SEO is something that is practiced continuously and good optimization is not achieved overnight. Good SEO is a combination of good content, quality links, and keyword optimization. Below are some techniques that will assist you with your efforts to improve your search engine ranking.

 

1. SEO-WordPress Permalinks

A premalink is a unique URL assigned to a blog posting by the software that remains as a permanent link for that posting. The permalink is made up of a base URL and numbers or date, time and names. A WordPress site keeps track of the physical location of the article using an index and converts the permalink to that address. The permalink structure can be set up easily when creating your blog with WordPress.
                                                 
By default, WordPress gives you a permalink structure set as www.example.com/?p=1 which will not help your search engine optimization. The best option you should use according to Matt Cutts, who works for Google’s search team, is the "post title with hyphens." Go to the options panel and click on the Permalinks tab. Select the custom button and type /%postname%/ into the field.  This is the best set up your WordPress blog because it is human readable and allows search engines to properly recognize your keywords. 

2. SEO-WordPress Page Titles

Arguably the most important factor in Wordpress SEO optimization are page titles. Page titles help search engines know what your site is about. WordPress themes don't have the best default page title tag for search engine optimization. A easy fix for this is to use the WordPress All in One SEO Pack  plugin.


3. SEO-Wordpress Post Titles

Use a descriptive post title that lets your readers know what the post is about. Use keywords or phases that potential readers may use when searching to find your post. 

4. Use Anchor Text for Internal and External Links

Anchor text is a hyperlink.  An example of this can be found on this page. WordPress All in One SEO Pack is the anchor text above. This gives readers and search engines an idea of what the page is about.  Avoid using "click here"  as an achor text.  Make sure you don't overlook the importance of internal linking whithin your blog. This allows you to link your new post to old ones keeping them alive.

5. Use Robots.txt for Duplicate Content

A robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots to crawl certain pages and ignore others. Admin files or monthly archives would be an example of files that are not relevant for search engines. By telling search engines to ignore these types of files you can improve your site indexation and eliminate duplicate content issues. Below is an exampe of a WordPress robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /trackback/

6. Use a Sitemap

A sitemap is used to assist your visitors and search engines while nagivgating your site. WordPress has a Google Sitemap plugin  that will create a Google compliant sitemap for your WordPress blog.  The plugin will update automaticly each time you create or edit a post. 

7. Ping services

Pinging is a built in notification system that notifies search engines each time you create a new post to your blog. Use the Update service function to notify tracking services that you have updated your weblog. WordPress already pings rpc.pingomatic.com. Check this WordPress link for a complete list of ping services you can use.

9. Adding new posts