Wordpress SEO in a few steps

If you haven’t heard of or used Wordpress yet, then you are one of few in the web world. After reading a recent posting in the Sitepoint Forums asking web developers to supply their Wordpress SEO checklists, I decided to post my own.

After installing Wordpress, download and install the following plugins:

• Google XML Sitemaps - to auto-generate XML sitemaps when new content is created.
  
• All in One SEO Pack - automatically optimizes your blog for search engines.
  
• Category Base Killer - removes the “category/” base text from the URL string.
• Wordpress.com Stats - quick and simple stats that are important to your blog.
  

Contributing factors:

• .htaccess: force the www rewrite for your website so all the urls.
  #Force www domain
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com [nc]
  RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
  #End force www
• XHTML/CSS: Develop a wordpress theme that has clean XHTML with semantic tags and clean CSS.
• Robots.txt: identify your sitemap and make sure your content is crawled correctly with the robots.txt file. Be sure to disallow the “wp-admin” directory.
• Permalinks: set to custom use %postname%. Ultilize keywords in your URL.
• More Tag: utilize the more tag so your entire post doesn’t show up on your homepage and it’s own page.

Useful Links and Resources:

• Wordpress SEO Checklist (SitePoint Forums)
• Ultimate Wordpress SEO Guide (ToddW Blog)
• Pushing Wordpress SEO Boundaries (Andy Beard)