WordPress Blog Optimization

We talk a lot about blog post optimization, but what you very seldom see, here or elsewhere, are tips on how to optimize your actual blog software. WordPress is an open source blogging platform, the most popular on the market. You should begin your blog optimization efforts by ensuring that the settings in WordPress are set to maximize your search engine optimization. Here are a few tips to help you do that:

• Start with your theme. Your first step in blog optimization in choosing a suitable theme. WordPress has thousands of free themes available for download, but not all of them are good themes. You are better off sticking with themes that are proven. Don’t use a theme that is from a first-time developer. They tend to have the most problems. Also, make sure your theme has developer contact information just in case you need it. And don’t choose a theme that has a lot of extemporaneous code. Otherwise, most of your themes should be good. But if you choose a theme and after about three or four weeks you don’t see any blog posts getting indexed at the search engines and you know you have good inbound links then test another theme to see if you get better results.
• Move to settings. After picking a theme, click on Settings on the back up administration area of WordPress. Make sure Blog Title and Tagline have eye-catching attention-getting content and that you use your primary keyword in both fields.
• Add a ping list. Under Settings again, click on Writing. Scroll down to the bottom and in the Update Services box add as many ping services as you can. Don’t just pick the top ones, but do include Pingomatic, Technorati, Coreblog, Blogstreet, Google Blogsearch, and Blogflux at a minimum. There are other ping services, particularly some foreign ping services, that I’d recommend as well. The reason you want to include foreign language ping services is because some of them will get you indexed through the back door of the search engines more quickly than places like Pingomatic and Technorati. One mistake that many new bloggers make is to stick to Technorati or Pingomatic and that’s it, but by limiting yourself to the larger ping lists you are cutting yourself short.
• Use Summary for feeds. Under the Reading tab below Settings, select Summary for your feeds rather than full post. This will force your RSS subscribers to visit your blog in order to read your entire post. Most subscribers will not have a problem doing this if they want to read your blog and getting your readers to your blog will register more traffic with your analytics software, which is measured by the search engines for quality and user experience, factors that may influence your future rankings. This is particularly true if your blog has a low bounce rate.
• Permalinks. Click Permalinks under Settings. This is very important. The structure of your blog post URLs, called permalinks, is very important for SEO purposes. You want your primary keyword to appear in your permalink. To make sure that happens, ensure that you write each blog post title to include your keyword, but also set your WordPress setting to Custom, Day and name, or Month and name. I prefer Custom because it allows me to move the date to the very end of the Permalink and put my keyword closer to the beginning.

There are other ways that you can optimize WordPress for better search engine results. Some plugins can be of great assistance here. But you can also tweak some of the code in your templates to ensure better results. That is more advanced than what this blog post needs. For now, as a bare minimum, use these strategies to optimize your WordPress blog before you start writing.