The Complete Guide to SEO on WordPress

Posted by Kyle Eslick on July 30th, 2007 | Category and Tags

If you run a WordPress blog that relies on search engine traffic, it is important to put a little time and effort into improving the search engine optimization of your blog. If you care about the optimization of your site, Jim Westergren has provided a well written Complete Guide to SEO for WordPress.

Unfortunately I’m not familiar with Jim’s creditability as an SEO expert, but the article is well written and he provides justification for most of the points he brings up. One of the things he has covered is the permalink structure, which has been talked about a bit on this site over the past few weeks. Here is what Jim has to say:

To enable the permalinks is easy and you have probably already done that, just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel. But what format is the best to choose? The structure /%postname%/ - nothing else. This is best because your URLs to your articles should never change. And if you have it like this it does not matter if you change the category of the article or republish it with a new date, it will always be the same URL (more about that later). And if you happen to have two posts with the same title it is not a problem as WordPress will automatically add -2 in the end.

Have you been using the wrong format? Well, if your blog is not totally new you should not change. It is not vital and for the next time you make a blog you know how to make it right.

If your blog is still young and you’d like to make the switch, I explained how to easily do this with a 301 redirect to ensure you don’t have any broken links. Otherwise, Jim recommends to stay with your current setup.

To see additional SEO tips, I recommend checking out Jim’s post and even bookmarking it for future reference!

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Comment by Chuck on July 30th, 2007:

Hi, Kyle,

I found your site through Bush Mackel, and I’m glad I did. This is a nice little tip, that I’m lucky to have found early on in the process.

There will be times when you have to type out your URL, so having that make sense to a human is key in those cases.

Keep up the good work!
-Chuck
http://www.ihateyourjob.com
Comment by Mark on July 30th, 2007:

I also followed your advice and used the redirect plugin. Very easy, and looks like everything’s working fine.
Comment by Rhys on July 30th, 2007:

See, the big problem was for me that I was originally on blogger, and I had a few VERY good backlinks from Technorati and the like. I’d rather preserve them than mess around with the structure to make it even more SEO friendly, though if I was to start a new blog, I’d definitely got for just postitles.
Comment by TipsoSaurus on July 30th, 2007:

Hey Kyle, I think we can make use of category slug as well. By keeping the keywords in the category slug and including category and post title in the permalinks.

For e.g. on my blog I’ve kept Windows Tips as one category and I know that everytime I make a post, these keywords will be there in the Permalink too.
Comment by CristianR on July 30th, 2007:

The only thing I want to say about the postname is that , from what I know html pages are easier to index and look more delicious in the eyes of bots and spiders . I use my own /%postname.html%/
Comment by Kyle Eslick on July 31st, 2007:

Chuck - Glad you found the site. Hope you check back regularly!

Mark - Glad the redirect worked well. I am very happy since making the switch.

Rhys - I’m not sure (will have to look into this more), but I think with the redirect you still get credit for the backlinks, although if you are using a different domain now that might not be true.

TipsoSaurus - I was under the impression that category slug will change should you switch the category, but that may not be true as I’ve never actually tried it.

Cristian - I’ve never actually read that .html pages made for better indexing. Was this from a credible source?
Comment by Blogging Experiment on July 31st, 2007:

Kyle, Jim’s pretty well known and very well respected in the SEO community. Another SEO post on WordPress that I found VERY interesting and helpful was Andy Beard’s WordPress SEO Master Class. If you haven’t seen it you should definitely check it out.
Comment by Kyle Eslick on July 31st, 2007:

Blogging - Thanks for the link! I’ve only recently started reading Andy’s site, so I must have missed that one.

I figured Jim was credible after reading the article. I really appreciate how he took the time to explain why things are the way they are instead of just telling you what to do. Thats a good way to learn and understand.
Comment by Art of Seduction on August 3rd, 2007:

Nice. URL names are very important in search engines searches. Similarly that is why popular domain names are so expensive
Comment by cooliojones on August 3rd, 2007:

I tried to do this before, but for some reason I can’t, I have to add index.php first. Does anyone know a way around this? If I do it the way you mentioned I get errors.