In its basic form, WordPress is already a SEO-friendly platform. It has well structured categories, pages, posts, tags and URL naming. It would be very easy for search engine bots to crawl the website and index the information in each webpage. WordPress also has built-in SEO optimization tools. With .htaccess, we can create permalinks from random-looking static URL. It also supports pinging and blogrolling to further speed up the indexing process. Many 3rd party SEO plugins are also available and we can tweak WordPress’ SEO characteristics to our likings. This would improve our chance of getting ranked higher in search results.
However, it is important for us to further improve SEO capabilities of WordPress. The platform is open source and it means that we can freely edit the code. For people who enjoy tweaking the code, it is important to make sure that the core codes remain clean and simple. After making changes, it is important to validate the code to make sure that errors won’t block bots and prevent it from reaching other parts of the website. Content is king and a WordPress blog won’t be able to perform well in search engine results if the content is not satisfactory. What talks to bots is the content and it should be unique and engaging enough. WordPress is already a perfect platform for SEO campaign and much of the success relies on the quality and uniqueness of our content. This should be quite obvious.
WordPress blogs can also be used as a photography platform and it means that they won’t be much text in it. Just images and links. However, we should still be able to add some textual content to describe each image. Bots could identify images through their filename, alt tags and WordPress tags. Having good descriptions will also help immensely in our SEO campaign and this will give bots more “food” to digest. Trackbacks, pingbacks and blogroll feature are available in WordPress and we can use these features to link to others’ webpages. In this case, we give people credit on their good content.
WordPress is known for its excellent navigation links. From any page, even 404 error page; users are still able to go to main page and use the categories structure. In this case, we should avoid using plugins or themes that eliminate much of WordPress’ excellent linking structure. Themes we choose should retain the basic structure of WordPress and bots should still have an easy way to crawl throughout the website in any situation.
Improving the SEO performance of your WordPress blog is also about establishing actual connections with readers and other bloggers. WordPress works best when it is a part of loyal community and strong network. We should also post new articles regularly or do guest-blogging in other’s blogs. A WordPress blog should be constructed with readers in mind and this will allow random visitors to return and read more of our new content.