Wordpress SEO Tips | Search Engine Optimisation For Wordpress

Now it has to be said word-press possesses a lot of search engine optimisation power straight out of the box, it’s a great platform for affiliate sites on the whole and is packed full of useful tools and features. There have been lots of posts on how to use wordress to start an affiliate blog (Kieron wrote an excellent post here) so I thought I would write a quick guide on how to make your blog more seo freindly, this in turn should help gain you more traffic and more sales.  These are the things I do when I set up a new blog and it works for me, it is by no means the definitive guide so please feel free to add any tips I may have missed.

Firstly: Sort out those permalinks

When you install wordpress you will notice that the links that are shown are ugly and include little or no words. They are of little use to the search engines and also offer very little value to your readers.  Thank fully wordpress is here to help, to fix your permalinks open your wordpress admin and click on options>permalinks. You will see an option for custom, if you want to display the post title as your permalink (this is what my pages use) then add /%postname%/ in the box and click update.

Next you need to update your ht access with some relevant code to make your new permalinks work, again word-press makes it easy for you as it is shown at the bottom of the page. Just copy the code at the bottom of the page and paste it into your htaccess. Now go and check your site - you should have pretty looking permalinks on your site that are search engine friendly, well done.

Now you have sorted your permalinks it’s time to tackle titles, meta tags, descriptions and duplicate content issues (one of the downfalls of blogs in the past!).

Thankfully there is a plugin that sorts all of this important wordpress seo in one go, it is called the All in one seo plugin. This clever plugin automatically optimises page titles, meta tags and sorts duplicate content on its own. The added bonus is you still remain in control as you can add your own page title, description and meta tags in a box that appears below your writing box in the admin section of wordpress. This plugin is a must if you want to optimise your blog for the search engines.

Next it is time to think about internal linking, wordpress already has interlinking through the categories, archives and through the inbuilt navigation but this is still not good enough for seo or your users. Wordpress has a tendency of being great for new posts in the search engines but poor for older posts, therefor it is important to bring older posts to the attention of your readers and the search engines. For this purpose I would recommend the related posts plugin by Alex King. This will add up to 5 relevant post links at the bottom of each post on your blog, this is great for seo and readership of your blog.

The final tip I can give you is ….

create link worthy and origional content that people will want to read. Your blog will not receive any extra traffic if no body links to it! So start writing good quality content and the links and traffic will follow.  This will also help you rank higher in the search engines! Best of luck and feel free to add your tips, comments or add a question

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