Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines
Update: I forgot something important. You definitely should change the permalink structure of your posts. The default for WordPress is www.yoursite.com/?=somenumber . Google will index your titles and if you use the default people won’t be able to find it by title or subject (for the most part). To change the default structure go to your dashboard, then Options–>Permalinks and change it to name and date based or better yet, customize it using the last option. Now when you use the “post-slug” option seen below, that will show up instead of the default.
WordPress can be an excellent blogging platform if you know how to correctly use it. Sure you can just install WordPress and start blogging away but by using the proper plugins you can increase not only your productivity, you can make your site much more visible to search engine bots and sites like Technorati and Alexa.
Get Rid of Blogspam
Getting comments on your site that are irrelevant is not only annoying, but they make your site look bad. They can get mixed in with valid posts and make it hard for readers to decipher what is really going on in the comments section. One of the most important plugins for WordPress is Akismet. It comes standard but you have to get an API key – which is free – to activate it. This plugin will block 99.9% of blog spam from your site. The more incoming links you get the more you will appreciate this plugin.
Make a Sitemap
After you have taken care of the spam you need a sitemap. This will allow search engine bots to easily index your site. Thankfully a combination of two plugins make this easy-as-pie. First you need Google Sitemap Generator (v2 or higher). Although the title says Google, MSN and Yahoo! are also supported and the plugin will generate a .xml sitemap file for you to submit to any of them. Compliment this plugin with Dagon Design’s sitemap generator and you will also have a nice, WordPress friendly, CSS customizable, easy-on-the-eye sitemap you can show on your blog.
You can view my sitemap.xml file here or my on-site one here.
Use Tagging
Three words, Ultimate Tag Warrior. This plugin allows you to create tags a the bottom (or top) of all of your posts. You can format the tags for Technorati, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Flickr and more. If you don’t know what tags to use with your post you can have the plugin generate related tags for you with the click of a button. Tags are another way for search engines to index your site and place your posts in relevant places.
Track Your Progress
Most bloggers like to keep track of how many people are viewing their site daily. You can use tools like Google Analytics or Awstats (which are both good) but if you want immediate gratification without leaving the WordPress admin page, you should install FireStats. It shows pageviews and visitors right on the dashboard but also has a more complex analytics tool that lists anything else you might want to know: referring sites, outgoing links, popular pages, OS type, and much more.
Post Slug
Post Slug is not a plugin, but instead a built-in feature many users don’t take advantage of. By default, WordPress uses the title of your post as your anchor-text. (This assumes you have date+name based permalinks) Search engine bots use the anchor text as a guide to what your post is about and how it should be indexed. The Post Slug allows you to modify your anchor text to your liking, or in this case, a search bots liking. You can change your Post Slug on the same page that you use to write your posts. Anchor text should be relevant to your topic, but short and sweet. Hover over the title of this post to see my Post Slug and you will notice it is related to the title but shorter, more concise, and eliminates unnecessary words.
