The quality of the default options that WordPress applies for you after a new installation is mediocre at best when it comes to SEO. As it stands, there's a lot you can do to improve how much search engines like your site and its ability to naturally rank higher by tweaking five simple things in your WordPress installation.
1. Titles
WordPress doesn't allow you to natively do it, but you should change how your WordPress installation displays titles. The All in One SEO plugin allows you to customize and alter nearly every aspect of your site's meta data, including your titles.
Set your home page's title to be a miniature description of your website with its main keywords present, your pages with your post's title followed by your blog title and your pages to have titles that are set by themselves.
2. Permalinks
The “Permalinks” tab in your WordPress Administration menu allows you to customize how your WordPress pages appear. By default, they have boring URLs that lack any sort of keywords.
To fix this, simply change your permalinks to any option that includes your blog's title. The best option is to include the title preceded by the category.
Keep in mind that this is a step that should be taken as soon as your blog is set up. Otherwise search engines will be unable to find your old pages and will be forced to re-index your website from scratch if you have a preexisting site with a lot of content.
3.Tailor Your Content Around a Keyword or Key PhraseThe fundamental idea concerning content and SEO is that you have a keyword or key phrase that you want to rank for. It might be a brand name, a word or a string of words.
The point is that you should make sure that your keyword is included in your content at a rate of anywhere from 2 to 3 percent. This will give search engines a good idea as to what your page is about.
One other important thing to note is that you should also use synonyms of your keywords throughout your page. This is a tip that applies to ranking well with search engines that have begun shifting their searches from plain keyword matches to semantic searches.
4. Optimize Your Images
The single goal of SEO is to bring in more visitors by ranking better. One way that this can be done is by ranking better for images, however the only way to do this is by making sure your images are optimized.
The best way to do this is to make sure that your images have a keyword-rich file name. Once that's done, make sure that you describe the images in the alt attribute tag with a short blurb that includes your keyword. If you do it right, you should rank well in image search engines and therefore pull in more traffic.
5. Interlinking Pages
This is the one thing most people forget about because they think WordPress's category listings are enough to make search engines connect the relevance of pages together.
You need to interlink your pages. This means you need to link from one post to another when the main keyword is used.
If you accomplish this, you'll see that your visitors hang around on your website longer to read more content and smart search engines will be able to establish that your pages are about a certain keyword.
Michael is an SEO Manager at Search Factory in Brisbane, Australia, delivering search engine optimization strategies to clients fanging from small businesses to large enterprises. For more visit: http://searchfactory.com.au/
