WordPress is already awesome when it comes to SEO, even Matt Cuts of Google admits this at his 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 rankings in search Engines for your given keywords.
Following are the top 3 tips you can apply today to enhance SEO Power of your WordPress 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? yoursite/?page_id=34 or yoursite/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.