THE WORLD OF SEO

November 26th, 2010 by Peter

As I’m sure you already know, WordPress is a fantastic free, open source, self-hosted blogging tool and publishing platform that is used on millions of websites worldwide and is backed by a large, active community that provide thousands of tutorials, themes and plug-ins.

WordPress is truly a powerful tool for users from all backgrounds and abilities. Once you’ve downloaded WordPress and spent time finding a relevant theme (or even creating a custom theme for your site), what do you do next?

Once you login to WordPress, you’re presented with an admin panel with quite a lot of options which can be pretty confusing and daunting, especially if you’re new to WordPress.

I think one of the most fundamental checks/changes to make is to ensure you’re not blocking robots from visiting your website (unless ofcourse you have set this for a reason). It’s pretty easy to make this mistake especially since it’s a simple checkbox during the setup. To check that you’re not blocking robots, go to the “Settings” section of the left menu and then click on “Privacy”. You’ll then be presented with two radio buttons. Ensure the radio button is selected on the following:

Another major change to make once you’ve installed WordPress is to do with the permalink structure. What is a permalink? Well, a permalink is the “permanent URL” to your posts, categories and other pages within the WordPress installation. The default’s set “Ugly”, for example – http://example.com?p=2. With the permalink section, you’re able to convert the URL’s to “Pretty URL’s” such as http://example.com/category/post-name/

On the majority of WordPress installations, I change the permalink structure to a custom structure of “/%category%/%postname%.html”.

This will change the URL’s to be something along the lines of http://example.com/category/post-name.html

The importance of changing the permalink structure will be detailed within a future post.

Once you’ve made and checked the above two points, the rest of the options from the WordPress admin are pretty much configurable at your choice such as defining which day the new week should start.

Once you’ve changed all the initial settings for your WordPress setup, you should look to improve your WordPress site further. As mentioned above, WordPress has a large active community that provide thousands of plug-ins (both free and paid). It can be confusing at first to find which plug-ins you need to install for your site. Before I knew about SEO, I’d search the WordPress plug-in directory for hours on end, looking for plug-ins to extend and expand my site. I could have spent the time writing content for the site instead but I had no real clue as to which plug-ins would truly benefit my site.

WordPress now has a built in function which allows you to search and automatically install plug-ins that are within the WordPress plug-in directory (but ofcourse, you can also upload a plug-in manually if you wish). Simply go to the Plug-ins section and then click on “Add New”.

I think perhaps one of the most essential plug-ins to install is the all in one SEO pack.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

The all in one SEO pack is useful in many different ways. To mention just a few features, it allows you to add a canonicalization tag to every page, generate meta tags automatically and allows you to add robot tags to specific pages (for example, adding a noindex,follow tag to the tag pages). View the above link for a full list of features. Once you’ve installed the All in One SEO pack and activated the plug-in, go to the settings page as there are a few options you need to change. Firstly, enter the homepage meta into the appropriate fields. Next, tick “Use noindex for Archives”. Depending on your circumstances, the rest of the options should already be set.

It’s also a good idea to install the Google XML Sitemap, this allows you to create a dynamic sitemap which is updateable at the click of a button.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

From an SEO point of view, that’s pretty much all you need in terms of plugins. There are quite a few social media plug-ins that I like to install where possible. “SexyBookmarks” is a great plug-in that allows you to add selected social network buttons to your post pages. There’s almost 100 to choose from with quite a few options (of which you most likely won’t need to change) “WP to Twitter” is another plug-in I like to install, it basically allows you to update twitter automatically when you create a new post.

There are thousands of articles created by the WordPress community which will assist you in learning WordPress within more depth. I think perhaps the best way to learn is by simply playing with the platform and get familiar with it.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 10:09 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed.

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