Enhance SEO for your WordPress blog

WordPress by itself does a good job with SEO (search engine optimization) but you can make improvements to help your site with SEO as there are some nice free WordPress plugins to do this for you. I’ll go over the two plugins I use to help with SEO and getting indexed by search engines.

The first plugin I use is All In One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert. This plugin helps optimize your site for search engines. The main features this plugin has (as of when this was posted) are:

• Edit your home page title, description and keywords
• Change the title format for posts and pages
• Add webmaster verification codes for Google Webmaster and Bing Webmaster
• Add Google Analytics ID for tracking
• Add noindex tags for category pages, archive pages, tag pages, etc
• Add additional code into the header of posts and pages

To get and install the All In One SEO Pack plugin on your blog, follow these steps:

• Go to your “Admin” area of your site
• Click the “Plugins” link in the left side nav
• Click the “Add New” link at the top of the page
• In the search field, type “All In One SEO Pack” and click search
• The plugin you want should be the first one listed, but find the one named “All In One SEO Pack” by Michael Torbert, and click the “Install Now” link for it and you should be all done

The latest versions of All In One SEO Pack now includes an XML Sitemaps feature so if you use that feature as well, you won’t need the next plugin I’ve been using, Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold. The main features this plugin has (as of when this was posted) are:

• Create an XML sitemap that can be indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing
• Choose which pages (category pages, tag pages, archive pages, etc) to include from being included in the XML sitemap
• Choose exactly which category pages to exclude from being included in the XML sitemap
• Change the frequency of how often your homepage, blog posts, categpry pages, etc are crawled

To get and install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin on your blog, follow these steps:

• Go to your “Admin” area of your site
• Click the “Plugins” link in the left side nav
• Click the “Add New” link at the top of the page
• In the search field, type “Google XML Sitemaps” and click search
• The plugin you want should be the first one listed, but find the one named “Google XML Sitemaps” by Arne Brachhold, and click the “Install Now” link for it and you should be all done

I hope this helps you improve SEO for your WordPress blog. If you have any questions concerning these plugins check out their official sites or feel free to leave a comment and I can try to answer them.