WordPress has had a very quick rise to the top in the blogging and CMS platform stakes over the past few years, no doubt contributed to by the fact that the platform is free to use, and is supported by a very large and active community of developers who not only support the platform, but the various plugins and themes that are available for it.
The only issue with WordPress is that it never really has been made search engine friendly, however, there is a huge support for plugins out there that are completely free, that will transform your blog into a super power in the search engines.
It is worth noting however that there are a lot of settings that you can use to optimize your blog. This is why I recommend the use of clone wordpress files in order to make installing a new blog much easier.
The first setting that I recommend that you change is about changing the URL structure of your installation. In your administration area, under your settings menu, you will be able to change your permalink settings.
When this setting is set as default, a numerical value will be assigned in your URL to all posts, meaning that you will get no SEO benefits from this at all, apart from the dominant keyword in your domain.
This should be changed so that it is at least post name based, which will insert those valuable keywords into your URL for each post or page.
Keeping in mind also that with older versions of WordPress, some modifications were needed to be made manually to some files, so this is why I recommend using the most up to date version of WordPress.
The most essential plugin for WordPress SEO would have to be the All In One SEO Pack. It is available for free through the WordPress database, and can be installed manually in matter of seconds.
This plugin will allow you to set titles, and descriptions for all pages and posts on your blog, plus your main URL as well. The benefit of this comes in two ways. First, it is all about relevancy for a particular phrase, and second, you can literally sell from the search engines themselves using a great title and description.
Google XML Sitemaps is a great plugin that completely rewrites the way that WordPress creates its dynamic sitemap. In fact, sitemaps are a problem on WordPress, as they are Dynamic, meaning that most search engines will struggle to read them.
This plugin creates a real file that can be read, and even edited, plug it automates the submission of this file to the search engines so you don’t even need to ping your website or blog whenever you decide to add more content.
This is hands down one of the easiest ways to get the search engines interested in your website, as such, I also recommend submitting your sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tools for inclusion in their index.
If your website or blog takes a long time to load, it is not going to rank well. Unfortunately, most mid level hosting providers can be slow at times, and this can impact how well we rank.
It is with this in mind that I like to use cache plugins that create static files for your website so that it will load faster without any server side processing needed at all. Most of these plugins are completely free, and take only minutes to install.
SEO is just so important to any website, especially when it comes to getting those initial visitors through the door. I cant stress this enough, however, getting these settings right requires quite a lot of work.
This is exactly why I stress that using clone wordpress installations is the way to go, as it really will save you a huge amount of time in the long run.
