Recently, within the FrogsThemes.com team we have been discussing the SEO (search engine optimisation) benefits that WordPress can have out of the box in terms of improving your search engine performance and structure.
We all agree, using WordPress is better than struggling on your own trying to build a website that is firstly WC3 compliant and extremely well optimised for search engines. Sure it can be done but WordPress can save you one key thing, your precious time and if your non-technical then it can help you optimise your website without the technical expertise.
Time=Money, I’m sure we would all agree, so to save you time there are a number of plugins and tweaks you can make that are going to help you:
A. Save you time and money
B. Improve your SEO performance and visibility on your WordPress website
Improving WordPress for SEO
1. Permalink Structure
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual blog posts or pages, as well as categories and other lists of your posts.
Straight out of the box most WordPress installations are set to display the permalinks (Canonical URLs) default as
http://example.com/?p=X where X is the Post ID. I’m sure you would agree they are nasty really ugly looking things and not very search engine friendly at all.
Another default permalink structure that you will see regular is the two examples below:
http://example.com/category/post-name/
or http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name
If you’ve got a lengthy category name or post title your URLS are going to look massively long!
E.g: http://example.com/flower-tips/top-10-tips-for-improving-your-flower-arranging
(It’s too long right!). Whilst there has been raging debate in the SEO Industry if Longer URLs actually improve PageRank and rankings, there has been no defined answer to say long URLs are particularly harmful to your search engine optimisation.
Some SEOs favor shorter links other believe Longer URLs help your SEO more effectively.
The Ideal Permalink Structure
http://example.com/post-name/
This is what Frogsthemes.com permalink structure is displaying now. This is recommend for both pretty and SEO friendly links. It also means people who share your content on social media will have less trouble copying a link into a URL shortener.
How to Change Permalinks in WordPress
Firstly before you change your permalink structure, if you have a website that has been around longer than a week you might want to tell Google where all your old links have moved to. This can be done by the correct method of doing a 301 Re-direct in WordPress. There is also a re-direction plugin which will help you do these 301 re-directs for you automatically, although it helps to learn the manual method.
The first thing you’ll need to do is go into Settings> Select the Permalinks option.
Select the Custom Structure option, and type /%postname%, once your done click save changes. Simples! Congratulations, you have now changed your permalink structure to display just the postname.
2. Essential Recommended SEO Plugins
Here is a short list of some of my recommend SEO plugins to increase the SEO performance of your blog or WordPress Website.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
For me, the very best WordPress SEO plugin out there hands down. It’s Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more. The best thing about this plugin is the ability to allow you to view a search snippet preview of how your page title and meta description will display in the search engine results.
If your consider moving from the AllinOneSEO plugin (also recommended below) it has a basic import functionality for HeadSpace2 and All in One SEO plugins to copy over your meta titles and descriptions. It also has Breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles.
Breadcrumbs are important for improving usability and navigation on your website but it can also improve your search engine optimisation structure. There is an invidual breadcrumbs plugin also done by the same plugin developer you can also use individually.
Joost De Valk of Yoast.com is considered one of the leading experts on WordPress SEO and someone whom I deeply respect and admire. I suggest you follow him on Twitter for more WordPress SEO tips.
All in One SEO Pack
Another good SEO plugin which I still use today for a number of WordPress websites is All in One SEO, although I have started to systemically switch my WordPress sites to Joost De Valk’s WordPress SEO plugin over the next couple of months.
All in One SEO, is still the most popular and most used SEO plugin out there for WordPress and it’s main benefit is giving non-technical users a helping hand by automatically optimising your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimisation) by re-writing titles and generating meta descriptions based on the content of your post or page.
Google XML Sitemaps
Simply and easily this plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog. Quick indexing of your website means quicker rankings and Google will index your site faster by finding all the pages included in your sitemap.
Photo Credit: by Fayes4Art
About this Author
Illiya Vjestica is part of the blogging team at Frogsthemes.com, a regular WordPress user and serial blogger. He works as an online marketing consultant at Smartdog digital where he helps clients understand the benefits of using open source software such as WordPress.
