SEO stands for “search engine optimisation”. WordPress comes loaded with SEO features.
Here is a brief overview:
Switch on and off access to your site by search engines
1. Privacy: you can control global access to your site by search engines at Settings, then Privacy. Most people want their web site to be available to search engines and therefore do not turn access off to them.
We have added a list of update engines to you WordPress
2. Update engines: we have added a long list of update engines to you web site under settings, then Reading. These engines are alerted whenever you make a change on your site. They in turn tell other search engines a change has been made and to come a get the new information.
3. SEO Features can be turned on and off.
4. Page Level Meta Tags: your site also feature page (and post) level meta tags. This is very fine control and useful. The Meta Description is the text that will appear under your link on search engines. The Meta Keywords are not seen be people browsing your site. You should limit your keywords to 60 characters. Make sure you use the six most important keywords you have first. You should also make them specific to your web site and not vague or unrelated. Phrases are better than single words. Separate phrases with commas.
Meta information is a description of what is found on a page. Meta information is best individualised to each page. Meta information includes the title of the document (seen in search results), the description of the page’s content (also seen)and then meta tag keywords which list off important single word or phrase descriptions of the page content.
Note that the keyword meta tag is largely ignored as a result of abuse. Carefully consideration however is required for the title and description meta data. If you count up characters in the title and page description on google, it will guide you on the number of characters to use. Google has a “external” keyword selection tool (external to it Adwords program). This tool will help you choose keywords to focus on in your title, description meta tags and body text of your pages. The tool specifically shows you what keywords are popular and what level of competition you can expect on them.
5. URL rewriting: WordPress can rewrite page addresses into plain English and remove funny characters from the address such as question marks and equals signs which don’t mean much to search engines.
You’ll observe that by default database web sites do not produce human friendly URLs. They have = and ? and a page number – not at all memorable. This can be addressed by URL rewriting, a slight of hand delivered by the web server. There is a catch though, by the latest web server software. E.g. IIS6 does not support URL rewriting, but IIS7 does.
While the main benefit of URL rewriting may be ease of recall for humans, it’s also great for machine audiences, search engines. URL rewriting gives the site owner the facility to present many more keywords to search engines. A rewritten URL is called a permalink.
