In my experience working with Wordpress and content management system (CMS) sites, I’ve come across several helpful tips and techniques for optimizing and designing your wordpress site. A few simple adjustments can make a world of difference for marketing, promotion, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and the overall design.
1. For SEO, use one of the freely available plugins designed to let you customize the meta tags and titles for each page. I would personally recommend the “All-In-One SEO” Plugin, which offers an addition to the individual page settings where you can specify a number of meta tags and a unique title for the page.
2. Set a custom format for your page URLs. The default URLs for wordpress posts are, well, a little lackluster. Just a day and a month. Not a whole lot of context for Search Engines, which generally rely on the content and page URL to get an idea of what’s on the page, so they can index it. While generating a sitemap takes care of a lot of the bigger details, giving your posts a better URL can drive more traffic to the site through organic searches. You can set the custom page URLs via “administration menu > settings > permalinks”. Set the “common settings” radio box to ‘day and name’ or ‘month and name’ to add the page name to the post’s URL. You can also create a custom naming structure for your URLs, which will automatically be configured on previous posts as well.
3. Use the ‘AddToAny share button’ plugin as a quick way for users to send your blog posts or pages to a friend. Not only does it make it easier for the end user to send their favorite blog post or a funny joke to a friend, you also make word of mouth advertising much easier. You can set where it will appear, and it offers automated syndication to a large number of social networking and social media services, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Etc..
4. You can hide pages from wordpress’ navigation menu (wp_list_pages, for coders) without having to hardcode anything. The “Exclude Pages from Navigation” Plugin, and several similar plugins, offer easy ways to remove a page from the menu. In the case of the “exclude pages from navigation” plugin, it’s as simple as changing a dropdown box in the right-hand column of the article or page’s settings page.
Tags: Add to Any, CMS, Content Management Systems, Custom Pagelinks, helpful tips, hiding pages in wordpress, optimizing wordpress, SEO, SEO tips, tips, wordpress, Wordpress Pagelinks