Search Engine's Love Optimized WordPress Blogs

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the big stumbling blocks for many people when it comes to their website. What is "search"? In a very specific way it is all about keyword phrases.

Users submit keyword phrases into the search engines - and the search engine spits back what "it" thinks you are looking for,based on that keyword phrase. So keyword phrases are quite literally the foundation of the search engine's formula, or algorithm.

Before you even get to your web page's content,the search engines and users must go thru your "address" or your url. If you think of your url as a signpost - a very short ad for your website - then this traffic tactic will become painfully obvious on why you need to pay attention to this detail.

1-your domain name - do almost any random search in google or any of the search engines, and you will find in many cases the top listed sites contain your search term as part of the domain's name.

As a general rule - a keyword based domain name will out perform a non-keyword based domain name. And it is even better if the keyword is 1st in the domain name. Golfshoes.com would be a better domain name then MyGolfShoes.com, and a quick search of this term -golf shoes golfshoesonly.com turns up multiple times in the first couple pages of search results. So if your domain name has nothing to do with your websites content - find a domain that does.

2-Your web pages url name can also influence your search engine rankings. Say you are driving down the street and you see most of the buildings only have addresses on their signpost - and you see a building that used the term Golf Shoes as it's address and you were looking for gold shoes.

Would you turn into the place that just had numbers for an address, or would you turn into the place whose address was the same as the keywords you were looking for? So for example, Wordpress blog by default will display your pages url address as: yourdomain.com/?p=145 Yuck says the search engines and yuck says the web visitor.

When we think in terms of your website's address as a signpost or mini ad in makes common sense to give the search engines and the visitors what they want. So wouldn't this be better? http://yourdomain.com/golf/golfshoes/ Well in fact it is a superior way to setup up your WordPress blog.

How to do it?
To change your WordPress blog setting so you end up with keyword based urls...
1-in your WordPress Admin area - go to permalinks
2-select custom
3-enter this:
/%category%/%postname%/
4-save setting
5-In your .htaccess file which is nothing more than a text file (but is a critical file for your website's operations - so do not change anything in this file)
Add this code - see website for html

If you set up your blog in the main directory - add that code to the .htaccess file in the main directory. If you have your blog in a sub directory, then add that code to the .htaccess file in that sub directory.

If there is no .htaccess file in that sub directory then just add the code to a notepad text file and then save the file as .htaccess as "other" file and then upload to that sub directory.

Yeah I know that is a goofy file name that has nothing before the "dot" but that is how it is done.
Once you make this change - then your urls will display the category of the blog followed by the blog posts name So....

6-Use keyword phrases in your blog's categories and post titles Now go make a decent signpost for your WordPress blog!

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