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.

Custom Permalinks For Better Wordpress SEO

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Especially when they are used to link to individual postings, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change. Hence…permalink.

By default Wordpress has a php-like link-structure setup for your posts.

http://example.com/?p=N

According to Wordpress, this is default in the software because it works on every server environment. However, it is not desirable because you’d like to have your keywords in post URL’s for better ranking purposes. They also just look so much better and keep things organized.

http://example.com/category/post-name/

This is done by opening your Wordpress admin panel and clicking on the Options tab. From there you’ll choose Permalinks > Custom. A number of tags are available to use in your permalinks structure. I prefer to keep it short and sweet with just /%postname%/ for better keyword density and to keep my blog timeless. Readers might think your advice is outdated if they found out it was posted last month.

Initiate a 301 Redirect in Wordpress

The first thing you need to do before you start anything is decide whether you want to use yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com as your default DNS. This is important when considering Google Pagerank(PR) relies on the number of back-links to your domain and you don’t want Google thinking you own two separate domains, one with www and one without. Since you have no control over what others are going to use for your URL, you need to activate a 301 redirect, or “preferred domain” on your site.

This is this most basic but essential task when beginning to optimize your site. You’ve probably heard it a million times– and for a reason. It’s seriously important, and an instrumental part of basic SEO.

How do you use a 301 redirect with Wordpress?
FTP to your site and make sure hidden files are showing. In Filezilla you can do this by pointing to View > Show Hidden Files. Find the file .htaccess and open it with a text editor. If you’re using Wordpress you’ll likely already have an .htaccess file with rules generated by Wordpress when you activated custom permalinks. If you don’t already have an .htaccess file, create one with notepad. Skip down below the rules generated by Wordpress and add the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Upload the new .htaccess and voila, every time you get a link from someone with yourdomain.com, it will automatically redirect them to www.yourdomain.com. I suggest using the www. version of your domain as the default just because most of everyone with PR10’s do. Doing what’s already been proven is easier than trying to fight the wave for no reason.

Now that you’ve read this, take action. The next post in this series will give you a few more tips, so it’s easier to take them one by one rather than attempting to accomplish your entire SEO campaign at once.