WordPress is becoming the king of the blogging community because of its amazing capabilities. It features options for the most advanced users but is also very easy to use for beginners. The ability to customize it to your needs has made it increasingly popular. But how do you customize it to be popular with the search engines? Everyone wants their web site to show up high in Google and other major search engines. Here are some must do tips to make your WordPress blog search engine (and user) friendly.

1. Content, Content, Content. That’s the whole purpose of your blog, right? Too many people neglect web site visitors when trying to optimize their web sites for search engines. You must remember that your site is intended for human eyes and it must be natural and reader friendly first, before making it search engine friendly. Using spammy SEO techniques may bump you up a little bit in the search engine results but if you notice the top results, they are always reader friendly.
2. Your first step towards making your WordPress blog search engine friendly should be to change your Permalink structure. The default WordPress setting is anti-SEO friendly. A typical blog post with the default Permalink structure looks something like this:
   

   http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123

   Within your WordPress settings, they have some other Permalink structure options. You will want to select an option that uses the title of your posts in the URL. For example:

   http://www.yourdomain.com/2007/04/27/sample-post/

   This is one of the options provided to you but WordPress also gives you the option of creating your own structure. This is necessary for your blog’s SEO success because it makes the URL much friendlier to search engines, and also can provide some keywords in your URL which will always help your ranking status. It helps your web site visitors also because it gives them a rough idea about what your post is about. They are also more likely to link your blog postings if they have more readable URL’s instead of the “/?p=123” situation. It is important to change your permalink structure in the beginning stages of your blog. But if your blog has been around for a while with anti-SEO-friendly url structure, and now you want to switch to SEO-friendly Permalinks, you can try Permalink Redirect plugin, which will automatically redirect existing blog urls according to your new permalink structure by means of 301 permanent redirect. This plugin is useful when you want to switch to a new permalink structure without losing existing SERPs of your blog contents.

3. Page titles are a very important factor in search engine rankings and your blogs page titles are no different. The default WordPress setting automatically generates your titles to look like this: “Blogname – Blog Archive – Post Title.” To optimize your blog for search engines, you should switch the Post Title and Blog Archive positioning. When people use a search engine and come across your blog, this title is the linking text that they click on. The words they searched for will be bolded so you want those words to be to the far left as possible. Swapping these two positions will do that for you. In order to change this, you will have to edit your header.php file. You will want to find the code that looks like this:
   

   <title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

   and replace it with this code:

   <title><?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘–’; } ?><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title></li>

4. Sitemaps are a necessary part of any search engine optimization campaign. Sometimes creating a sitemap can be tricky with frequently updated contents. Fortunately with WordPress, there is a handy sitemap plug-in that will do all the work for you. All you have to do is install the plug-in.
5. Many bloggers using tagging as a way to list their posts in different social networking sites. The Ultimate Tag Warrior is another WordPress plug-in that will assist you in creating these tags. These are similar to the categories that are already implemented in WordPress but it is an additional form of categorizing that will help you in the “Web 2.0” sites like del.icio.us and Technorati. You will also want to take advantage of the Meta tags by inserting relevant keywords and page descriptions.
6. After you have optimized your WordPress blog with different plug-ins and options, you will want to get your blog listed in many of the blog directories available. Search engines count links to your sites as votes towards its popularity. You only want links (or votes) from sites that have similar content to yours. There are many blog directories out there that meet this criterion. Also, if you enjoy reading someone’s blog who has similar interests to yours, send them and e-mail and request a link to your blog. Listing your web site in your forum signature or e-mails may not give you credit for a link but if readers enjoy what you had to say, they may be more inclined to visit your web site and possibly link to it in the future.

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