Hello wordpress bloggers, yesterday I was talking about some great plugins for wordpress to improve your search engine optimization. Today I will tell you some tips about how you should set your wordpress to get success on search engines.

WordPress is considered one of best blogging platforms because it allows to perform Search Engine Optimization functions that most of the other blog platforms do not support. This includes elements like title tags, meta descriptions, related posts, optional excerpts, and other easy ways of making the Search Engines clearly aware of your content and what it is about.

Best format for Permalinks

The permalinks or permanent links are one of best ways to improve your seo. By activating them, you will have links permanently for every post you write, so if you have them deactivated just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel and activate them. For this permanent url, you can set different formats: Date and name based, Numeric and Default. Also there is an option to customize this format, so you should check that and set the structure /%postname%/ and nothing else. This is best because your URLs to your articles should never change. Try to avoid using dates as subfolders, this ties your post to an specific date, limiting your ability to update old posts. Also, using dates as subfolders may result wrong in search engines because your post will be ranked with less weight and this will reduce the crawl rate. If you noticed, my blog has dates as subfolders. I changed the structure just like I recommend here but the problem is that wordpress change automatically every url’s post, so this mean that every oldest post linked in my newest posts won’t be find, redirecting you to the 404 error page. I’m thinking a solution for this, don’t worry .

Use your keywords on slugs

Post slugs allow you to insert a topic or keyword phrase into your URL. For example, you can use www.yourdomain.com/blog-setup-basics.php instead of something like www.yourdomain.com/?p=140. If you don’t set a slug ( you can find this at the right of the posting screen ), wordpress automatically will set as slug the title of your post with a “-” between words. Try to avoid “the”, “or” and “and” in your posts slug, and use some of your blog keywords on it to get success in search engines indexing.

Enable Pinging

This is a little out of place but it’s good to mention it, what is a ping? pinging sends a signal to the Search Engines to come take a look at your blog every time new content is added or changes are made. This gives you a big SEO advantage, as it ensures your content is seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help your posts rank right away for less-competitive keywords.

Following this tips, you will be optimizing your blog for search engines, google, yahoo, msn, ask etc etc…The implementation of your keywords on your permanent links is very very important and it’s something that you should have in mind when you are setting a post tittle and slug.