SEO Guide: How to Optimize a WordPress Blog
Posted by Mike | Filed under Blogging, SEO
Hello everyone! I’ve been experimenting with WordPress blogs for some time now and I have found out that there are a lot of things that you can do to optimize a WP blog and get it to the top of the search engine rankings. In this guide, I will include the settings that you need to tweak, steps that you must take and plug-ins that are highly recommended for search engine optimization.
Title and Description
Your site’s title is very important. It will help in bringing your site up or down the search engine rankings, so you have to make sure that you use the correct title. Usually, the template that you’re using will make your title tag okay already, but here’s a good suggestion for a title tag:
<title><?php wp_title(''); ?><?php if(wp_title('', false)) { echo ' |'; } ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
The code above will look like this:
This is my post’s title | My Very Interesting Blog
For your site’s description, you must include some targeted keywords but NEVER stuff them! You can edit your site’s description by using META tags, and a plug-in called Add Meta Tags should help you do this. If your site is about the latest cellphones (and if you’re targeting the key phrase “hottest cellphones”), a good description looks something like this:
My Cellphone Site is an online place where all the information about the hottest cellphones can be found. News on the latest mobile phone models can be read here, and members of the site can share reviews on the newest and hottest cellphones.
Permalink Structure
You have the freedom to choose your permalink structure by changing the settings which can be found at WordPress blog’s control panel -> Options -> Permalinks. There are lots of fancy structures, but the best permalink structure is /%postname%/. Why? Because you’ll have the ability to republish the post any time you like without having the problem of a broken link.
You may also want to put a ‘301 redirection‘ in your htaccess file. By doing this, your site will only have one URL (www or non-www). This will ‘force’ the search engines to give only one ranking to your URL.
Blog Navigation
Your blog’s navigation plays an important part in search engine optimization as well. Put the nofollow attribute on links which are not THAT useful. It is recommended that comment links are set to nofollow because they will just increase your pages’ number of external links, and that’s not a very good thing…
Make sure that all the links are accessible! Search engines might have a trouble crawling your site when you have broken links.
Anchor Text Issue
As I have mentioned in a previous blog post, relevant keywords as your anchor text will improve a page’s ranking (if the anchor text is used as the search term). And if that’s the case, then your links to your other pages should have good anchor texts!
You have to choose your post titles wisely because they will serve as the anchor texts for your posts. If a post is about your experiment on a cat’s behavior, don’t use “Teh Experiment!!! LOLZZZZ” as your title! It is better to use “My Experiment on Cat Behavior” because the keywords are there… oh, and you also have to choose your pages’ names very well!
Hmm… before I forget, you should not use images for links as search engines can’t ‘extract’ an anchor text from pictures. 
Getting Backlinks
Well, we have to face it… Link building is the backbone of search engine optimization, and a site will not get good rankings if it doesn’t have high-quality links. There are a lot of ways to get backlinks, but some of them will not really work with a blog.
Here are some quick tips on how to get inbound links for a blog:
Submit your blog posts to social news sites. Sites like Digg and Sphinn (Why Sphinn?) can give you a lot of traffic. And if the people who visit your site appreciate your works, they might link to it. All you have to do is write amazing content, submit, and wait for the people who like what you write. It’s that simple… Really.
Submit to blog topsites. Doing this can bring in some traffic and exposure. Topsites, especially those which are popular, can help your site get indexed by the search engines.
Recommended Plug-ins for SEO
Well, here are some WordPress plug-ins which can help your site attain better search engine rankings. Enjoy!
All-in-One SEO Pack
This can help you in editing your blog’s title, description and other things which are related to SEO. A must use plug-in.
Share This
A plug-in by Alex King, this can help in getting more exposure for your blog (and more visitors… and backlinks… and better search engine rankings…).
Similar Posts
This is a plug-in which displays posts which are related to the current post being displayed. This will increase the visibility of your posts.
Sitemap Generator
This is a plug-in from Dagon Design. As you may know, sitemaps can be a guide for search engines in crawling your site’s pages, so this sitemap generator is something that you will need if you want the search engines to improve their crawling.
Do you know of any other plug-ins which can be used for SEO? Please comment on this post and let’s see if I find it nice. 
Whew, that’s it! I REALLY hope that this guide helped you guys! Please leave a comment if you have some time to do so. Thanks for reading, and look forward to my future posts. 
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Hi,
. This is just what I’ve done for my blog. Anyway, great advice!
