First you’re gonna need the All In One SEO Pack. If you have trouble uploading and activating the plugin see this video.

Once you’re done with those two steps login to your blog, go to “Settings” and from there to “All In One SEO Pack”. What we’re actually after here is to change the <title> values so that they are more keyword rich and SEO-compatible.

Title Tags

Here is the title syntax we are going to follow:
Website Title | Category > Subcategory - Item

Below you can copy paste those values in your plugin settings:

• Post Title Format: %blog_title% | %category_title% – %post_title%
• Page Title Format: %blog_title% | %page_title%
• Category Title Format: %blog_title% | %category_title%
• Archive Title Format: %blog_title% | %date%
• Tag Title Format: %blog_title% | Tags – %tag%
• Search Title Format: %blog_title% – %search%

Also, check all the “noindex” options below and “Autogenerate Descriptions:”.

SE-friendly URLs

Last thing to do is to tune your URLs to be more Search Engine-friendly. While in the settings section, switch to the “Permalinks” tab. There you will find various options for URL formatting.

By default your link depth shouldn’t be more than 2 steps, which means:
www.root.com/folder1/folder2/

While if you are running WordPress for a blog it’s not a problem to use the default year-date formatting. For any other projects I suggest experimenting with the “Custom Structure” option. It allows you to type-in your variables, thus forming a new URL structure. If you don’t know which ones to use exactly consult with the All In One SEO Pack settings tab.

Here’s what I used for one of my sites:
/products/postname/

Note

Switching to those options takes no more than 10 minutes. And it is always worth to spend some time on improving your site’s structure. Don’t underestimate small settings, because they can make a big difference.

• Create Robots.txt
• Add the following directives:

Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/K2RC6/comments-ajax.php
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /wp-login.php?action=register
Disallow: /wp-login.php?action=lostpassword
Disallow: /wp-trackback.php


• Generate a Sitemap
• Add your sitemap to the Robots.txt

sitemap: http://money.tradeo.biz/sitemap.xml.gz


Now you will avoid having system pages (like mysql queries/error and logins) indexed by search engines.

If you use affiliate links to monetize your site, add the URL’s to your Robots.txt file. This will keep them usable, but search engine spiders will not be able to follow them, thus, increasing your page value (yes, because you have less outgoing links).

If you find any good indexing optimisations for WordPress, drop a comment here or maybe a mail to let me know. Thanks!

See also: WordPress SEO 101