I keep repeating it but one of the main reasons why I use wordpress as a cms is the simple fact that when I launch a site it gets spidered and indexed within a few days. I get long tail organic search results often within the first two weeks after the launch of a new site.

By no means do I have large sites but in the end a lot of small niche sites add up and that is why I try to be very specific with the topics the sites are dealing about.

My list of SEO I apply to my standard install of wordpress is this

1. Ultimate Tag Warrior http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/ 
2. SEO Title plugin from http://www.marketingop.us/2006/06/06/seo-plugin/
3. robot.txt
4. permalinks -> custom ->/%postname%/
5. Title post in H1
   

The first and second are related to each other as the SEO Title plugin needs the UTW plugin. I also often use UTW as a navigation in the sidebar but not always.

The robot.txt I have filled with the following

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-config.php
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /wp-register.php
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-rss2.php
Disallow: /wp-trackback.php
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed/atom/
Disallow: /feed/rss/
Disallow: /trackback/$
Disallow: /comments/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/atom/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/comments/feed/$
Disallow: /shop/

The reason why is duplicate content This robot.txt will help me to keep the site clean for the spiders and crawlers as they do not see the archive etc where the same posts are available again.

The permalinks is something I had before at /%category%/%postname%/ but lately changed to /%postname%/ and I get the feeling it is working better but have no hard data for it. The main thing is to change your permalink from dynamic to static (so no index.php?p=4)

The last I do is in the template I use if I haven’t build it myself I make sure the title of the article is in H1 tags and sometimes add to the comment part things like …have some opion about -Title article- leave a comment. This will add some keyword density. Make sure it doesn’t look spammy.

I am sure that using these seo tips for wordpress will help you as it did work for me and keeps on working till today.

Posted on April 29th, 2007 by edwin
Filed under: Promotion