Optimizing Your Wordpress Blog - Part 1

Optimize For The Search Engines

When considering how to make your blog help you make money online, you need to think about two things:

1. The Search Engines

2. The People USING the search engines

In this two part series, we will start with thinking about the search engines; after all, if your blog can’t be found in the first place, you won’t have any readers to optimize for!

The Search Engines

I’ll refer to Google mostly as it’s the 800lb Gorilla in the industry (why is it always Gorilla’s?  Can’t it ever be elephants or Whales?  They ARE bigger) but this applies to ANY search engine.

The VERY first thing you should do is to change the permalink structure from something like:

http://www.YourDomainName.com/?p=101

to:

/%category%/%postname%/

And of course, don’t forget to register for and ACTIVATE Akismet, unless you want hundreds of nonsense ’spam-comments’ that is.

Plugins

By far the easiest and quickest way to optimize a blog for the search engines (that I’m aware of) is to install the correct plugins.  There’s an absolutely superb book by Cenay Nailor called ‘The Ultimate Guide to Wordpress Plugins’, which you can get by click on the image below.

Which Ones To Install First?

As your blog develops (and sometimes they seem to take on a life of their own), you will choose plugins so that your blog functions the way that you want it to, but initially, to make it optimized for Google, you will need to install the following plugins:

1. SEO Title Tag

You can get this from NetConcepts.  This plugin simply turnes all of your post titles into Google-friendly tags.

2. Simple Tags

Which you can get HERE, improves the standard Wordpress tagging system by adding tag auto-completion, tag clouds, mass-editing, tag suggestions and a configurable tag-cloud option.

3. All-In-One SEO Pack

This great plugin has multiple features, all designed to make your blog more visible to Google (and the others).

I’ll discuss optimizing for people tomorrow, so please come back to read more, or subscribe to my feed HERE to get regular updates.

Luke.