How to Optimize Your Wordpress Blog For Search Engines

Wordpress is a great platform for blogging. It does not require much technical know-how to install and use it. This and its versatility are the main reasons why Wordpress has become so popular. Today we discuss few tricks and tweaks that beginners can use for better functioning of Wordpress. This also gives them higher search engine optimization results.

Server

Install your Wordpress on a Linux server, rather than using the free blog hosting at Wordpress.com. It may cost a bit more but would save you many headaches in future.

Enable Pinging

This is a feature I really like in blogging platforms. Every time you publish a post, your blog sends a signal to the search engines to come take a look at your blog . This ensures that your content is being noticed by the search engines and is regularly updated.Your content gets indexed much faster and get immediate ranking for the post.

Pinging can be enable from your Wordpress administration area.

Permalinks

By default Wordpress publishes a post such as:

www.blog.yoursite.com/?p=13

However this does not give the search engines any idea about the post content or topic. By altering the permalink structure you make your URLs more useful for your readers and search engines.

In your Wordpress administration area, click Options and then click Permalinks. Now you would see various choices under heading "Common Options" choose "Custom" and in the custom Structure field add this

/%category%/%postname%/.

This will make your URLs appear as www.yoursite.com/category/postname

Slugs

Post slugs allow you to insert a topic or keyword phrase into your URL. By default your post title becomes your post slug but you can alter that from post slug tab on right hand side column of your post writing area.

Changing your slugs to better keyword laden titles helps in SEO.

Good Luck with your SEO efforts.

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