Improve Your Search Engine Ranking Potential

The basic "out the box" WordPress SEO settings are not enough to fully optimize your blog, but there are a number of plugins you can use to enhance your WordPress blog further:

1) Make a decision - to use, or not to use, the www. prefix in your blog URL's...

If your blog uses URL's which include 'www.' and others which do not, the search engines will index two versions of your blog and aside from the possible waste of bandwidth from double spidering, one of them will be filtered as duplicated content. While this problem might be real or just a storm in a tea cup, being pro-active seems to be the wisest option. You need to decide which system you want to use and stick to it, always!

The Redirections plugin by John Godley allows you to specify which system you want to use and will automatically create '301 redirection' for other URL's. For example, if you decide to use the 'www.' prefix any link to your blog that does not contain the prefix will automatically be redirected to the correct URL which contains the 'www.' prefix. The major advantage of using this plugin is that it also creates re-directs if you choose to change a post slug (used for the post file name). It also creates redirects if you decide to change your permalink structure and already have posts indexed in the search engines using the old permalink structure.

2) Create Optimized post title tags

The SEO Title Tag plugin by Stephan Spencer is an essential plugin. By default WordPress places your blog name, a separator and then your post name in the title of each page (i.e. between the 'title' tags). The SEO Title Tag plugin reverses this and places your post name before your blog name in the title. From a search engine optimization stand point this is advantageous, because:

- It gives the keywords in your title more prominence.
- It provides more meaningful search engine listing results.
- It provides more meaningful browser bookmark names.

One of the major advantages of this plugin is that you have the ability to create a unique title tag for your blog index page and separate title tags for your category pages. By default, WordPress just uses the blog name for the index title and category names for the category page titles.

3) Include description and keyword meta tags in your blog's 'head' tags...

Including meta keyword tags in your blog's header is not a necessity, most search engines ignore them, but including them won't harm your search engine optimization chances on some of the simpler search engines.

Some search engines will use your meta description in their search listings, others like Google will display all or part of a sentence which contains the first instance of the keyword or phrase being searched. The most obvious thing to do would be to add your keyword phrases into the meta description tag, but these must contain a call-to-action (e.g. make the reader want to read your article).

Creating a compelling meta description which includes all your keyword phrases makes it somewhat difficult for programmers to build a plugin for creating automated meta description tags... The most common meta description solutions are plugins which take the first 100 or 150 characters from the first sentence to include them in the meta description. The most effective meta keywords plugins are those which also handle the tags you add to each post. Here are two plugins for you to consider:

i. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin by Christine Davis is the ultimate tagging solution for bloggers, but it can also include the tags you add to your posts as meta keywords. This plugin can be used for a number of different features on your blog, so it makes sense to use it instead of different plugins for each feature.

ii. The Head META Description plugin by Kaf Oseo takes your post excerpt or if you don't enter one, the first 20 words of your post content and includes them in a meta description tag. To get the most out of this plugin you need to get into the habit of writing an attention grabbing post exert (or first sentence) for all your posts. This is a good article writing habit to get into whether you use the plugin or not.