1. Change your permalink structure

If you have just installed WordPress and look at your post titles you may see something like this: www.yourblog.com/?page_id=2. Now from a search engine point of view thats not doing you any favours at all. Unless someone is searching for “page_id=2″ anyway, which is unlikely I think.
Wouldn’t it be better if you saw www.yourblog.com/your-post-title?

Here’s how:

Log in to your WordPress dashboard (version 2.6.2 at time of writing)
Click on ‘Settings’ (top right hand side)
Click on ‘Permalinks’
Click on the ‘Custom Structure’ radio button and type the following into the field:

/%postname%/


Click ‘Save Changes’

If you now look at your blog within a browser you will see your post titles within the URL, a significant step towards getting you seen by the search engines.

2. Change your TITLE tag

As it stands unaltered WordPress displays your title thus: Your Blog Title >> Your Post Title. It would be much better from a SEO perspective if it saw your post title first, before the blog title or better still (in some cases) without the blog title at all.

Here’s how:

Log in to your WordPress dashboard (version 2.6.2 at time of writing)
Click on ‘Design’
Click on ‘Theme Editor’
Click on ‘Header (header.php)’ in the list on the right hand side
Find the following code:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

and replace with:

<title><?php wp_title(); ?></title>


or if you want to include your blog title:

<title><?php wp_title(); ?> - <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>

Now your title should show as Your Post Title or Your Post Title – Your Blog Title.

3. Make a sitemap

I use an excellent and highly configurable plugin called Google XML Sitemaps (download here) which generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap.

Make sure you do steps 1 and 2 before activating your XML-Sitemap plugin.
Install the plugin and activate.
Click on ‘Settings’
Click on ‘XML-Sitemap’
Click the link to build your sitemap for the first time.

This sitemap can now be specified within Webmaster Tools in your Google Account.

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