Make your WordPress blog more Search Engine friendly
Search Engine Optimization is an important part of making your blog more visible to search engines, and if you’ve got a blog that’s optimized for search engines, with unique content you’re gonna get hell lot of traffic for sure. So, here’s a short and simple post on 3 little things you can do to make your WordPress blog more SEO friendly:
Change the post permalink structure
By default, WordPress Post permalinks are like this:
mywordpressblog.com/?p=123
you can change them to this:
mywordpressblog.com/my-first-post
But why? These URLs filled with keywords can help in increasing your rankings on SERPs. Mind you, search engines also look at page URLs rather than just the content. Blunt URLs with post numbers won’t aid in SEO.
You can alter the permalink structure on WordPress by navigating to Options >> Permalinks. You must get this done in the initial stages when you start a blog. If you’re gonna alter this in the middle, try the Permalink Redirection Plugin
Titles on individual post pages
The title on pages is an important part of SEO. Most WordPress themes have the following title structure on individual post pages:
My Blog >> Blog Archive >> Post Title
Too lengthy, too many words, and it is not a good thing. The most fitting title on single post pages would be only the post title or the post title followed by the blog’s name. Such a title will have a greater emphasis on the keywords you have used in the title of your post, rather than unnecessary stuff like Archive etc.
As Daniel points out, here’s how you can achieve such a title structure on WordPress:
<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ‘ – ‘ ; bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();}
elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();}
else { wp_title(‘’,true); } ?></title>This code will display the blog name on the home page, the post title on single post pages and the blog name plus category name for category pages.
Alter the Footer
This tip is a kind of relevant to all blogs, irrespective of the blogging platform you use. The footer is a piece of text that is displayed at the bottom of your page, and it’s the last thing that a crawler sees on your page, as Mani tells us.
Here’s how the footer looks usually on WordPress blogs:
© Blog Name
Adding some appropriate keywords to the footer along with your blog’s name and links to posts/category pages will only make your blog more SEO friendly.
On WordPress blogs, you can edit the footer by navigating to the Theme Editor and modifying the footer.php file. But, make sure you don’t spam the footer 
Hope you enjoyed these simple tips.
What steps did you take to make your blog more search engine friendly? Share with us in the comments.
Note that this entry is a part of Daniel’s Blog Project: Three