Now let’s optimize your blog for the Search Engines.

Now let’s optimize your blog for the Search Engines.

Essential Wordpress Plug-ins

Plug-ins are like little applications that allow you to do different things on your blog. Some are very helpful with SEO, some allow your visitors to interact with you more, and some can automate your content for you.

In order to find plug-ins go to Wordpress.org
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins

Here is where you can find all sorts of plugins to suit your needs. You can also find lots more if you just do a Google search. Most are free but some are paid.

Here is a list of essential plugins I recommend you install:

All In One SEO Pack – this helps you to automate SEO for every blog post you make
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Google XML Sitemaps – this helps to build a sitemap for you and also pings Google every time you make a change or a new post. This is really useful in getting your blog indexed quickly.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Sociable – this adds social bookmarking buttons to your posts so your visitors can easily bookmark your content.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable

You will download them as a zip file, but unlike when you download a theme, don’t unzip them.

1) In your Dashboard go to ‘Plugins’ and click on ‘Add New’.

2) Click ‘Upload’ at the top

3) Click ‘Choose File’ and find (e.g located on your desktop) the plug-in you want to upload and click ‘Install Now’. When you select the plug-in from your computer, remember you don’t need to unzip it, just upload the zipped version.

4) Click ‘Activate’

Permalinks

In order to get better SEO, we need to change the permalinks so that the title of each blog post will be included in the URL. e.g. from this: www.yourwebsite.com/?p=40 to this: www.yourwebsite.com/lose-weight-with-raw-food/ which is much more search engine friendly.

1) Log into your blog, go to ‘Settings’ and select ‘Permalinks’.

2) Select ‘Customer Structure’ and enter /%postname%/ into the field:

 

Good info. But I have a question ...

All of my WP blog posts have the date of creation inside the link name. Example: http://copyclique.com/2011/02/benefits-of-hiring-an-advertising-copywriter/

Should I figure out how to get rid of the creation date? (2011/02) Or is it best to leave as is?

 

It simply doesn't matter. Google is quite familiar with the WordPres CMS.
They know exactly how a blog post URL looks like