SEO is Search Engine Optimisation. Naturally, you want your blog to stand out of the crowd and get listed on search engines; using Wordpress is a good start, as its clean structure positively invites the search engine “crawlers” to come in and list every post and category.
However, there are some things you can do to improve SEO. First, you can be more imaginative and use post titles that sum up the post contents. For instance, instead of “My Day Out”, you can put “Margate Beach - Sun, Sand and Sandwiches!” These descriptive words are known as ‘keywords’ and search engines love keywords.
Then you can customise your permalink structure. A permalink is the URL of an individual post and the permalink structure affects how the search engines find and list blog posts. Go to ‘Options’ -> ‘Permalinks’ in your WP control panel; in the ‘customise’ field put /%category%/%postname%/. The URL of your post will then be “http://www.mywpblog.com/Holidays/margate_beach”.
Note: To change your permalink structure, you need to have permission to write to the .htaccess file. If you’re not sure about this, then this Wordpress.org guide will help.

This entry was posted by Val on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007