In terms of SEO, the title tag is one of the most important things: In fact, the title appears as a link in search engines results and social bookmarking sites. Unfortunely, most WordPress themes displays the title tag in a non-optimized way. I had recently written a tutorial here at Cats Who Code to obtain a really SEO-friendly title tag.
2 - Create an archive page
In my opinion, all blogs should have an archive page: It allows your readers to quickly browse your blog and find what they’re looking for, and this page is also very good for SEO. Some months ago, I wrote a tutorial on wphacks.com, showing you how you can easily create this kind of page, with or without the help of a plugin.
3 - Use the correct H tag structure (h1, h2, h3..)
When I download free WordPress themes, I'm often scared to see how badly the H structure is used: h2 are everywhere. In order to get the best SEO results possible, you should use the correct structure:
h1 for the post title
h2 for inside titles
h3 for inside subtitles
and so on...
4 - Use a good permalink structure
If you're not using permalinks yet, don't even ask why do you get so bad results from search engines. Permalinks is a complete must have.
To enable permalinks, go to the "Customize Permalink Structure" page in your Wordpress Admin : Dashboard>Options>Permalinks and choose a permalink structure.
In my opinion, you should choose "custom" and use one of the following structures:
/%postname%/%post_id% /%post_id% /%category%/%postname%-%post_id%5 - Increase your Pagerank by leaving comments on other blogs
Having backlinks is really important, in terms of SEO. But, especially if your blog is quite new, having quality backlinks isn't always easy. The solution is to leave (relevant, of course) comments on blog who don't use the rel="nofollow" attribute, or have the Top Commentators widget, or even Comment Luv.
Some times ago, I have compiled a list of 250+ links to get free backlinks. You should definitely check it out, and leave some comments!
6 - Install the "ALL In One SEO Pack" plugin
In my opinion, All In One SEO Pack is one of the best ever WordPress plugins: It allows you to enable meta descriptions and keywords, avoid duplicate content by noindexing pages as such as categories or tags, and tweak titles.
7 - Create a robot.txt file
Duplicate content can really hurt your blog rankings. One of the best things against duplicate content is to create a robots.txt file.
robots.txt is a simple text file, containing instruction for search engines (follow that link, don't index this directory, and so on...) and uploaded on your server root.
A good robots.txt file can be found here. There's also a great exemple in Kyle Eslick's Success With WordPress ebook.
8 - Read WordPress SEO ebooks
As I told you last week, ebooks are a very good way to get and keep useful information. Jai from Blog Oh Blog wrote a whole ebook about WordPress SEO. It is free, so you have no reason not to download it. Also, I recommend Kyle Eslick's Success With WordPress ebook, which contain a very good chapter about WordPress SEO.
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