that help it rank well with the search engines. The default settings aren’t fully optimized, however. Let’s look at a few strategies for improving your WordPress SEO.

The first thing you should do after installing WordPress is to change the permalink settings. This is the structure that WordPress uses when creating the URLs to all your content. By default, your permalinks will be something along the lines of www.yourdomain.com/?p=123 where the 123 is the post ID. You will improve your WordPress SEO properties by simply allowing keywords and keyword phrases in your urls…. these are then spidered by the search engines which will then use these keywords to determine the content and value of your blog……don’t miss this step!

Permalinks Will Boost
Your WordPress SEO

There are two things wrong with this type of permalink. First, even though the search engines have gotten much better at dealing with these types of links, they still don’t get indexed as quickly sometimes. And second, these type of links don’t include any keywords in the URL to help improve your SEO. Keywords and keyword phrases in your urls have been found to get your pages indexed, ranked and placed faster and higher in the SERPS.

A better choice is to include the title of your post as part of the permalink. This change can be made on the Permalinks page in the Settings area of the admin dashboard. Use something like this instead:

/%post_id%/%postname%

That will use the post ID so you are sure you won’t run into duplicate post names (which is more likely than you think as time passes and you add more and more posts) and the postname which will make the URL more visitor friendly as well as get your keywords into it.

The next thing you should do is install an SEO plugin such as All In One SEO or install a theme that includes this functionality by default. These plugins improve the source code by optimizing your title tag, meta keywords and description tags, etc. This data can either be generated automatically from the content of the posts or you can manually enter them for each post you make.

Improved WordPress SEO Is Affected
By Duplicate Content…..Be Careful!

Lastly, be careful that you don’t create duplicate content issues within your own site. For example, let’s say you add a widget to your sidebar that shows the monthly archives. If those archive pages show the full content of each post, you could wind up with two different URLs that each have the same content. So, just to be clear, avoid full content being duplicated on another location in your WordPress theme.

Always display snippets on those types of pages, leaving the full content for only the main post page. That way you’ll avoid any duplicate content problems. Improving your WordPress SEO isn’t that difficult, spend some time, read some books, watch a few videos and engage in learning exactly how you can take your WordPress SEO one step higher and you will be on your way to being a wordpress master!!