WordPress is a great website platform for a lot of reasons. Once it’s installed and themed, it’s an easy way to keep your content updated without needing a web team… and it also is a powerful platform for SEO.
When you think of blog software, a picture of a long page with lots of copy – you can actually set up a WordPress blog to have the appearance of a normal website. If you look for “premium themes”, you’ll find a lot out there, and most cost between $24-$100, and can be customized.
When you are working with WordPress there are a few key plugins to have installed, and if you follow a process for each blog post, the optimized SEO for each page comes naturally.
In fact, this blog get’s new posts on Google’s index in minutes.
Here’s the plugins you’ll need for a SEO wordpress site:
1) All in One SEO Pack – this plugin adds fields to the post editor for title tag, meta description and meta keywords. All you need to do is copy your post title into the title field, a line or two from your text and a few keywords.
2) Google XML Sitemaps Plugin for WordPress – it creates a sitemap and lets Google, Yahoo and Bing know you updated the site.
3) WP Auto Tagger – creates tags for each post, which in turn creates tag pages – more content.
The other major thing to do is change the permalink structure to a search enginee friendly format. By default, WordPress URLs are structured to appear as “/?p12″, which does nothing for SEO. Use this structure - /%postname%/%category% – and you have URLs that are SEO friendly. (Found under permalink option)
Use the self-hosted version if posssible. The hosted version doesn’t allow you as much freedom for editing the theme, or adding plugins.
There are plenty of other reasons to use WordPress for your site… and when you have a website that is addressing the basic SEO needs on an ongoing basis, you’ll see the difference in the results.
