The best place to start when thinking SEO for your Wordpress blog is from scratch. In this guide I am going to lay out steps you can take to start your blogging aventure out smothly when it comes to SEO.

1) Stay away from hosted blog services such as blogger, wordpress, etc. There are many reasons for this, some SEO, yet for me it was the fact that at the end of the day they control your site, not you. Plus, all the traffic that you get will be directly or indirectly exposed to their brand so to speak. Domain names are cheap, so is hosting, you can be up with your own server and domain name for less then $40.00 bucks these days. Spend the money, in the long run it will be worth it.

2) There is a lot of debate going on right now about where to place you actual blog. Should you use a /blog setup of install everything in the root of the site. A lot of the debate rests around personal taste, but some talk seems to be giving even a slight SEO benefit to the /blog setup. For this reason when I consult others on SEO for their sites I recommend they go with the /blog idea. I mean even though there is nothing official about this take a look at Google’s blog spokesman Matt Cutts blog notice the /blog However when I do blogs for myself I use the opposite, I stick everything in the directory root, I just prefer it better that way. So this step is up to you and pretty much boils down to personal opinion I suspect.

3) Get the latest version of Wordpress and set it up. Once installed, lets talk about plugins. Let me say that not everything needs to be done through plugins, I have seen webmasters develop a plugin that does nothing more then add a few lines in one file. This is not a plugin, things like that should be done manually. Also note that a super-dooper-all-in-one plugin does not usually do everything you need to do. So yes, there may be certian plugins that can knock out a lot of others on this list but I purposly choose not to go that route.

- Another Wordpress Meta Plugin - Use this to handle the meta information on all your pages. It’s lightweight, does what it’s susposed to, and I have never had any issues with it.

- Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Works great and has never caused me any issues.

- Post Teaser - Post Teaser generates a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive and category pages, with a link underneath to go to the full post page. It includes features to generate a word count, image count, and an estimated reading time. This has some real SEO advantages, I will go into what later but grab this, you will need it.

- Related Posts - I prefer wasabi, it returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Works wonders, get this.

- SEO Title Tag - Create a customized title tag for any post, static page, category page, or indeed, any URL! This is a great plugin. I use it on just about every wordpress site I do.

- ST Add Related Posts to Feed - Adds Related Posts to your full content feed. Ultimate Tag Warrior or Related Posts is required. I will get more into this later but make sure you get this one.

- Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure - Duplicate content cure is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages. This I have only been testing. The reason I include it though is because the tests are looking good.

- WP-PageNavi - Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog. Wordpress navagation sucks, this will fix it.

4) Take a look at what I wrote on Wordpress SEO Canonicalization I don’t want to reshash this topic here but make sure you do this. It’s a biggie.

5) Now lets talk robots.txt - Wordpress has a real duplicate content problem. One stop to fix this is using the robots.txt file. Create a text file called robots.txt and save it in the root of your site. There are a lot of vairables to this but I will give you a general example of what one should look like.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /2005/
Disallow: /2006/
Disallow: /2007/
Disallow: /2008/
Disallow: /2009/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /dh_
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.gz$
Disallow: /*.wmv$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$

Sitemap: http://www.careerwebmaster.com/sitemap.xml.gz

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

You can also try adding a 301 Redirect using mod_rewrite or RedirectMatch to help with duplicate content.

6) Make sure you setup a Google Sitemap for your site. Then configure it with the sitemap plugin you used above.

After this you are going to need to get into some more advanced stuff that I will write about later. I’m sure I have left out something here as I tend to be a little A.D.D., so let me know if you think I should have included something and didn’t. I am also going to update this thread as I test things that work and come across new things that need to be done.