Setting up WordPress sites is easy, properly optimizing them for SEO isn’t. WordPress is decent for SEO out of the box, especially the new versions. But there are still scopes to transform that ‘decent’ bit into ‘excellent’. SEO is not limited to low quality link building and blatant keyword stuffing any more. It has literally gone through an evolution in the past decade, and will never stop evolving. In this article I’ll randomly present 31 easy to implement, effective ways to boost the SEO of your WordPress blog.
Pick a good web host
The first step is to ensure your site loads fast, because speed is a very important ranking factor for Google. If your site is presently not loading very fast (even heavy pages should load in under 1.5 seconds), you can contact your host and ask them why your website is performing slowly on their server, but if they fail to provide you a specific reason (such as your website hitting your allocated resource limits), you can be sure that their servers are slow in the first place.
Starting with your WordPress Blog
When you set up a new blog, you can use the ‘discourage search engines from indexing this site‘ feature of WordPress until you’re done with working on the structure of the blog and ready to launch it. When you have that option enabled, it disallows search engines (bots) to crawl your pages (handled from robots.txt).
WordPress also includes rel=”noindex” and rel=”nofollow” tags in the pages of your blog, so that they don’t get indexed by search engines until you want them to. This is useful because most bloggers tend to delete the default ‘Hello World’ WordPress post and tweak permalink structures and all, which would otherwise result in lots of 404 not found errors to show up in Google Webmaster Tools.
Alter the default permalinks structure
By default, WordPress uses ‘?p=[id]‘ permalinks for posts. This is not search engine friendly and you’ll lose the opportunity to put a few important keywords in post permalinks if you don’t switch to a text-based permalink structure. I prefer the ‘yourdomain.com/year/month/post-name/‘ format, but you may choose any other similar structure.
Install an .xml sitemap plugin
Installing an .xml sitemap plugin is vital for WordPress blogs. Providing search engines like Google links to all the pages on your site in a sitemap, preferably in the .xml format, helps them index your site content faster, in an easier way.
Install an SEO plugin and start using rel=”canonical”
Installing a good SEO plugin is a must because it can take good care of numerous SEO aspects of your blog automatically. As soon as you install one, you should enable the rel=”canonical” tag for pages on your blog. It helps search engines to determine the original source URLs of content on your blog. That way, it helps eliminate duplicate content issues from WordPress sites.
I personally prefer using All in One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert. It provides users a broad range of options regarding link canonicalization, page titles, meta description, keywords optimization, noindexing categories, tags and archives, Google Plus authorship, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools verification. So many options under the hood make me love the plugin so much.
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