Wordpress is quite liked by the major search engines. This is partly caused by the focus of the CMS for the web standards. You still need to do a few things to optimize your website for the search engines a few are outlined below:

Permalink structure

A standard wordpress installation does not come with a very SEO friendly URL structure (permalink). This would be something like “http://www.yourwebsite.com/?page_id=21. This has no search indexation value for search engines. How to change this? In the settings panel of your WP you can click the link “permalinks”. KYou are presented with some selecable options in “common settings”. There you should select the option “custom structure”, and now you can add your own custom permalink structure. For a normal site i always opt for “/%postname%/. Now you can click the update button and you have a new permalink (http://yourwebsite.com/seo-tips”.

Sometimes WP tells you to create a .htaccess file. Normally this means you don’t have writing rights schrijfrechten hebt (WP normally makes a .htaccess file). IN this case you should make a .htaccess file in wordpad and upload it to the root of your webiste and chmod jour de file to 777 and try again.

Title tag and meta description tag

SEarch engines take a lot of weight to the title and meta description tags. Normally wordpress calls the title (linkname) of the page into the title tag and it pulls the bloginfo description in the meta discription.
This means that the title tag and description tag are not really flexible (meta description would be the same for each page.)

A good plugin can be installed to correct this. I normally use HeadSpace for this After installing this plugin you should check if the title contains the code “wp_title()” moet bevatten.

Your pages and posts now have the option to include a standard title and description for each page. So now you can try to make search friendly and high ranking titles and descriptions for every page and post.

sitemap and XML sitemap

A normal site map and an XML should actually be installed for every wordpress site, search engines use them and will index your site higher if you include them.

There are lots of sitemap plugins available for Wordpress

Breadcrumbs plugin

These are good for search engines because they add to the internal linking structure making it easier for spiders to crawl from page to page. IT is also user friendly in the sense that visitors of your website can find their way around easier on your site. Again many plugins are available for Wordpress breadcrumbs.

Keyword rich text in footer of website

Google seems to put high value on keywords in the footer nonwithstanding the fact that these appear last in the code, so it could not harm your cause to add some keyword rich text or sentences in the footer.

h1 h2 h3 h4 tags

Semantically correct coding is important for the search engines. The so called h1 h2 etc tags are subheadings. H1 is the most important, then H2 etc. You should always add one H1 tag per page and a number of H2 tags etc. It would not be good to include two H1 tags. Search engine robots put a lot of value to keywords in subheading tags.

There is a lot more but if you do these things correct you are on the path to higher rankings in search engines.