I’m not going to talk about the much repeated permalink editing or heading changes here. Instead, I’m going to share with you some SEO tips for WordPress that you might not have bothered to check, the fine details that is. Keep in mind that some of them are the result of recent updates from Google. Let’s go.

1. Nofollow your RSS feeds

We don’t need the bots to crawl them. Google is clever enough to discard them but you might want to keep other bots awy.

2. Nofollow your Archives and Tags

They make the content show up at more than one place (the original article) and thus may create duplicate content on the blog. Why take chance ? Nofollow them.

3. Change the Post title to H1 from H2

Normally, all WordPress themes comes with the post title as H2. In my opinion you should change it to H1 as it could be the most important title on the page.

4. Add Titles and ALT tags to your smaller images

Many a times, you miss the smaller images. Tag them well with ALT and Title tags.

5. Test your page load time and keep it under 3 secs

Most of this depends on your server and code. Its not easy, but if you can keep it as low as possible – just great !

6. Take off any signs/characters from your page titles/ Change the page title format

Many a times, themes comes with fancy character signs like “>>” in the page title. Rip them off, you’re wasting SEO real estate there.

7. Change the blog/site name to H2 or H3 from H1

Most themes come with the blog/sitename in H1 on any page. Change it to H3 or so, and use the CSS to make it appear visually big. We need post titles to be H1. (Ref: step 3)

8. Fix your default 404 error page with a plugin

We don’t need them. They’re ugly. Use a plugin to show up a custom 404 error page. Alternatively the best thing to do is to find and kill all the broken links.

9. Make your meta descriptions unique and not a repetition of your content (snippets)

If you took the easy way, then you might have not touched the meta description. Instead of pulling the first few lines from the post itself, its always good if you can make them unique and descriptive so that it appeals to anyone on the SERPs and draws in a click.

So, it doesn’t matter if you use a SEO plugin or not, make sure these silly looking metrics are taken care of, because in the long run, these “silly” things could make a difference.