How To Optimize WordPress For The Best SEO Results

WordPress is a popular platform for building websites because it make the process so easy. WordPress handles all the formatting and layout of your site so you can focus on the content. But the default setup isn't very well optimized for the search engines. In this article we're going to discuss some ways to improve the SEO on your WordPress-based sites.

Privacy Settings

The first thing you should do is check the privacy settings in the WordPress admin dashboard. You can choose whether or not to make the site "visible" to the search engines. If the wrong option is set, your site won't be indexed or ranked.

The default setting is to make the site visible to the search engines, but it's still a good idea to double-check. If this isn't set right, nothing else we're going to cover will matter.

Permalinks

The next change you should make is to the permalink structure. By default, WordPress uses a pretty unfriendly URL structure - your posts and pages will show up as something like www.mydomain.com/?id=123.

There's no keywords included in the URL and there's some debate about how effective the search engines are at even indexing sites with these types of URLs.

Instead, you should change the permalink structure to include keywords. You can make this change in the Permalinks settings page, and set it to something like this:

/%postname%/

This will use the title of your post as the URL for the page. For example, if your post title is "My First Post" the URL would be www.mydomain.com/my-first-post. This will ensure that you get the keywords in your URL (assuming you use them in the post title).

SEO Plugin

Another important step to improving the SEO on your site is installing an SEO WordPress plugin. There are several of them available but the most commonly used plugin is called All-In-One SEO.

This plugin will optimize the HTML tags on each page - title tag, meta tags, etc. - using the post title and the content of the post itself. You can override these settings manually if you want to really optimize each page, but even the default settings are a huge improvement over the default setup for WordPress.

Note: Some premium themes, such as Thesis, have SEO features built into them. If you're using one of these themes, there's no need to install a plugin. In fact, doing so can cause conflicts between the theme SEO and the plugin SEO so you're better to leave it up to the theme in this case.



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