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WordPress is already awesome when it comes to SEO, even Matt Cuts of Google admit this at his official blog. You have already taken right step of choosing WordPress as your blog or site back-end. However there are few critical SEO steps you must take to really make it command the best possible ranking in search Engines.

Following are top 3 suggestions you can take today to enhance SEO of your WordPress powered site and blog:

1. Search Engine Friendly URLs – You do this today and see the difference, SEF URLs have benefit of both worlds, users love this easy to understand links and Search Engines rank them for those keywords. What you would prefer? somesite/?page_id=34 or somesite/my-page! Same goes with other users and search engines.

They will thank you and reward you for having keyword rich, short easy to understand URLs, Links of your website. This step really affects your WordPress site’s SEO, so do not skip this but do this today.

To turn ON SEF URLs, go to  your WordPress Admin panel, Click on Settings, then click on Permalink Settings, choose the last option called: Custom Structure and then put this into the box: /%postname%/ and click SAVE Changes. You are done! For any troubleshooting or fully explained screenshots look for the page at the bottom of this article.

2. All-in-SEO Plugin – Thanks to WordPress plugin developer we have this awesome plugin to make our life easier. Before the days of this plugin was not born, one has to go to dirty html and edit the theme files to make them more search engine friendly.

Install this plugin and most of the SEO stuff will be taken care of this easy to use , best WordPress SEO plugin. To install this plugin is just same as you do install any other plugin.

3. Optimize Your Home Page Title – This is to most important area in SEO, do not let any useless keyword use this most important space at your website for SEO. I suggest you have short, keyword rich , title which correctly targets the main keyword phrase in your market.

For example if you have a blog about Dog Food Recipes: Instead of having blog title: “Joe’s Love for Dogs’ , make it like “Dog Food Recipes by Joe”. To update your main blog title in WordPress: Click ‘Settings’ and then ‘General’ and  here you update ‘Blog Title’.

So you learned today top three SEO steps you can do to really take your WordPress blog’s SEO to next level. This whole exercise will take about 10 minutes of your time. So I suggest you do this today for your at least main blog so you really see the difference in SEO ranking in coming days.

WordPress is awesome to use as blog platform, almost everyone likes it and blogs using it. However the biggest problem any wordpress user face is the security and hacking attempts to destroy the blog.

WordPress community have some plugins to tighten the security of a blog and also backup the wordpress for easy restoring in case of any damage. But there is news from WordPress core developers that they have launched a service, still in beta, and not open for public yet called: VaultPress

The vision of VaultPress is to ensure that blogs and sites under its care are always completely secure, regardless of what happens. Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups. This is some of the most advanced technology I’ve seen interact with WordPress.

In the future, if your site is tampered with in any way, we’ll know within minutes and can take appropriate steps. The VaultPress core engine will be able to protect you against zero-day security vulnerabilities by updating your blog with hot-fixes, even while you sleep.

Source: VaultPress Blog.

This is a big promise! If delivered as promised this will really bring peace to the bloggers life. Let’s see how it goes in coming weeks. Service is still in beta, and will be soon open for the public. It will be a paid service on monthly payment plan, estimated price they list at invitation page is $25 a month.

Happy Blogging!

I just visited an unintended blog of mine which is also powered with WordPress and using Akismet Plugin to eat the comment spam daily.

It was shocking to even imagine myself moderating 900 comments a day for that blog, thanks to Akismet 93% spam is already being caught by it. And I have to take care only few comments a week.

Thank you Akismet for making our lives easy.

Mohsin

I just discovered my years old blog at my website www.AcmeAims.com which I plan to use for Self Development and Motivational Stuff when I will be free from my business projects.

There I had a blog about Website traffic which i decided to transfer to www.FreeInstantTraffic.com/blog . I wanted to preserve all URLS to posts intact as old blog was indexed in Google and other search engines deep and many users were coming there.

Using the built in function of Import and Export of WordPress i imported all content to new blog. But I was concerned about the URLs structure as I want the incoming users from SEs to go directly to right post without error.

The htaccess file did the magic. I just added one line at my previous blog’s .htaccess file and I am done. Everything was taken care by .htaccess file and every old link is pointing to right link to new blog. For example this was post old blog: http://www.acmeaims.com/website-traffic/seo-wordpress-and-keywords-in-url.html … You see this redirect to new Blog’s correct post flawlessly.

Ok how you can implement this too with your old blog’s .htaccess file:

Open you .htaccess file and implement this line of code as shown:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /website-traffic/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /website-traffic/index.php [L]
Redirect 301 /website-traffic/ http://freeinstanttraffic.com/blog/
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

In above .htaccess file the RED line was added.. where as /website-traffic/ is folder in old domain and http://www.freeinstanttraffic.com/blog is link to new blog.

If your previous blog was at root domain.. it could have been like this:

Redirect 301 / http://www.freeinstanttraffic.com/blog/

Note: I had to set the same Permalink structure for new blog as it was for previous to make this work right.