Wordpress is a wonderful platform for blogging and it can even be used as a CMS solution for a professional company website by just some clever adjustments. ( See one of my clients website in real estate market ) Optimizing Wordpress for better search engine rankings is easy and there are several plugins ready to use on your optimization process. Here are a list of useful Wordpress Search Engine Optimization tips to help you build a SEO Friendly structure in your blog.

Optimization of Internal and External Links

SEO Smart Links is a great plugin for internal link building. It can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog, allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. It also adds “nofollow” attribute to external links and opens links in a new window.

Optimize your meta tags and dublicate content 

All in One SEO Pack  is a must- have plugin. It addresses many important on-page factors like titles, descriptions, keywords, dublicate content and saves time.

Optimize your permalinks

Use either /%postname% or /%category%/%postname%/ permalinks URL structure while optimizing your URL’s. You can do it from your dashboard by going to Settings>Permalink Settings and custom your structure in common settings area.

Optimize your titles

Use your targetted keywords while giving titles to your posts. Don’t make your titles too long and try to use most attractive keywords for both search engines and real users.

Edit your template for header tags

Header tags are important factors when telling search engines what important topics are covered in your content. Make sure your template uses <h1>, <h2>,<h3>,…tags in important sections of your pages and use header tags yourself while creating content wheneven applicable.

Use Robots.txt file and Sitemap

Use Google XML sitemap generator, a great one-stop plugin for your sitemap needs. It creates a robots.txt file and addresses your sitemap itself so you no longer need to do it yourself.

Socialize your blog

Social bookmarking is a must-do off-page link building strategy and  there are several plugins helping you at this point. I am using Add This plugin which has rich array of features, not only enables bookmarking in several favourite sites, but also printing and emailing the content as well.

Refresh your content regularly

Don’t use copy and paste method to create content as major search engines won’t rank your content unless it is unique.  You should deliver fresh content to your blog regularly so search engines would visit and crawl your website often and rank you higher.

Promote your social micro-blogs and vice versa

You can use plugins for social micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed. For example Twitter Tools creates tweets in Twitter whenever you post a new content in your blog, with a link to the blog post. It is a quick-win that leeds Twitter users to your website.  It is also an intelligent way to extend your network and followers in those social websites.

Create a community 

You can use subscription plugins like Subscribe2 to send email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog so your readers would visit your website regularly as long as you provide new content.

If you know other ways of optimizing  Wordpress please let me know…