Although 'out of the box', WordPress is a very SEO-friendly and SEO-optimized CMS (content management system) and blogging platform, there are still a number of ways in which you can improve the on-site SEO characteristics of your WordPress website.
1. Yoast's WordPress SEO Plugin. Install and configure this fantastic plugin written by famed WordPress developer Joost de Valk. WordPress SEO is actually a combination of some of Joost's older standalone plugins as well as some new functionality.
Apart from allowing you to specify HTML titles and meta descriptions for your posts, WordPress SEO lets you properly configure your Robots Meta data, generates XML sitemaps, cleans up your HTML
section, adds breadcrumbs to posts and pages and more.Alternatives to Joost's plugin include Headspace 2 and All-in-One-SEO, but neither do as much as this one plugin and the general wisdom is that the fewer plugins you have, the better.
2. Urban Giraffe's Redirection Plugin. This plugin is used to manage your 301 redirects and keep track of your 404 errors. The former is necessary so that you maintain the URLs that were first indexed by the search engines and retain whatever page rank they had and provided to your other links.
404 (or Not Found) errors can spell disaster for a webmaster, and you should keep close track of these so that you can fix them or redirect the broken URLs quickly.
3. Include Category Descriptions. To take advantage of additional search engine 'love', if your theme or some plugin does not include this functionality, include the following piece of code into the top of your category.php page: and edit each of your categories via the WordPress administrative interface to have a keyword-rich description.
Not only does this give your readers a better idea of what your category archive pages are about, but it also informs the search engines.
4. Change Your Permalink Structure. Update the permalink structure (Settings -> Permalinks) and either choose or enter a custom structure that at a minimum includes the post's slug. For example: /%postname%/
This updates your URLs to include keywords (instead of just a number) that the search engines also like.
5. Use a Caching Plugin. Although this was never an issue before 2010, site speed now matters to at least some search engines (Google in particular). So for this reason, use a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. Both will speed up the site for your visitors.
Remember, that while these tips will go a long way to improving your site in the eyes of the search engines, you should still perform additional research to determine what other methods and techniques you should be using to SEO-optimize your WordPress website/blog.
Khalid Hosein is a blogger, computer consultant and tech geek who runs gadget blog Gizmos for Geeks, where you can find the latest in gadget and technology news, insights, howtos and much more. He is proud to run on WordPress on all of his blogs, such as Untethered Dreams, a blog that discusses the ins and outs of blogging, running websites, monetization, advertising, affiliate marketing, automation, outsourcing, promotion, and SEO. Visit both sites for free newsletters with members-only information.
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