Out of the box WordPress isn’t particularly SEO friendly but fortunately it is a relatively easy problem to fix by following some basic SEO practices.
Basic SEO requires:
- All Pages have unique titles
- All Pages have a unique meta description tag
- All Pages have a unique meta keywords tag
- All pages have meaningful page names.
- All Pages have at least one incoming link (internal or external) so that the search engines find them.
This can be accomplished in 5 simple Steps.
- Change default permalink structure to use the postname only.
- Remove the blog title and blog tagline from the page.
- Install and setup The All in one SEO plugin.
- Make sure each page/post has a unique page title and description.
- Use Pages and not Posts for content that you want to rank well for and Pay Attention to Your Internal Linking.
Step 1 -
Change The Default Permalink Structure
The permalink structure determins the page and post names that WordPress creates.
By default WordPress uses meaningless page numbers for the page name.
To make WordPress more SEO friendly you need to change the WordPress settings so that WordPress uses meaningful page names.
Although there are several options the one I use and recommend is to use the page/post title to form the page name this you do in the Settings > Permalinks section where you change it the to use the postname only.
It should presently be set to use the default structure click the custom radio box and enter the following in the text box:
/%postname%/
- Step 2-
Remove the Blog Title and Blog Tagline from the Page
Most WordPress themes display the Blog Title and Blog Tagline above or with the header logo image on each page/post in the site.
Again this is not SEO friendly and need to be changed.
The Site tile and tagline are set as part of the install and can be changed in the settings>general section.
You could simply leave both blank but because the site title is used elsewhere it is not the best solution.
You can hack the page/post templates to remove it but that is too technical for most and is not recommended.
My preferred solution is to use a theme that allows you to remove them by simply selecting an option.
Fortunately with WordPress 3.0 and the introduction of child themes this can be accomplished by using a child theme of the default twenty ten theme called 2010 Weaver.
In the main options of the weaver theme you will find a simple tick box that hides both the site title and tagline (screen shot below)