You read my mind
Hi Diana,
Nice to know that you found this guide helpful.
Great tips you have there thanks very much. Found you on your DP thread
Nice post! For many people just launching their WP blog this is great
!
Thanks The Art Poster and Mike Pendersen for giving such positive comments. I hope that you can drop by again!
Nice one. I loved the posts and theme too.
Hi,
Thank you for this guide. Really helpful. Where do you exactly copy the title code ?
Great post but I have to disagree about using nofollow in comment links…
I want to be able to reward those who comment on my blog so I use the dofollow plugin. However to discourage abuse I have some really good spam-fighting plugins such as Akismet (of course), Comment Timeout, and Simple Trackback Validation.
Another must have plugin for SEO is Google XML Sitemaps. As per the plugin description: “This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.”
thanks i am going to try them
A great post. Many are sure to find this useful
Very nice post! I have several WP blogs and was already aware of some of the points you brought up, but I still found a lot of info that will help me to make my blogs better. Very much appreciated!
Very helpful article, I printed it out. Good luck to you.
Nice post. Can you expand on the submit to “topsites” angle? Is there a listing of these or something?
Thanks
Hecm:
I’ll post a list of topsites.
Always good to have information in one spot. I too dofollow the comments on my blog. Comments are always good to have. I also have a google alert set up for my blog name, etc. so I can see if others are talking about me, don’t think it hurts to have google look for you.
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Thanks for suggesting a lot of tips for WP SEO and putting them in a single post for convenience. Having to wade through all the info out there in cyberspace can be quite tedious, so an article like yours is a really good thing to have.
No follow is no more valid, as recent tests show that google is simply ignoring it because of abuse.
Sure is quite a lengthy and comprehensive list you have there of things to optimize in WordPress. Can be quite intimidating for newbies, but anything worth doing requires time and effort before becoming a success.
Looks like some nice tips. We leave the follow on comments on our blogs because we have found it helps to encourage participation. But you are spot on the title stuff.
Nice info for a WP noob like me.
Thank you for the nice guide. It really gives me idea on how to optimize my site.
Wow, this is the best SEO post I’ve ever come across. Spot on! Thanks!
Stumbled.
unTECHy: Hey, thanks for the stumble and the positive comment. Hope to see you more often here!
Wow, I thought I knew a lot about SEO, great info there!
I actually changed a few things in my site, hope to see good results, if anything changes I will let you all know!
Wow! The best SEO guide for Wordpress that I’ve seen…. You know I’m new to blogging and this will help me a lot specially when I get my own domain. Right now I only have a wordpress.com blog but sooner or later I will get my self hosted blog.
Kudos Juggler for a job very well done!
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I thought I knew a lot about SEO, great info there. Thanks for article.
Thank you for the nice guide.
Great ifo about wp seo opp” on question regarding RSS and xml and atom feeds are all of these still a rss feed?? confirm please” I submit to every rss feed as long as I put my uri and comment in that blog post”"”
thanks man
All in one seo is just enough for the wordpress on-page seo.
Nice one. I loved the posts and theme too.
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I will add up something, whenever you create a new post for your blog, always post it to measure social bookmarking sites like digg,stumble and propeller. This method is doing great for me. The new page gets indexed in search engines within 2-3 hours and i get a lots of hits for that page, though the conversion of such visitors are very less but it helps in increasing alexa ranking.
Awesome article. I wrote a similar post on my blog titled Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines. I basically just talked about a couple SEO plugins (Google Sitemaps and All in One) for WordPress. You took it a step further and talked about promotion, social bookmarking, etc…good job!
Nice blog, very informative I like this post much because I really Working on this
Awesome tips…exactly what I was looking for.
Thanks a lot.
I am not much aware about coading of php but this is really simple to implement for new comer also, Thanks I will try this with my blog also.
Really usefull post for all wordpress blog holder like me. Thanks
thank you good post I like this blog Good Point.
I have just started wordpress blog in my website and this will be useful for my new blog. Thanks
Nice info thanks..
thank you for this best post. I LiKE THİS SiTE.
Thanx
All in one seo is just enough for the wordpress on-page seo.
thank you
nice post
Thank you for share this guide
Hi, that is great advice, I will certainly be optimizing my wordpress blog
Angela
I never knew about ’share this’ plugin. I would definitely install this plugin (I did check now and a warning popped that its not tested on my WP version) once compatibility doubts are cleared! Cheers for the post. I bookmarked the page