Have you ever wanted your WordPress blog to be on page one of the search engine page? Of course, who doesn’t. In this article, we will take a closer look at the following areas to optimize WordPress blogs for search engines:

* How to avoid duplicate content.
* How to properly structure the blog.
* How to increase page load and speed.
* How to have the best Meta tags and other code.
* How to use the best URL structure.
* Create backlinks automatically.

In this article we will examine 2: How to avoid duplicate content and How to use the best URL structure. If you want to do the 6 above, there is a hyperlink at the end of the article to a video that will take you through them methodically.

How to use the best URL structure.

The default WordPress URL looks like this: yourblog.com/?p=154

This tells search engines nothing about your page; however, if your page looked like this “yourblog.com/mlm-companies-reviewed”, the page would rank much higher for the keywords in the page title. However, before making any changes to your permalinks, be careful, as changing them without performing the following action first will lose your bookmarks, existing rankings, and backlinks.

So here’s what you do initially: Go to your plugins area in WordPress and look for “Redirect” under the Add Plugins feature. Add and install a plugin called John Godley Redirection. Activate the plugin, now any changes you make to the old permalinks will automatically redirect so everything stays the same when it comes to user and searches.

Now go and change your permalinks in the Settings section -> permalinks to the following structure /%postname% in custom structure.

The Slug is the %postname% part of the URL generated for your post, so in our case it will be sublog/Slug-is-here

The slug is generated from the title you give your post, which is good because the title contains your keywords. The problem is that it will contain other words that are not needed by search engines. So, for example, if your post was called “What do you need to do to teach your dog to sing?” it would result in yourblog.com/What-do-you-need-to-do-teach-your-dog-to -sing while the really important thing is yourblog.com/teach-your-dog-to-sing. So that would be a better URL, and you can do it manually every time. However, you can automate it by installing a plugin called SEO Slugs. This will automatically remove common words like: and, in, etc.

How to avoid duplicate content

WordPress is set up to create duplicate content and unless you make some changes, it will happen on your blog as well. This is something to avoid as search engines don’t like duplicate content. If you want a full explanation, check out the video link at the bottom of the blog post. To solve the problem you can do the following: Go to Tools? Redirect? Modules (The redirect is the plugin we installed earlier.)

Click on the modules and select edit WordPress, there change the settings so that your site is always searched with or without WWW, but not both, there is a dropdown box in the Canonical parameter. Choose the one you prefer, otherwise your site may get indexed twice and you will lose ranking. In the Strip index parameter, set it to Strip Index.

Archives, WordPress archives by various criteria, such as date, author, category, and tag. Turn off the ones you don’t need. Also, only the cover should be shown in full and the rest should show excerpts. Here is how:

Find and install the Joost de Valk Robots Meta plugin. Then go to your settings page in WordPress and click on Meta Robots, scroll down to the “Prevent Indexing” section and check the following boxes:
All admin pages
Author Archive
Date-based files
file tag
File, Archive

This will ensure they don’t show up on Google, preventing duplication. If you know what you’re doing and are using tags and categories, don’t bookmark them. For most beginners, they should be clicked.

Then, in the Archive Settings area, disable author archives and disable date-based archives.