Wordpress is simple, minimalistic and yet extremely powerful. However, being easy-to-use, the engine has also some huge disadvantages - e.g. "naked" Wordpress is very inefficient when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Reason: there is simply too much to tweak, too many plugins to use and too many details to take care of.

Imagine having the search engine traffic to your blog increased by tens of percentages, or perhaps even doubling it, by just a few hours work. With putting just a bit of SEO effort into your WordPress you can increase your search engine traffic, just by getting the basics right.

In one sweet little plugin you can customize title tags, meta keywords and description. Plus if you are lazy, All in One SEO Pack automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for you using your post title and content.

There are quite a few plugins that you can just easily drop into your WordPress, enable, and have everything you need to be able to create good titles for blog posts, and write meta descriptions for them, both requisites for good WordPress SEO. Just download it, drop it in, and activate it. After that, go in to the Headspace options, select the modules submenu, and drag the "more text" module from disabled to simple. This will allow you to change the more text on all your posts into something more appropriate, without becoming dull.

Search engines can't "see" a site. They can only "read" a site. Pretty does not talk to a search engine. What "talks" to a search engine are the words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs, educates, and babbles. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine and compare with all the parts and pieces to give you a good "score".

Although each has his own taste, your WordPress permalink should look permanent for SEO purposes. Now after writing each post, think carefully of the slug you choose for it.

A search engine enters your site and, for the most part, ignores the styles and CSS. It just plows through the site gathering content and information. Most WordPress Themes are designed with the content as close to the top of the unstyled page as possible, keeping sidebars and footers towards the bottom. Few search engines scan more than the first third of the page before moving on. Make sure your Theme puts the content near the top.

Wordpress is the best blogging platform out there, bar none. It's funny how Matt Cutts praises it, when Google owns Blogger. Good to see he's being honest about it.

Pages you block in this way may still be added to the Google index if other sites link to them. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other publicly available information can appear in Google search results. However, no content from your pages will be crawled, indexed, or displayed.

As of version 2.3, WordPress comes with not 1, not 2, but 3 (!!) archives built in by default. It has a category structure, a tag structure and a date based archive. That creates an awful amount of dupe content, so you should get rid of two of the three. After that, it's just a matter of personal taste.

And yes, he said that if he were starting a business and wanted to drive traffic to his website then he would install a WordPress blog. He said that WordPress is the perfect tool for search engine optimization (SEO).

Even when you've picked one structure, you're still left with some pages which have no real use for the search engine. Your frontpage only contains 10 posts, usually, and when you have more, they go to /page/2/, /page/3/ etc. This will prevent search engines from showing these pages, while allowing them to follow the links to your posts. Do the same to your login and registration pages, and your search result pages with the same plugin.

It is now 28 Jan 2007, 8 months after the first post, and the creation of the index page for the Search Engine Optimization Blog phrase. The index page of the site is now ranked 136th for the phrase.

Even when you're running a one author blog, WordPress will automatically create an "author" archive, which is a listing of all posts made by each author. They have some use on multi author blogs, but on one author blogs you should disable them, using the robots meta plugin as well.

An important way of getting both your visitors and the search engines to find more related content on your blog is using a related posts plugin. Adding them in is quite easy, as they both consist of just a few lines of code to add to your template.