Wordpress SEO

Out of the box wordpress is poorly optimized for search engines. A small amount of search engine optimization can make a huge impact on your search engine referrals.

The single most important thing you can do is enable permalinks. Enabling permalinks in wordpress allows you to include information about the blog post in the link to the post. Search engines absolutely adore this kind of thing.

To enable permalinks on your blog login to wordpress and go to Options > Permalinks.

The default permalink formats in wordpress include the date and title of the post. You don’t really need the date information, search engines can’t make any use of it. It just distracts them from whats important - the title of your post.

 I use the most gratuitous SEO permalink format possible. I only include the post title in my permalinks. This is great, and if you pump your post titles with keywords and search phrases you’ll really stand out in search results.

To implement this in your wordpress blog, select custom format in permalink options and enter /%postname%/ as the format. Click the Update button.

Note: If wordpress tells you it can update the .htaccess file, follows its instructions and do it yourself. Otherwise your permalinks won’t work properly.

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