The Ultimate WordPress SEO Resource Guide

• By: Matt on 10/15/2009
• In: Wordpress
• Tags: Wordpress SEO

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There are many guides for WordPress SEO spread throughout hundreds of blogs across the internets. Some of them have fairly useful strategies and others are simply a waste of your time. The default WordPress theme is pretty descent but when it comes to using other themes you never know how good, or bad, the theme was built for optimal SEO friendliness.

I have compiled what I believe the be the definitive sources for WordPress SEO. Below you will find a list of top search engine optimization tutorials, the best plugins to use, and some awesome wordpress themes that take care of almost 100% of your SEO needs with little tweaking.

WordPress SEO Guides and Tutorials

1. Must See SEO Guide for All WordPress Bloggers
This SEO guide from WP Beginner is a good starting reference point for all WordPress blogs. This goes over on page seo, permalink settings, and even proper markup. There are also some tips on increasing the load time of you wordpress driven blog.

2. The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog
Yoast has compiled the most complete and detailed WordPress SEO how-to that you will probaply ever see on the web. He covers everything from the title all the way to the core of your theme. If you are A.D.D. or illiterate he also has a video you can watch. While the other ones I have mentioned in this post are good, this one is more than likely the only one you will ever need.

3. The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Theme Search Engine Optimization
Nathan Rice has developed a list of tips for bloggers that will help them embrace the natural flow of good SEO in the form of a well optimized theme.

4. WordPress SEO for Beginners The Blog Oh! Blog Way
Blog Oh! Blog has put together what can be considered as a crash course for all the people who are struggling to get better search engine results with their WordPress blogs.

5. Search Engine Optimization for WordPress
This SEO guide comes straight from the WordPress Codex. This is a good overview to maintain your WordPress site’s optimal friendliness towards search engine spiders and crawlers.

Must have Plugins for proper WordPress SEO

1. HeadSpace2
HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site.

2. Yoast Breadcrumbs
This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.

3. All in One SEO Pack
Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines. Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines, gives you the ability override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want, and for beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.

4. Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

5. Platinum SEO Plugin
Platinum SEO has some of the smartest options to optimize your wordpress blog for search engines. Once set, these provide smart onsite wordpress SEO (search engine optimization) benefits to your wordpress site.

6. SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

SEO Friendly WordPress Themes to Increase Your Traffic

1. Thesis Theme
The Thesis Theme for WordPress is a high-quality template system that you can use to improve your site immediately. Thesis boasts the strongest SEO of any theme on the market today thanks to its expertly-coded HTML + CSS + PHP framework. Not only that, Thesis also contains additional options that will allow you to fine-tune each and every page of your site. The days of worrying about your in-site SEO are over—with Thesis, your strategy is “just add killer content.”

2. Headway Theme
With Headway you can stop worrying about what plugins to install and how to efficiently optimize your site. All the options are there and easily accessible. With Headway you can stop worrying about the monotonous tasks and focus on the important aspects of the website. Let Headway propel you to the top of the search results.

3. Citrus Theme
Many bloggers and webmasters are discovering the benefits of using WordPress as a CMS (content management system). Citrus Theme is an excellent choice for people looking to do more with WordPress than just blog. Citrus Theme is coded to be search engine optimized, out of the box. This means that Citrus Theme was developed to properly display blog’s header tags, descriptions, alt and title tags to search engines.

4. The Sharp Theme
The Sharp theme is a widget ready super clean, crisp WordPress blog layout with 4 color variations that is SEO optimized, while still being easy to customize and use.

5. Convergence – Community WordPress Theme
Convergence is a nicely put together WordPress theme with the intent and focus on creating a community site. This theme includes many popular features seen in today’s industry leading community sites. If you’ve ever thought about starting a community based site, then this is your theme. Download it today and be up and running in no time at all.

6. Press Blog Theme
Press is a minimalist blog theme which can serve many different purposes. The nature of its design means the scope for modifications are endless and the boundaries for content are only determined by you. All Obox themes come packed with the OCMX-Live content management system. Learn More

I will continue to update this post as I find more themes and better resources. If you have some suggestions on any tutorials, plugins, or themes let me know in the comments and I will look into adding it.