Enable Permalinks

Permalinks let search engines find you more easily. Not only that, but it often helps with organization and reader-friendliness. To enable permalinks, login to your wordpress administrator section and click the Options tab. Click Permalinks and choose how you want your links to be set up. Some folks prefer the date to be included, others don’t.

Make it RSS friendly

Sign up for a feedburner account and migrate your wordpress to feedburner by removing any indication of the Wordpress raw RSS. Edit your template’s header to point to the feedburner account so search engines aren’t confused. Provide your readers with Feedburner’s consolidated RSS link so you can keep track of your readers in one place, too.

Increase awareness with MyBlogLog

Get an account with MyBlogLog. As a new-comer to the blogosphere I’ve realized that acceptance and awareness of your blog will have a lot to do with your interaction with the community. MyBlogLog allows you to connect with others with your same interests, see who has been reading your blog, and more. Try it out — it’s free.

Play ping pong

No, not the type with a table and two paddles. Ping popular sites to let them know when you have updated your blog. It’s simple to do automatically with Wordpress. In your Wordpress administrator panel, click the Options tab, choose Writing; then scroll to the bottom of the page. There is an input there for services to ping after writing a new post. Here is a list to get you started:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://rpc.wpkeys.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.britblog.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

Join Technorati, and use Technorati tags

Technorati is the web’s blog search engine. Check out the site and I’m sure you’ll be able to comprehend the benefits of being listed. Also, provide technorati with tags in your posts to help users of Technorati find your content that much easier.

Get link-backs

Trade links with others who have blogs in similar categories. These links will help you in your SERPS (search engine placement), Google PageRank, Technorati Rank, and can also net you a few extra readers.

Create and use dynamic Meta descriptions

Forget the whole Wordpress Codex meta story. Add dynamic meta descriptions per page with this Wordpress plugin. You’ll be happy you did.

301 redirect

A lot of your Google PageRank has to do with link-backs. You don’t want links to youdomain.com to be counted separate than links with www.yourdomain.com. Here is an example 301 redirect courtesty of Pronet Advertising (put this in your .htaccess file on your web server).

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_Host} ^YOURDOMAIN.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Of course, make sure it’s only 4 lines and YOURDOMAIN is replaced with your actual domain name.

Including your URL in forum signatures

This is almost a no-brainer. It goes back to getting involved in the community. Find 4 or 5 forums (if you have time, if not do 1 or 2) that you can get involved in general discussion. Make yourself sound somewhat intelligent and put your url in your forum signature. When you help someone fix a problem or give a piece of insight– people will click the link to see what else you have to say, it’s only natural.

Submit your site to search engines

Follow the usual steps to submit your site to the popular search engines. It’s different for every one of them, but you can find out how by reviewing their website– or ask in a comment and I’ll be sure to help you. This is something that is often overlooked by beginning bloggers and webmasters.

Optimize Robots.txt

Search Engines read a yourserver.com/robots.txt file to get information on what they should and shouldn’t be looking for, and where.

Specifying where search engines should look for content in high-quality directories or files you can increase the ranking of your site, and is recommended by Google (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40367&ctx=sibling) and all the search engines.

An example robots.txt file for Wordpress courtesy of the Wordpress Codex:

User-agent: *
# disallow files in /cgi-bin
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /z/j/
Disallow: /z/c/

# disallow all files ending in .php
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.txt$

#disallow all files in /wp- directorys
Disallow: /wp-*/

# disallow all files with ? in url
Disallow: /*?

# disallow any files that are stats related
Disallow: /stats*

Disallow: /about/legal-notice/
Disallow: /about/copyright-policy/
Disallow: /about/terms-and-conditions/
Disallow: /about/feed/
Disallow: /about/trackback/

Disallow: /contact/
Disallow: /tag
Disallow: /docs*
Disallow: /manual*
Disallow: /category/uncategorized*

If you don’t have a robots.txt file in your domain’s directory, make one!

Create a sitemap

Sitemaps are quick run-downs on the content and links in your blog. While this is often useful for your readers to quickly find a post they’re looking for– it’s almost more important for search engine purposes. Create a sitemap with this Wordpress Plugin, and submit it to Google here.