Wordpress SEO

Built-In SEO for Wordpress

Wordpress, by its own nature, already has very good search engine optimization (SEO) features already built-in. In particular it has the ability to

  1. Enable search engine friendly URLs
  2. Notify update services, and
  3. Make use of comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks.

In this article, we will examine these three important Wordpress SEO features. In another article, we will look more at other plugins that we can install in Wordpress to further enhance its SEO abilities.

1. Search Engine Friendly URL

What is a search engine friendly URL (or SEF url)?

Search engine friendly URL will be a URL with keywords embedded in the URL and that looks like...

http:// example.com/health-benefits-olive-oil

An non-search-engine-friendly URL would be using query string parameters instead. It looks like...

http:// example.com/post?id=123

Because search engines can parse words out from the URL, it benefits you to have search keywords in the URL.

Search engine friendly URLs are NOT enabled in Wordpress by default. You have to enable this feature manually yourself. Make this the first thing you configure as soon as you have installed Wordpress. This is done by going to "Settings -> Permalinks" in the Wordpress Dashboard.

There you see under "Common Settings" the default URL structure is...

http://example.com/?p=123

This is no good. Change it to either "Day and name" as in...

http://example.com/2011/06/04/sample-post/

or to "Month and name" as in...

http://example.com/2011/06/sample-post/

For advanced users, you can even choose the "Custom Structure" and enter /%postname%

This will remove the date from the URL as well as the trailing backslash. But in all these cases, you have the "postname" in the URL. This postname in URL can be adjusted to include search keywords during the edit of your post.

2. Update Services

In the Wordpress dashboard, go to "Settings -> Privacy". Make sure that "Site Visibility" setting is set to "I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines"

This setting is set during the installation process of Wordpress and is set as such by default. However, it is good to just check to make sure that this is the case.

When search engine visibility is set as described, then you will be able to specify one or more "Update Services" in "Settings -> Writing". By default, Wordpress has already put in the update service of "http://rpc.pingomatic.com" for you. This is fine. You can leave this as it is and it is not necessary to add additional ones (unless you are an advanced user that have a particular preference for another or additional update services).

3. The enabling of comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks makes your site more search engine friendly by virtue that there are greater interactions (and links) between your site and other sites.

When you allow comments on your post, it makes your post content longer (which is good) and search engine will also see that the page changes more frequently (which is good too).

The "default article settings" in "Settings -> Discussion" is where you configure this. There you want to checkmark all three items...

  1. Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article.
  2. Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).
  3. Allow people to post comments on new articles.

We do recommend that if you turn on comments, you should also turn on comment moderation. In other words, checkmark "An administrator must always approve the comment". As you can see, there are nice built-in SEO features to perform Search Engine Optimization for WordPress. And even more SEO features can be found in additional Wordpress SEO Plugins.