Top 5 SEO tweaks for WordPress

17Jul09

Are you looking for more traffic on WordPress? It’s not too hard to get, you just need some SEO tips to enhance your configuration.

We will here give you the best tips for making your WordPress SEO friendly.

Your best option is creating a Custom permalinks. For this tweak you simply change the page title that is given by default, which is of format: www.yourdomaincom/?p=5 , to a much more user friendly and search engine oriented title:www.yourdomainname.com/category/page title.

In order to do this you need to go to Options > Permalinks and change the default code for this other code – /%category%/%postname%/

Another tweak you can use is making your titles links. Links are easier to detect by search engines, and by this, easier to be found by your users.  Luckily, you can very easily convert your titles to links permanently. To do this, go to your Main Index Template and Page Template and find the post title’s code, which will be something like

[h2][?php the_title(); ?][/h2]

but between these > < instead of square brackets.

To transform your headings into links, replace this code by these next one, always changing the square brackets with > <

[h2][a href="[?php the_permalink() ?]” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to [?php the_title(); ?]“][?php the_title(); ?][/a][/h2]

You are already ahead of the rest with your new SEO improvements, but there’s more. There are plenty of Google Sitemap generator plugins for WordPress. We’ll talk about the Google Sitemap generator plugin by Dagon Design specifically. You can use this very customizable (it´s options page is in the Word Press admin panel) plugin to create a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. You will be amazed by all the options it includes. From support for multi-level categories and pages to multiple-page generation with navigation; covering permalink support and letting you choose what you will display, the order of the items, and tons of other features worth checking.
The last tweak we’ll talk about is adding custom Meta tags to different pages on your WordPress blog. Using the All in one SEO plugin you can go further than settling with a general tag for your entire site. Having several meta tags throughout the different pages on your blog will make each page’s description unique when your site appears on the SERPS, meaning more options for people to click on!
With these WordPress tweaks you will be ahead of those who don´t have SEO WordPress blogs and will get lots of new visitors for sure!

Read more about WordPress tweaks!

Filed under: Hacks, How-To, web 2.0, wordpress   |  2 Comments
Tags: all in one seo, backlinks, custom permalinks, page template, seo friendly, seo hacks, title links, whitehat seo, wordpress