Beginner’s Guide to Wordpress SEO

September 5th, 2008

How to Optimize your new Wordpress Blog

Now that you have Wordpress installed, you can start the SEO process for your new site. This mainly deals with a self-hosted Wordpress blog but some or more steps may work for you on your hosted Wordpress blog as well.

1. Setup a restrictive robots.txt. This will keep the search engines out while you prep your site.

2. Install All in One SEO Pack. Configure Home Title, Home Description, and Home Keywords.

3. Set Permalinks to /%category%/%postname%/. Make sure to setup the .htaccess with write permissions from apache, or put the file there yourself. Then, make sure to enable AllowOverride for that .htaccess file.

4. Setup your Sitemap Generator for Wordpress.

5. Setup Google Analytics.

6. Pick a new Wordpress Theme.

7. Customize your categories and tags.

8. Write a few posts.

9. Unblock your robots.txt to let the search engines at your site.

10. Submit your site to Google Webmaster Tools.

Congratulations! You are now off and running. You have taken the steps that most Wordpress users miss along the way. Your site is now optimized and ready for a steady stream of posts in your niche. Go for it!