One Hour Complete SEO Implementation on a Wordpress Blog

There are a couple of good resources your can manipulate to optimize your website for search engines as effectively as possible:

Meta Tags:

Meta Tags contain information that describes your site’s purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. The meta tags are stored within the head of your header.php template file. By default, they are not included in WordPress, but you can manually include them and the article on meta tags in wordpress takes you through the process of adding meta tags to your WordPress site.

The WordPress custom fields option can also be used to include keywords and descriptions for posts and pages. There are also several WordPress Plugins that can also help you to add meta tags and keyword descriptions to your site found within the Official WordPress Plugin Directory.

Robots.txt:

Search Engines read a yourserver.com/robots.txt file to get information on what they should and shouldn’t be looking for, and where.

Specifying where search engines should look for content in high-quality directories or files you can increase the ranking of your site, and is recommended by Google and all the search engines.

Feed Submissions:

WordPress comes built-in with various feeds, allowing your site to be viewed by various feed readers. Many search engines are now accepting feed submissions, and there are many site which specialize in directories of feeds and feed services. Simply Google “submit blog to feed directory” to generate a list of all the top feed directories available on the internet. Some of the are free, while some ask for a fee to add you links within their directories. I recommend manually submitting your blog to free directories, and just give them time to add your links.

Technorati Tags:

Technorati is a “real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs.” According to the site, “Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging. Because Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities underlying these conversations.”

Permalinks:

Permalinks are improvements to your existing URLs which can improve search engine optimization by presenting your post, page, and archive URLs as something like http://example.com/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/ rather than http://example.com/index.php?p=423.  

As search engines use links and the title as part of their information gathering, links to posts and articles within your site gain importance with Permalinks.

Sitemaps and Google Sitemaps:

As of June 2005, Google is now accepting sitemaps of your site as part of their website submissions. Google needs to have this sitemap formatted in a special way using XML. You can use the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress to generate a sitemap for your Wordpress website quickly and easily.

A sitemap or “site map” is a single page listing of all the posts on your website. It is intended for your visitors to get a good overview on what your site is about and to find a blog post quickly but it also has great benefits in the search engines as a good link is always pointing to all your blog posts. By having a link to your sitemap on all your sites pages both visitors and search engines will easily get to it and find all your posts. Also, a sitemap is automatically updated each time you edit or add new posts. This will save you alot of trouble if you have a large website with over 500 posts.