WordPress SEO Tips
There are a lot of things that go into optimizing your site for the search engines, but with a minimal amount of effort you can cover about 80% of the important stuff. While the list below isn't all inclusive and isn't going to have you ranking number one for competitive terms, it will at least give you a fighting chance to get noticed.
Optimize Permalinks
How many blogs have you seen rank well that don't use the postname for the URL? The answer is "not many." Go to settings/permalinks in your backend, select the radio button by custom structure and enter "/%postname%/". This will help you with SEO but also make your post URL's look cleaner and more professional.
All-in-One SEO Plugin
Install the All-in-One-SEO plugin. This will allow you to enter a custom title, description and keywords for all of your posts. Make the title of your post different from what you put into the All-in-One SEO's title field. why? Because your post title will be the <h1> tag on your page, and if that is the same as your title tag you can get penalized for overoptimizing or stuffing keywords. It's better to be safer than sorry.
Next, click on the plugin options for All-in-One SEO and enter your home title, description and keywords. Then check the box next to rewrite titles and make sure your post title format says "%post_title%" and page title format says "%page_title% ". You want to get rid of your blog name to keep all of your pages and posts with just your keywords that you want to rank for, no sense wasting juice on your blog name since you should rank well for that anyway.
One of the great things about WordPress is that it does a great job of organizing your past content for you and your readers, but the bad thing is that in doing so there are a lot of duplicate content issues to overcome. The All-in-One SEO pack makes it easy to prevent this. Click on the plugin options for All in One SEO and check the box next to noindex for categories and noindex for archives. This way the spiders will go to your category and archive pages and follow the links through, but won't index those specific pages that contain nothing but excerpts from your other pages.
How easy was that? I know there are a lot of other ways to optimize your WordPress blog for the search engines, and I'd love to hear what you have to say in the comments. I will be adding more content later detailing tips and tricks for SEO, but this should be a simple starter plan.
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