The most challenging stage in websites maintenance and promotion is represented by the application of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques with the purpose to increase the websites visibility for search engine robots.

Depending on the website structure and content type, the selection of SEO algorithms is different from a situation to another. All SEO techniques have common principles, but their implementation will follow specific guidelines, based on a given website particularities.

In case of websites (usually blogs) based on WordPress content management system, there are a few SEO tips that will increase the traffic not only for the homepage, but even for certain posts or pages. The most important action to optimize your WordPress blog is to modify the permalinks structure. You can change the default permalinks structure by going to your WordPress administration panel, choosing Options, then Permalinks.

At this point, you can choose a predefined structure or to specify a custom one. The most recommended is the link structure that contains in its name keywords related to the content and also present in the Keywords meta tag. As a consequence, you could choose the next option for your permalinks structure, which will contain the category name and respectively the post name:

CODE
/index.php/%category%/%postname%/

In case you change the permalinks structure and you want to maintain the traffic coming from the old links, the plugin called "Permalinks Moved Permanently" will redirect the visitors to the new location of your posts. The articles titles must be maintained short and should also be directly related to the post content. It is also recommended to use H1 or H2 tags for your titles, but it seems that the WordPress CMS do this article title formatting automatically.

Another important step in your WordPress SEO is represented by the optimization of HTML meta-tags title, description, keywords for the individual webpages. In this sense the plugin "All in One SEO Pack" will automatically generate optimized meta-tags and will adjust the webpage titles structure. A sitemap is also another useful tool in making your website more visible to search engines. For example, a Google compliant XML sitemap could be generated using "Google XML Sitemaps" plugin.

This article represent only a short introduction to the search engine optimization methods specific yo WordPress content management system. These tips will ensure the minimal search engine visibility for your blog. For an advanced SEO, you must know that, beside the quality of your content, there are many other influencing factors of websites interactions with search engines, like one way links, the number of internal links, type of content and more. By analyzing these factors, you will be able to decide the adjustments needed to gain the desired level of website transparency for search engines.

Source : Softpedia