Now that you have done a quick and easy install of WordPress using Fantastico and updated your default WordPress theme to a custom WordPress theme the next measures you should take to prepare your WordPress blog for earning money online all have to do with the minor (but necessary) modifications that are essential for getting your blog optimized for the search engines.  We all know that traffic equals money and the best source of traffic is also the free source of traffic - search engines! This post is the first in a series dealing with the necessary steps any WordPress webmaster needs to take to make his or her blog search engine friendly.

WordPress works pretty well ‘out-of-the-box’ so to speak, but there are necessary setting changes that need to be made in order to optimize your WordPress blog for Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the rest of the big search engines.  One of the first simple, but oh so necessary tasks, is to change how your WordPress installation displays URLs.  Initially, WordPress does not display search engine friendly URLS.  Search Engine Friendly URLs are URLs that display the title of the post in them, they have a meaning and contain keywords that are relative to the post.  For example, a Search Engine Friendly URL looks like: http://www.killerincome.net/changing-the-default-wordpress-theme-to-a-custom-theme/ you can clearly see the title of the post right in the URL. But this is not the way WordPress displays URLs by default, this is the result of a simple setting that you need to make to your blog before you start writing and posting.

The way to modify this is very simple. Once you log in to your WordPress admin panel, simply click the ‘Options’ link along the top menu bar.  One of the sub-categories under the ‘Options’ menu is ‘Permalinks’ so you will need to click that to get to the area where you can customize how WordPress displays your URLs.

Under the ‘Common Options’ heading you will see different URL options, including Default, Date and Name Based, and Numeric.  The one you want to select is the last one - Custom.  So click the radio button to the left of the word ‘Custom’ under the Options heading and type the following into the ‘Custom structure’ textbox: /%postname%/ make sure to include the slashes. 

What this does is simply append the post name (i.e. the title of your post) to your domains URL so that you get a Search Engine Friendly URL that looks like: http://www.killerincome.net/changing-the-default-wordpress-theme-to-a-custom-theme/ instead of the default WordPress URL that could look like http://www.killerincome.net/?p=123. As you can probably guess the second URL does not really convey any meaningful information to the Search Engines about the topic of the post, while the former URL specifies exactly what the post is about. Hopefully you have learned something new from this post.  Ultimately there are a few more necessary steps to make your WordPress blog as search engine friendly as it can be, but if you have been following along so far you are well on your way.  Website (or blog) preparation is an extremely important search engine optimization step that a lot of website and WordPress blog owners overlook and then wonder why their site is not appearing or ranking well in the search engines and why they are not making any money.  As you can see, with a few extremely simple tasks you can have your blog already ahead of much of your competition.

In the next part of this series on optimizing your WordPress blog for the search engines, we’ll talk about an essential WordPress plugin that will allow you to modify the Titles and Meta keywords and descriptions for each of your posts so that you can better differentiate your blog pages in the eyes of the search engines.

See ya next time!