How To Optimise WordPress
11th July 2007 by Hannah Parker
So you’ve got yourself a nice WordPress blog? But your posts don’t seem to be being picked up very well by the search engines?
With a couple of tweaks (well 4 spring to mind) your blog will be super SEO friendly!
Here’s the changes I’d make to your WordPress Setup
1.)Permalinks - By default, WordPress permalinks looks something like this:
http://www.mydomain.co.uk/?p=123
Ideally you want them to look like this:
http://www.mydomain.co.uk/blogging/how-to-optimise-wordpress
The way to do this is to login in to your WordPress account then select Options>Permalinks. Select “Custom” and add custom structure of “/%category%/%postname%/”
2.)Meta Tags – Add a plug in to support editing meta tags. I’ve used HeadSpace2
3.)Sitemap - Make sure the search engines can easily find all of your pages. Ensure the robots.txt file points to the location of the XML sitemap for the WordPress Blog. Then ensure that you have a frequently udpated sitemap.xml. You can do this by hand OR you can use a plug in such as “Google Sitemaps” plugin by Arne Brachhold
4.)Page Title – The title of blog entries by default is usually “Blog Name – Post Title”. It would be more sensible to have this the other way round – such that the most prominent words in the title is the title of the actual post. To do this, go into you templates and find the header.php. Find the title line
e.g. <title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?> </title>
and then switch it round:
<title><?php wp_title(); ?> – <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>
There you are! All done.
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