A Guide to an SE Optimized WordPress Setup

[ Digg this! ] Since I’ve been installing and managing WordPress blogs for so many bloggers/clients, I have already outlined lots of steps to optimized blogs for search engines. I cannot guarantee that these steps will send you to the top of the SERPs but based on experience and experimentation, they’ve been helpful in one way or another.

• Install in the root domain. This is one of the lessons I had to learn the hard way. See, the basic problem was some people are installing their WordPress blogs under a sub-folder like /blog/ or /wp. Not only will it affect your Adsense ads but it also lengthens your blog URL.
• Once you’ve installed WP, go and fix the WP Options esp. the “Blog Title”, Tag Line and Blog URL/Address. Blog titles should be descriptive and just don’t limit it to 1 or 2 words. Same with the tag line. Settle with a fixed URL. If you want http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com it’s up to you but make sure to use this URL all the time – blog comments, forum signatures, email signatures, etc.
• Change the permalink structure (if you have mod_rewrite support) to something keyword-rich. My usual format is customized for /%category%/%postname%/ which uses the category title and post title as part of the URL structure. If you are targeting a certain niche or topic, you can add that keyword as a Category Base. Say if you want to blog about arowanas and bought the domain myfishpondblog.com, you can use “arowana” as the category base so that all permalinks have the structure myfishpondblog.com/arowana/category/post-title/ — you’ll have the keyword “arowana” on all your permalinks. Also good for Adsense keyword targeting.
• Choose an SEO friendly WP theme. The basic rule of thumb for an SE optimized theme is to` compare it with the default Kubric theme. That includes H1/H2 tags in text blog title, links to archives and categories on the sidebar and permalinked post titles. I try to avoid Ajaxy themes or features as they are hard to index by the SEs and post titles that uses Flash or image objects (Alexified theme).
• Edit the footer of the theme to add a link back to your blog homepage. Some WP themes have this by default though. Just don’t use generic text link anchors like Home, Back to Main, etc. — use the blog title itself as the anchor text.
• Add as many categories as you can think and setup your category links that lists them all even if there’s no post categorized under it. Most people only add categories when they do a post which is still uncategorized. Each category represents a single page and these pages will soon have their own pageranks so you’d rather have them linked to as early as possible. Word the categories as descriptive as you can — say use “Gadgets & Gears” instead of “Stuff I tinker with…”
• Install these SEO-friendly WP plugins — Optimal Title, Related Posts, Simple Tags, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Permalinks Redirect, Google Sitemaps, Top10, Get Recent Comments, Add Meta Tags.
• Remove excess links like the default blogroll, links to xml or css compliance sites and other stuff. Just leave the link back to your WP theme creator/designer.
• Be aware of the “Post Slug” feature when composing really long post titles. If you don’t know where is that Post slug, it’s just on top of the Category drop down menu in the Write Post section. So, if you have a really long post title like “The Ultimate Guide to an SE Optimized WordPress Setup” you can put in the post slug “guide seo wordpress setup”. Your default permalink would have been domain.com/category/the-ultimate-guide-to-an-se-optimized-wordpress-setup/ but by fixing the post slug, you’ll end up with just domain.com/category/guide-seo-wordpress-setup/ — it’s shorter but still has the essential keywords.

Ok, the last point isn’t really about WordPress setup but I think it’s worthy to add that to the list.

Again, the guide assumes that you’re just starting out setting up a new blog. If you already have one for quite some time, some of the changes might have adverse effect on your SE traffic.

Anybody want to add to the tip list?