Blogging is very hot these days. Almost everyone I know has a blog and of course has something to say about something. There are of course multiple blog platforms that offer different features and use different coding structures. It is true that search engines love blogs and forms due to the freshness of content on these items, but also due to SE-friendly struture of some of these blogging web application packages.

While Blogger, ExpressionEngine, Movable Type, Typepad, and Vox are all good blogging platforms, Wordpress is truly the superstar of the show. Wordpress is an almost perfect platform for those of us who want to have the best blogging features plus the freedom to make changes as we wish (I am talking about a self-hosted Wordpress blog here). But due to its dynamic structure, Wordpress blogs are barely optimized for search engines from the very first day, so I thought I share 5 quick things that I have personally done for my own Wordpress Weblogs.

1. Post titles, post titles, post titles: Title tags are one of the most important factors that search engines consider when evaluating your pages. Having the right title tag with keywords that you intend on targeting can make a world of difference. I would put more than my title post as my title tag just to have the opportunity to properly optimize each and every post for search engines. You can either write the PHP code yourself or use a plugin such as SEO Title Tag from netconcepts.

2. URLs: Post URLs are also important for your search engine efforts. Wordpress does not optimize your URLs for you, at least not right from the start. So make sure you optimize your Permalinks using Wordpress’ interface. You can use something like /%category%/%postname% for your Permalinks (go to Settings menu and click on Permalinks).

3. 301 Redirects: you want to make sure that you take care of broken links and 301 redirect them to the right location. You can easily do so with the Redirection plugin for Wordpress.

4. No follow Links: You want to make sure that you are not leaking Pagerank by links that are posted in your comments. In addition, links to META pages can also be no followed to increase your link weight. You can take care of this using All-in-One SEO pack.

5. Finally, make sure you have the right robots.txt for your blog. While many SEO professionals discount robots.txt as an effective SEO optimization technique, it is still important for you to make sure that you avoid content duplication issues on Wordpress. For instance, http://www.example.com/category/post1 is the same as http://www.example.com/post1 in most cases, so want to make sure you don’t get penalized for duplicate content as a result of this. You can either do a change to your .htaccess file to achieve this or add the following to your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /category/*/*

There are multiple ways around this, but the point is to avoid having two exact pages with two different URLs seen by search engines.

Finally, make sure you keep the fresh content coming. Use the keywords properly, and you should see better results by implementing the above changes. There are a few other things that you can do that I will address in a later post.