WordPress is a popular blog software. Learn how to optimize your WordPress installation so that your new blog is ready for search engines. Includes step-by-step instructions and screenshots for every step.

1. 

   You can find the Permalinks tab under the Settings header.

   Enable Permalinks. To make things easier for you, WordPress converts it’s normal dynamic URLs to static URLs with no extra plugins.
   You can find the Permalinks section under Settings. Settings is usually at the bottom of the left navigation in the WordPress admin section. Depending on your plugins installed, it may look slightly different.
   After selecting the Permalinks section under Settings, you will be brought to the main page for Permalinks. Here you can change your Permalink setup. When you change the Permalink settings, WordPress should update your .htaccess file for you. Be sure that your .htaccess file has the necessary file permissions for WordPress to edit it. This makes it extremely easy to change settings. I suggest that you pick one setting now, and then you don’t change it after this. Search Engines will begin indexing your posts, and if you change them all, you will lose all that you had indexed.
   I suggest that you pick either the Day and Name setting or the Month and Name setting. The first and last entries, Default and Numeric, don’t provide very much information on the page that is being viewed. It is also possible to create your own custom structure. If you do this, be sure to include %postname% for the name of your post. For more information on creating custom URL structures, read here.

   

   It is suggested that you set your WordPress Permalinks to one of the highlighted options.

2. 

   You can find the Installed tab under the Plugins header.

   Install necessary plugins. The next thing that you should do is install the necessary plugins for your WordPress installation.
   The Plugins section is a full header. It is under Appearance on the left navigation. Depending on your plugins installed, it may look slightly different.
   You can install plugins by downloading the plugin file to the correct folder, or by using the new plugin installer in WordPress 2.7. I haven’t used the new plugin installer yet, (since it requires FTP and I use SSH for all of my remote management needs), so I will go over how to install a plugin by downloading the files on your own. First, download the file to your server. In my opinion, the easiest way to do this is wget. Move into $WP/wp-content/plugins/ in terminal, and then type wget $URL. $WP is your WordPress directory and $URL is the URL of the zip file for the plugin. Next, unzip the .zip archive. Assuming that you have unzip installed, type unzip $FILE. $FILE is the plugin zip file. Once the plugin file is unzipped, WordPress will recognize it. Head to Installed under Plugins and your new plugin should be under Inactive Plugins. There are many ways to install a plugin, I just went over the method that I use. I find it to be the easiest. The plugins that I suggest are: (in the future all of these plugins will be revisited with in-depth guides to their usage and optimization)

   • HeadSpace2 – http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/
   • SEO Friendly Images – http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-friendly-images
   • WordPress.com Stats – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
   • WP Super Cache – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
   • Sociable – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/
   • Redirection – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
3. Consider a faster server. Speed is everything when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. If WordPress is still slow after you have install the WP Super Cache plugin, consider moving to a faster server. If load times are high and a bot is looking to index your site, it may give up on the request or not return to index your site again for a longer period of time than the default. This all depends on the search engine that is indexing your site.

This article is only the first in a series of articles that make up the Full Guide to WordPress SEO. Check back for more!