5 SEO essentials for WordPress

I’ve recently dealt with several WordPress installations. I am by no means an expert in this one so, you know – this is an amateur’s guide to the essentials. But sometimes an amateur’s guide is best. Yes? or No. I don’t mind – you can leave your opinions in the comments.

So – you’ve got your basic WordPress installation. Someone has promised to skin it for you to make it pretty, someone else has promised to link it in to the site so visitors and search engines can find it, another person is actually going to write the magic content. That’s everything covered isn’t it?

Nope. Really very much nope. Here are my 5 SEO essentials for WordPress:

1.) Top, number 1, really very big, super important thing to remember. Think Pete wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. Check you haven’t accidently blocked the entire website. You can do this by going to your WordPress dashboard and going to Settings > Privacy Settings and checking the Site Visibility and check that it says “I would like my site to be visible to everyone”.

2.)Google XML Sitemaps – this one generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines. The one to watch out for here is to ensure that the root of the blog has a writeable sitemap file – so if you have told the plugin that you want the sitemap to be at mysite.co.uk/blog/sitemap.xml, then ensure that you have placed a file there with that name and ensured that it is writeable

3.)All In One SEO – after installation of the plugin, go to the “options configuration panel” and ensure plugin status is “enabled” and that you’ve filled in some good keyword rich stuff for “Home Title” and “Home Description”.

4.)Permalinks – a really good one that isn’t default. This is part of WordPress – no plugin required. Go to Settings > Privacy. The default option has question marks and parameters and numbers. This is not particularly useful – a far better option is “month and name” which includes the name of your blog post – hopefully getting some keywords into the URL structure. In order for this to work, you must ensure that the root of the website contains the .htaccess file and that the file is writeable.

5.)Google Analytics For WordPress – a straightforward one this, to ensure that all your posts of your analytics tracking script on.

Drat. I always think of a 6th essential point but 5 is snappier – let’s just say – another thing to consider then…

Another Thing to Consider.) Promoting your blog on Social Media – there are lots of auto tweet plug ins. I tried a few. I didn’t enjoy the experience on any of them very much. I’ve decided to stick, for now, with my trusty friend twitterfeed.com