Out of the box WordPress is very search engine friendly. However, there are a few adjustments that can make WordPress a search engine magnet.  Over the next few weeks I am going to be publishing a series of posts that will teach you how to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. No advanced skills are needed to make these adjustments. This first post covers permalink structures and the All in One SEO plugin. If you have any questions, or need assistance, you’re invited to share them in the comment section below.

Step One: Permalink Structures

WordPress default permalink structure creates URLs that look like this:

?p=123

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links. But the real bonus is SEO.

Google and other search engines look for keywords in web page URLs. It’s not known exactly how much the keywords in the URL influence ranking, but in my experience it appears to hold a lot of weight.

Here is a video of Matt Cutts talking about keywords in URLs.

Adding keywords into WordPress URLs is a quick and easy SEO enhancement. In your WordPress Dashboard scroll down to the bottom of the page and look in the left column for the Settings section. From there you will see the Permalinks section.

Here’s a screen shot:

You can adjust your permalinks to display the day and name, month and name, numeric, or custom structure. Using the day and name setting adds the full year, month, day, and post title into the post URL. Using the month and name setting adds the full year, month, and post title into the post URL. The numeric option doesn’t add the post title into the post URL.

Custom structure is the option I choose. The reason I choose the custom option is because I don’t like to display the year, month, or date in the URL. I only want the keywords. In the past I have used this code:

/%postname%/

Lately, I have started using this code:

/%category%/%postname%/

You can learn more about using WordPress Permalinks here.

Here are some additional references that may help you:

• How to Use Permalinks to Enhance Your WordPress SEO Blog
• Tweaking WordPress Permalinks For Best SEO
• SEO Friendly URL Structure for WordPress Blogs
• The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog
• Best SEO WordPress Permalink Structure
• Setting Up Your WordPress Permalink Structure

Step Two: Install All in One SEO Plugin

Michael Torbert’s All in One SEO Plugin has really stood the test of time. I have personally used this WordPress plugin for many years. The plugin gives you the ability to customize the structure of your article titles, optimize the titles of your category, tag, search, and archive section, and auto generate meta descriptions and keywords. There are many additional features that you should learn about as well. I recommend paying a visit to Michael Torbert’s home page and learning more about the All in One SEO Plugin. Michael also has a PRO version which might be worth checking out. Personally, I have never used it.

Here is a helpful video tutorial I found on YouTube that will teach you more about the All in One SEO plugin and how to configure it:

By the way, the All in One SEO plugin is one of my personal favorites. Stay tuned for the next post that will offer you more information on optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines. All of your comments, questions, and even suggestions are welcome. You’re invited to share your feedback using the comment form below.

Google published a post on the Webmaster Central blog today offering some tips on how to recognize and avoid duplicate content on your website. I wanted to offer some specific tips on how to recognize and remove duplicate content on your self-hosted WordPress blog and decided to create a video tutorial.

This video doesn’t cover all of the bases; however, it will help quite a bit towards the prevention as well as the removal of duplicate content from your blog. Keep in mind, there is a fear about duplicate content and often people say that having duplicate content on your blog is bad. I can’t say that it’s a good thing, but I don’t think it’s something that should be considered as being bad. The reason for that is simple. Google understands that many bloggers aren’t very computer savvy. Instead, they are people who simply enjoy writing about their day, or telling the world about their opinions and views, etc. In other words, most bloggers aren’t programmers, nor are they SEO experts.

That said, if duplicate content was really a BAD thing, then it’s very likely that Google would have display duplicate content in the results. Knowing this, I think Google does a really good job at automatically determining source content. And what I mean by that is this. With a WordPress blog, a copy of your post content is found in multiple sections Typically, a copy of a post can be found on the homepage, category page, tag page, and in yearly/monthly/weekly/daily archives; however, source url for a blog is the individual post page.

Overall, Google understands the linking structure of WordPress and other blog platforms and for the most part gets things right. However, there’s many situations when that doesn’t happen. And with that, there’s ways that you can totally control and prevent Google from indexing multiple copies of your blog posts. Take a look at this video to learn how you can prevent and remove duplicate content from getting indexed on your WordPress blog.

The first step is to recognize if your WordPress blog has duplicate content indexed in Google. You can do this by doing a site:query search as shown in these example image below:

The above screen shot illustrates this search: [site:garryconn.com "On SeoHosting.com I wrote an article offering"] or as shown below in this screen shot:

You’ll see that two listings appear in the above example. Google has a reference to my home page and the blog post page. Technically, this is duplicate content. However, this is what I call controllable duplicate content. In other words, even though Google has a record of the same content appearing on the home page as well as the post page, it’s a matter of time before the content will be bumped off the homepage due to the age of the page.

