You must have noticed that some websites rank higher than other in the search engines when you search for them using keywords, at times the website that is ranked higher is not even better than the one that was ranked lower,that is because just the website content doesn’t make up for the websites ranking there are some techniques and tweaks that are implemented to make the website SEO friendly.

WordPress blogs come with specific default settings, making some changes with the settings will make your WordPress blog more compatible and will probably increase the traffic from readers who are not aware of your blogs existence.

Search engines want a frequently updated web site with good information, and that also has a solid, navigable directory structure with meaningful URLs.

Tweaks for WordPress SEO settings –

• Custom Permalinks

URL structures are important to search engines for multiple reasons. This is definitely one of the best suggested SEO techniques. This tweak requires you to change the default page title from (www.yourdomaincom/?p=5) to a much SEO and user friendly www.yourdomainname.com/category/page title.
This can be done by following the two below steps.

1. Goto Options > Permalinks
2. Change the default setting to custom with the following code – /%category%/%postname%/

• Change blog URL

Change your blog URL http://mysite.com/blog to http://www.mysite.com/blog because most of the websites have WWW and that makes the URLs consistent.
Here is how you do it:

1. Go back to the settings in your admin console.
2. Go to the General menu item
3. Change the WordPress address (URL) from the non WWW URL to the WWW URL (e.g. http://mysite.com/blog to http://www.mysite.com/blog .
4. Save the changes and login again.

• Custom Page Title

Page titles in WordPress are by default like this – Blog Name – Post title
A better title would be Post Title – Blog name, as the important keywords are in the post title.

• Make your titles links

If your theme doesn’t have links on your article titles, make the change today. Convert them to links so that they can be detected easily.
This tweak simple incorporates the permanent link to your post headings.

• Use a Google Sitemap generator plugin for WordPress

Its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

• Add custom Meta tags to different pages on your blog.

This plugin gives you the option of having more than one meta tag for each page. The description of each page will be different and will thus attract people to your site.

• Title and Description Tags

Two of the most important content factors for a search engine are Title and Description tags. Basically, there are three pieces of content that any search engine will see on a given page. The first is the page itself which is what you and I as human beings see. The next is a Title tag. Title tags can be seen by humans by looking up in the top of your browser bar as most browsers put this up there. it is generally an 80 character tag that you can use to label a page. Search engines pay a lot of importance on this tag.

First, go to the settings of the plugin and put a Title and Description tag for your HOME page. Then, as you go about writing posts, create titles and descriptions that have some search volume. Search for related keywords using your browser make a note of them and try to include them in your titles,descriptions and posts, don’t go over board and end up on the spamming side.