A beginers guide to Wordpress SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Wordpress SEO is like any other form of Search Engine Optimation. However, with the use of a couple of freely available Wordpress plugins, and a change to the default Wordpress settings, the job of optimizing your Wordpress blog can be made very simple for anyone, even a complete beginer.

Permalinks.

Permalinks are the actual links to the individual pages on your Wordpress site, they are the URL's that you see in your web browser address bar, and by default they look like this www.mywebsite.com/?p=123. As you can see, this isn't very search engine friendly. In order to get some much nicer looking URL's, navigate to your Wordpress settings, then select Permalinks. Once there, select the bottom option "Custom Structure" and type into the box next to it /%postname%/ (including the forward slashes). Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes.If your .htaccess file is set to be writable, then Wordpress will add the following code to it in order for this to work correctly.

 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

If this file is not writable, then you will have to manually add this yourself.If you now go to your Wordpress site, and select one of the links in the menu, you will see that the URL in the address bar is now much different, and should look like this  www.mywebsite.com/my-page-name/. As you can imagine, this is much better for the search engines to read, and for your human visitors to.