This tutorial teaches you about how to optimize your WordPress blog to search engines in about 60 minutes. If you are getting started with blogging using WordPress, you can make your blog appear on radar of search results just in 2-3 weeks. But you will have to work a little which isn’t difficult either.

Before starting off with this tutorial, I assume you have your latest version of WordPress installed on your server. If not, I recommend you to upgrade it, because some plugins which I mention later in this tutorial may not compatible with your older version. And please register at Technorati.com before starting off (you will know why later). If you are already on those services, skip that step.

Now let’s get started.

WordPress SEO within WordPress.

There are two basic things you will have to do within your WordPress settings. Go to Settings and open:

Permalinks: Permalinks shapes the structure of your blog content’s URL from a post to page and archives to category. By default your permalink will be some be non-seo friendly and will have post ID, page ID, numeric etc.

Select any other structure that you would like your blog to have. Or I recommend using this custom structure:

/%category%/%postname%/

This will add Category and Post Name to the URLs.

Update Services: Open “Writing” settings and you can find something called “Update Services” at the bottom. By default, there will be only one from pingomatic.com. Now you add Technorati one in a new line:

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

This will ping to those services whenever you publish new posts and lists your post in many other blog search engine services. You can see the list of services your content will be pinged to on their sites.

WordPress SEO using Plugins.

There are many plugins available for WordPress to help optimize your blog to search engines. But only few stand out of the crowd. So go ahead and simply install these plugins either from the inbuilt plugin installer of WordPress 2.7 and above or download them from WordPress plugin database and upload them via FTP. I recommend you to use the inbuilt plugin installer feature.

If you opt for the Inbuilt Plugin Installer feature, open your WordPress admin dashboard and go to Plugins and click on “Add New” and in the search box, type “SEO”. Your search result will end up with Top 4 plugins on the first page. And Install and activate these plugins mentioned below. (After activating the plugins, go to Settings in WordPress Dashboard and setup those plugins according to your needs. I recommend you not to play too much with the settings):

I will just let you know what you must do for individual plugins.

All in One SEO Pack: Go to Settings and you must fill your blog details like your blog title, description and add few good relevant Keywords. To find the best Keywords for your site, use Google AdWords: Keyword Tool and in the “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” select “Website Content” and enter the URL of your blog to fetch the Keywords from the content of your blog. Do this if and only if your blog has enough contents. Say like 10 posts. If not “Descriptive words or phrases” and enter some relevant words or phrases that best matches with your blog content that you will be planning to post. And please remember to select only the good and relevant keywords from the result.

SEO Title Tag: Do nothing, but every time when you create a new post or a page, you get an option below the text editor to set your own Title to the post or the page as “Title Tag (Optional)”. This is useful when your regular post title is small, but you need it to appear more descriptive on search engine results. Say like, if your original post title is “How to make WordPress theme “Gravatar Ready”, but you want this to appear something more detailed or simple on search results, you can type in “Create Gravatar Ready Wordpress Theme”.

SEO Slugs: This plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. Here’s an example taken from the description of the plugin:

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”, Wordpress automatically assigns a long filename to your post, called a post slug: /what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plugin activated, the slug for our example blog post would look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings The slug is generated on saving a post (so you get a chance to look at it before publishing, and change it), or on publish. It won’t overwrite an existing slug.

SEO Friendly Images: This plugin will automatically add or update ALT and TITLE relevant to content.

For example: If your post has an image with name “Sunset Pictures” and the image file name is “Miami.jpg”, this plugin automatically adds “Miami Sunset Pictures” to your image ALT.

Last but not least, there is one more very important plugin that every WordPress blog should have. It’s Google XML Sitemaps. Install this plugin from any of the methods mentioned earlier and activate it. That’s all. Do nothing else. This plugin will do the rest. This plugin will generate XML Sitemap of your blog. It builds sitemaps for all WordPress generated pages and custom ones. This plugin also updates the sitemap whenever you publish a new post, page or edit any page, post, category etc and will update the sitemap and will notify to all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK etc.

Wordpress SEO using Technorati.

Technorati.com: Technorati lets you to optimize your WordPress blog to Search Engine for Blogs. Use this service to claim your blog. Go here to claim your blog. This also will gain access to many features like Authority, which gives a ranking to your blog depending on how many other blogs are linking to yours and many more features.

WordPress SEO using manual website URL Submission to search engines.

This is just one time procedure. And it is recommended to do if your website is newly registered. Go to these pages and submit your website URL.

• · Add your URL to Google
• · Submit your site to Live Search
• · Submit your site to Yahoo (Not recommended)
  
• · Submit your Blog RSS URL to Google Blog Search

This ends the tutorial. Now your wordpress blog is optimized for search engines to a certain extent. Just keep in mind that only these procedures takes 60 minutes. But for the changes to happen in search engines, it may take a day or few weeks.

And also, not just doing all this SEO stuff will help enhance your site visiblity on the search engines. You have to be regular and post regular so that the services  get pinged regular and search engines get regular updates. The regular you post, regular will search engines crawl your blog. It’s not important how much you post, but how regular you do.

I hope this tutorial helps you to make your blog blip on radar of search engine results.