SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION RESOURCES
Meta tags contain information regarding your sites purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. By default, they are NOT included in WordPress, but you can manually include them , use a premium theme like Headway , or use a WordPress plugin (not available on WordPress.com sites) like the ‘All-in-one-SEO-pack” .
- Robots.txt You only need a robots.txt file if your site includes content that you don’t want search engines to index. For more information on robots.txt files, see ‘How do I use a robots.txt file to control access to my site?’
- Feed Submissions If you use the built-in feed submissions that come with WordPress, you will need to know the link to the various feeds that your site provides. Here is a list of built-in WordPress feeds.
- Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere. If you are a blogger, this one is important because it keeps track on of the thousands of blogs that are updated, identify who’s linking to whom. Technorati uses WordPress categories automatically, so make sure your categories contain your important keywords. There are also several plugins you can use to maximize your Technorati tags.
- Permalinks are enhancements to your page and post url’s that will improve your search engine listing. Typically, a page or post will have a url that looks like this:http://yoursite.com/?p=290 , when it could look like this: http://mibec.ca/smallbizcafe/seo-for-wordpress-2/ The link will adopt the words you use in your post/page title. If you use keywords and keyphrases in your title, then you will increase your chances of being found by people searching for your keywords/phrases. See ‘Boost search engine optimization (SEO) using Permalinks’ for more information. You might also find the permalinks migration plugin or the permalink redirect plugin helpful.
- A sitemap is a listing of all the posts on your website. If you have a sitemap on all your sites pages, search engines will easily get to it and find all your posts. To set up a sitemap, see Automatic sitemap for WordPress
Judy Ranieri is the owner of MiBec – Simple Websites, Simply Affordable, and the author of the Small Biz Cafe blog