WordPress SEO: What can it Do For You?

Posted on 22. Jul, 2011

One of the reasons the terms WordPress and SEO are often found together is because  right out of the box, a WordPress site is more search friendly than most other “out of the box” solutions.

Search friendly means that the code is generally clean and easy for search engines to crawl.  Since it evolved from a blogging platform, it has nifty little features built in that will automatically ping the crawlers out ther telling them, “Hey, I’ve got something new here.  Come check it out!”

WordPress also automatically takes care of an RSS for you.  RSS is Really Simple Syndication.  Another nifty feature that helps spread your content across the web.

But, here is where some people are misled or where they go wrong with WordPress.  It is in not putting the correct information into the proper field for the SEO plugin or not knowing what the heck a plugin is in the first place!

A plugin is a bit of code written specifically to fulfill a feature the WordPress “out of the box” installation does not provide.  Some professional themes come with SEO plugins already integrated.  If the theme you are using does not, I recommend the simple and easy to use All-In-One SEO plugin.

Okay, whether you use the professional theme’s built in plugin or you add the All-In-One SEO plugin, the concept is the same.  You need to fill in the proper fields.  Those fields include the title and the Meta description.  Be sure each page and post is unique to avoid duplicate content issues.

There are a number of other features to maximize on when using WordPress SEO tools.  Here are some other things you will want to be sure and configure correctly.

• Set the permalinks to something that is user friendly, keeps the URLs short, and uses the keywords.  I generally check the custom box and include /%postname%/ in the field.
• Add in the Google XML Sitemap.
• Know ALL of the keywords you are targeting.
• Use the YARPP plugin that will help lead your readers to related posts.

Getting all of those things in place will take your “out of the box” WordPress SEO installation to the next level and actually increase you chances at getting found for keywords you are targeting.