The problem that you may run into is when multiple sections of your blog are referenced to having the same article content such as the category section, archive section, and tag sections. Commonly people think that this is bad and that Google will crack a whip and ban your blog because of this, but really the only concern is that you’re allowing Google to make the decision on determining which version of your content is the source copy.

The easiest solution is to install two WordPress plugins. The first one is called XML-Sitemaps. The second plugin is called the All-In-One SEO Pack. In the video above, I quickly show you how to set these plugins up; however, you may have some questions regarding the configuration, so by all means ask questions if you have them. Drop a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out.

SEO, Inc. just released a brand new – and free – SEO WordPress plugin called SEO Nova. There are many different open source plugins available for WordPress; however, SEO, Inc. claims that their version provides better SEO compared to others in the market.

“Although there are other WordPress SEO plug-ins available, these tools miss the mark when it comes to offering supporting information on SEO best practices” said Haven Brady, Director of Media Strategies at SEO Inc. “SEO Nova provides bloggers with a turn-key style platform condensed within an easy to navigate format for those who want to know why and how to increase their search engine visibility.”

SEO Nova includes some amazing and automatic SEO features. You can easily optimize post and page titles for search engines, Generate META tags automatically, Customize post level META data, control post page and Sub page optimization, Automatically 301 redirect any permalink, and fine tune search engine indexing to avoid duplicate content issues at any level.

SEO Nova is available free for download. You can get full plugin details, and video tutorials direct from SEO, Inc. In my opinion, SEO Nova easily replaces the famous All In One SEO Pack plugin.

Many authors such as myself have multiple web sites or blog. It is a common strategy to feed off one or more of our own web sites or blogs to help promote and increase the PageRank of another blog by providing it with backlinks. The problem with this is that it isn’t always easy to search through previously published web pages or blog posts to find the targetable keywords that you are wanting to use to hyperlink to your other web site or blog.

If only there was an automatic way to do this, life would be great. Well, guess what? There is an automatic way to hyperlink words in your WordPress blog and it comes to you in a free WordPress plugin called aLinks. This is a plugin that I have been using for a long time, but never really told anyone because of how powerful the secret is.

aLinks Give You The Ability To Automatically Hyperlinks Words:

This free WordPress plugin is awesome and one of my own personal favorites. Using aLinks is very simple. You don’t have to know how to write code and you don’t have to understand any level of programming. Simply download the plugin, install and activate. After the aLinks WordPress plugin is activated, simply tell the program what words or phrases you want to link and where you want the destination hyperlink to go.

aLinks also has support for Amazon.com affiliate links too. This is a great way to make extra money online by sending Amazon.com referral type traffic. I don’t use the program for that though. My main purpose is to feed links to certain blogs of mine that i am trying to quickly develop.

aLinks is actually a perfect program for SEOHosting.com clients who have blogs. SEOHosting.com enables webmasters to host websites from one control panel (WHM) and assign each account it’s own different Class C IP address. Each SEO hosting plan comes with private branded nameservers on separate Class C IP addresses. So as you can see, using a program lik aLinks is perfect for you with helping boost backlinks, traffic and increasing PageRank to other blogs or web sites you run.

As I had mentioned, aLink is totally free. Simply visit the aLinks home page to learn more about this wonderful WordPress plugin and to snag your free copy today.

A sitemap is a file that allows for search engines to quickly and easily find newly published content on your web site or blog. The sitemap.xml file has been widely adopted as the industry standard among popular search engines including, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.

If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog, creating and maintaining a sitemap can’t be made easier. Arne Brachhold has provided the WordPress community with a wonderful WordPress Plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin is great because it does everything for you automatically. You don’t need to worry about having to learn how to make your own sitemap.xml file, which quite honestly can be very complicated to create and very difficult to maintain.

Once installed, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin will create a Google compliant XML sitemap and even create a proper robots.txt file which will direct the Googlebot to your sitemap so that it can quickly and easily find your newly published content and also easily check for updates on your existing posts.

In addition to being Goole compliant, The Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin is also compliant with Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. Installing this plugin couldn’t be made any easier and the process involved in to different than installing any other standard WordPress plugin.

Some of the features included with this plugin is as follows:

Google XML Sitemaps Features:

Screen Shot of The Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugin: