Wordpress is easy to configure - but doing some cool little tweaks(which are also easy) can give you outstanding results - be it traffic or Search Engine ranks that you are looking for. here's a compilation of the best SEO tweaks for Wordpress.

1. Custom permalinks - Undoubtedly the best one suggested by SEO's. This tweak requires you to change the default page title from (www.yourdomaincom/?p=5) to a much SEO and user friendly www.yourdomainname.com/category/page title.
   This can be done by following the two below steps.
   
   1. Goto Options > Permalinks
   2. Change the default setting to custom with the following code - /%category%/%postname%/
2. Custom Page Title
   Page titles in Wordpress are by default like this - Blog Name - Post title
   A better title would be Post Title - Blog name, as the important keywords are in the post title.Search Engines love it so make the change today.
3. Make your titles links
   If your theme doesn't have links on your article titles, make the change today. Convert them to links so that search engines can detect them easily and humans as well(if they are planning to use the link). Without the link, it's impossible(almost) to link to that post right?
   This tweak simple incorporates the permanent link to your post headings.
   In your Main Index Template and Page Template, find the code for the post tiltle, it would look like this - without the square brackets but these > <.

   [h2][?php the_title(); ?][/h2]

   Now, replace it with
   

   [h2][a href="[?php the_permalink() ?]” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to [?php the_title(); ?]“][?php the_title(); ?][/a][/h2]

   
   (replace teh square brackets with these><)
4. Use a Google Sitemap generator plugin for wordpress
   There are quite a few plugins available, but i think this one by Dagon Design is the best.
   This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.Hmm, that's quite something right?
5. Add custom Meta tags to different pages on your blog.
   You are right, there is a default entry by which you can give a meta tag for the entire site. But this plugin helps you to have more than one meta tag for each page like the About page or the Contacts page. The result? When your site appears on the SERPS, the description for each page(Contact, About, and other pages if any) will be unique and this will attract people to click on your site. Sounds cool? It is indeed.
   

These are the Top 5 Wordpress tweaks that will give you that extra edge over normal wordpress non-SEO'd blogs. If all these tricks are combined with the ones that I've mentioned recently, i assure you'll be a hot pick for the search engines!

Labels: SEO, wordpress