Optimizing your wordpress blog for search engine rankings (SEO) is as important as regularly posting quality content. Here are a few things you need to do right now to help your wordpress blog rank higher for key words and phrases. Stop putting it off, you’re losing visitors, capital, and RSS subscribers right now. There’s no reason to even be producing content if it isn’t being indexed where people are looking for it.

In this multiple part series, I’m going to go over a few essential tools, tricks and tips you can implement to make sure your Wordpress blog is being reached by the people searching Google.

Using Google Webmaster Tools For Wordpress

Now that you’ve decided you want to use a particular domain, you need to specify that domain in Google Webmaster Tools. If you don’t already have an account, please sign up now. Google Webmaster Tools isn’t anything foreign, you don’t need a tutorial to figure out how to use it. Create an account right now and you’ll be surprised at how easily it is to navigate and use. You add your domain by simply clicking, “Add Domain”.

Open the control console up for your website and the first thing you’ll want to do is set your preferred domain. Click the Diagnostic tab at the top left, and choose Preferred Domain. Set it to whatever you provided earlier in your 301 redirect.

Once your website is verified (you’ll need to follow a few simple instructions to do so), you can do a number of important things such as check Googlebot crawl rate/errors, upload a sitemap, and mess around with your robots.txt file.

Submitting A Wordpress Sitemap to Google

Thanks to numerous developers and plugins constantly working on Wordpress, it’s functionality and flexibility literally grows every single day. One of my favorite plugins is the Google Sitemap Plugin. This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. So, not only will this help your Google index, but since the other majors have adopted XML sitemaps, you’ll be in the business with them also.

Download and install this Google Sitemap plugin. Once installed, generate a new sitemap and submit it to Google through the Webmaster tools dashboard. The plugin will automatically re-generate and submit your sitemap to Google every time you make a new post, which saves you tons of time.

An All In One SEO Pack For Wordpress

Once you’ve created and submitted your sitemap, you can continue your quest to optimize your Wordpress blog with Uberdose’s All In One Wordpress SEO Pack plugin. I was amazed at how much work I saved myself by simply installing this SEO plugin. You should be okay to ride with the default settings, after installation you may want to make sure the following is in order:

• Give your homepage a decent description (see Options -> All in One SEO).
• “Tagâ€? your posts with categories. Every category your post belongs to will become a META keyword.
• Write an excerpt for every post. This will become the META description. This is very important since this can become the snippet in search engine results pages, that is the first thing users see of your page besides your title. So put effort into this!
  If you don’t want your titles to rewritten, change this in Options -> All in One SEO.
• Tweak your titles. If you give a post or page a title of its own this will be used independent of any other option. Titles are the second most important thing for ranking pages!
• In addition to using your categories as META keywords you can define your own comma separated list of keywords. You can even disable categories as META keywords (see Options -> All in One SEO).

This plugin will take most of the headaches out of optimizing your blog, so take advantage of it.