Why I Love WordPress for SEO

Search engines love blogs, and they love WordPress blogs in particular. According to the WordPress Codex:

“WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.”

I know from personal experience that people have found my blogs before I’ve even added much content.

But better yet, there are a number of free plugins that also improve search engine optimization (SEO), such as HeadSpace2, SEO Smart Links, SEO Slugs and others.

You can do a lot to optimize your WordPress website for search engines. Here are just three of the basics:

1. Adjust your permalinks so that they follow the “category/postname” format, rather than the default format. To do this,

• Go to the “Settings” page and click on “Permalinks”
• Select “Custom Structure” and enter “/%category%/%postname%/”
• Click the “Update” button at the bottom of the page

2. Choose a strong, relevant Title tag.
Make sure the “Tagline” you use under “General Settings” uses keywords your target audience will be searching for.

3. Write good, readable, keyword-relevant articles.
Make sure your posts have a keyword density that will rank your website high in the search engine results, while still maintaining a readability that will encourage your readers to return, possibly even subscribe to your RSS feed.

If you need help creating, updating or maintaining your WordPress website, I can help. See a list of my services at www.theproductmidwife.com/webconsulting/.