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I started writing my beginner's guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It's time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.

If you're more of a visual type, try this WordPress SEO video. It's an hour long presentation I gave at A4UExpo London, that covers most of what's in here too.

As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices. If you don't have the time to do this kind of optimization yourself, consider hiring us to do it, check out our WordPress consulting services.

As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot, here's the contents:

1. The basic technical optimization: simplest stuff, highest rewards
   1. Permalinks
   2. Optimize your Titles for SEO
   3. Optimize your Descriptions
   4. Optimize the More text
   5. Image Optimization
2. Template optimization
   1. Breadcrumbs
   2. Headings
   3. Clean up your code
   4. Aim for speed
   5. Rethink that Sidebar
3. Advanced technical optimization: preventing duplicate content
   1. Noindex, follow archive pages
   2. Disable unnecessary archives
   3. Pagination
   4. Nofollowing unnecessary links
4. Altering your blog's structure for high rankings
   1. Pages instead of posts
   2. New wine in an old bottle: use well ranking-posts to rank even better
   3. Linking to related posts
5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!
6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved
   1. How should you get people to comment
   2. Bond with your commenters
   3. Keeping people in the conversation
7. Off site blog SEO
   1. Follow your commenters
   2. Use Twitter
   3. Find related blogs, and work them
8. Conclusion

1. Basic technical optimization

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there's a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.

1.1. Permalinks

The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.5, you'll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the "custom" setting into /%postname%/: