SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for Wordpress

Well .. let’s say you’re using wordpress to power your website. And what should be done next to make sure your website is ready to be crawled by search engine ? Here’s the answer on what should be done after installing wordpress to your web server, and it’s called SEO / Search Engine Optimization

As a side note, this should be done before you go submitting your site to various directories, doing some link exchange, or to various search engine itself to make sure they’re not indexing your unfinished website :)

1. Choose Whether you want to use WWW in your domain or not

This is the most important thing to do, so this come first before anything else. This is done because having one canonical url version for all of your page will help you improve your search engine ranking

And here’s what Matt Cutts said about this :

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

1. www.example.com
2. example.com/
3. www.example.com/index.html
4. example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

And now how to use it on your blog ? Well .. you can read my previous article on how to force www on domain name. And if you don’t like WWW in front of your domain, with a slight modification you can also force the non-www version on all of your webpages

If you’re using add-on domain, you might take a look on my previous post on how to configure add-on domain so it’ll looks like a single domain placed on a single server

2. Control how Search Engine Robot visit your site

The next step would be creating robots.txt file and placed / upload it to the root folder of your site. This is done to control how search engine crawling your page, so they do not index your secret page

Read here for more info about this or here. And if you need real world example about this, you can click here (Google Results) for robots.txt example from various live sites

As a note, there are different opinion on whether you should let Google or other search engine bot to index your /feed/ address, archives page, etc or not. Personally i’ve tried them both and i don’t find any differences (in traffic, because of Google putting my site into it is supplemental index) between blocking them or not

If you want to read more about this issue, you can read Aaron Wall from Seobook post about this Google Supplemental Index Issue

3. Change your Permalink Structure / Using Nice URL

In order to change it, just go to Options -> Permalink from your dashboard and choose the Date and Name Based Permalink. So your url will looks like this for an example :

1. Default URL Structure : http://www.example.com/?p=123
2. Optimized URL Structure : http://www.example.com/category/post-name/

If you need more information about Permalink Structure in Wordpress, you can read it from here

4. Use unique title and meta description for each page

I know that inserting each meta description to a custom field (as for title, im sure no one are using the same title every time) for every page is time consuming especially to those who’s moving from the free wordpress.com blog

Fortunately there’s one plugin for wordpress that can help you with this situation, and it’s called Head META Description plugin by Kaf Oseo (if i'm not wrong, because i couldnt find his about page) :P which will automatically create Meta Description tag for your wordpress blog

And now the next step to do is optimize your blog post title by installing another plugin, and this one called Optimal Title created by Elasticdog that can be found here

5. Create Sitemaps for your Wordpress Blog

Creating sitemap is necessary especially if you want Search Engine to index your pages properly (deep linking). And in order to simplify creating sitemap for your site, you can use the Wordpress Sitemap Plugins which can be downloaded from here

That’s all about it, as an addition you might be interested on reading my previous post about DIY SEO