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Basic WordPress SEO tips: 6 Settings for Search Engine…

WordPress is an excellent blog authoring tool and can also be used as an all-around content management system (CMS) for your site.  Best of all, it’s inherently search-engine-friendly.

People often ask us for tips on WordPress settings for SEO. Here are the bare-bones basics:

– In Settings > General Settings, choose a site title and tag line that contain keywords you might want to rank well for.  Of course, the site title should also be recognizable as the name of your blog!

– Under Settings > Permalinks, we recommend a custom structure for permalinks that includes the post name, as seen here:

/%postname%/

This will create permalink URLs containing the words in your post title,  for example, “this-is-my-best-post-ever.html.” If you would prefer to include the date or other elements, scroll down on this WordPress Codex page for a list of other available tags.  Here’s an example of a URL format that includes the current year as well as the post name:

– Under Settings > Writing, be sure that the update service is filled in. A respected updating service is the following:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

– Under Settings > Privacy be sure to select that you want your blog to be publicly available.

– We recommend including breadcrumbs on each post. We use a plugin called Breadcrumb NavXT to make ’em.

– HTML titles are important for SEO. You can install a plugin called All in One SEO Pack to gain the capability to edit HTML titles on each post, and to set up a good default format for all posts.  Some examples of good default formats are the following:
“Post Title | Blog Name”
“Blog Name: Post Title”

This screenshot shows an example of All in One SEO Pack settings for a breaking news website:

With these basic settings in place, your site will be indexable in search engines, and have at least a minimum level of on-page optimization built-in.  We’re guessing that was a lot easier than you thought it would be!  Congratulations – aren’t you glad you chose WordPress?

Readers: do you have an WordPress SEO tips to share?