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Many bloggers and website owners believe that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something incredibly complicated. After all, there are entire companies designed around this very subject, right? The truth is, the WordPress platform gives bloggers a pretty big advantage when it comes to SEO. Search engines love WordPress blogs because they are usually updated frequently and with the right on-page SEO strategy, you can rank very highly for whatever keywords you choose.  But remember, all serious SEO strategies begin with solid keyword research, so do not overlook the importance of that first step.  Having said that, here are my top 5 best WordPress SEO tips:

1. Change Your Permanent Link Structures. For some silly reason, WordPress has the default Permalink structure set to  something like this: http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123. This is not the optimal structure for SEO! For a good basic SEO strategy, set your permalinks to a custom structure of /%postname%/. An advanced SEO strategy would be to use a custom structure of /%category%/%postname%/. This structure is better because it will allow you to get two of  your top keywords in the URL. However,  there a couple of important things you must know when using this advanced strategy:  1) Only assign one category to each post, and 2) NEVER change your categories once you’ve created them because it’s basically the same thing as deleting your post. Whatever permalink structure you choose, don’t change it once the search engines index your blog.
2. Use the SEO Slugs WordPress plugin for even better permalinks. The SEO Slugs WordPress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. It keeps the permalinks short, sweet, and to the point.
3. Make sure your keywords are in your HTML Title Tags. The absolute easiest way to get this done is by using the All-in-One SEO Pack WordPress plugin.  It will allow you to set your homepage title format and your title tag format for each post and each page you create.  You can even create unique title tags for individual posts as one of the options. I simply prefer to customize my post title tags to this structure: %post_title% | %category% | %blog_title%.
4. Be sure to use the power of inner linking your posts. Whenever possible, you should reference and link to previous posts that are on the same topic as the post you are writing at the time.  The SEO Smart Links WordPress plugin puts this process on autopilot.  SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Awesome.
5. Create an XML sitemap for Google and the other search engines. There is no need to go trying to figure out XML because the Google XML Sitemaps plugin is a dream. It creates an XML  sitemap for you automatically and everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap will get updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol (like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo!) will be notified. I like to add the XML sitemap link to my blog’s footer and then forget about it. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

There you have it! My top 5 WordPress SEO tips. With all the marvelous plugins available, it’s no wonder why people like me love WordPress so much. For additional tips on a very keyword focused onsite SEO strategty, visit The Keyword Academy. They offer some great SEO tips in the post I linked to and their blog is full of some very useful information as well.