There is a reason why the WordPress platform is the standard among affiliate marketers. You can install it in a few minutes, add unique themes and plug-ins in seconds, and be indexed in the search engines within hours – even if you don’t know HTML. But the default settings for WordPress are designed for hobbyists and bloggers. Affiliate marketers whose business depends on high search engine rankings are left out in the cold. But that’s no reason to be discouraged. With a few easy tweaks, your site can become highly tuned for SEO.
Permalinks
Change the default permalink settings. The WordPress defaults have a date based directory of posts. This is perfect for blogger who wants to track her entries over long period of time, but it’s poison to an affiliate marketer wants to present evergreen content. Click options in your admin panel, and then click Permalinks. It’s easy to change this to a category based setting.
Ping Optimization
Pinging is a way of letting search engines and other indexing services know that you’ve made a new post. This is good. But every time you edit and update one of your posts, WordPress pings all those services again. The more you update, the higher the chances are that you’ll be seen as a spammer and blacklisted. This is bad. Ping optimization plug-ins strike a wonderful balance – getting you seen by more sites and reducing your chances of getting flagged by accident.
Tags
Tags can be a big boost to your SEO efforts if you use them properly, but the default WordPress settings make it tough to keep track of them. Most new affiliates will be tempted to give up entirely. Luckily, plug-ins like Ultimate Tag Warrior make it easier to recognize and manage your tags.
META Tags and Keywords
Items like your title, META description, and keywords are all covered by the default WordPress installation, but it’s tough to have pinpoint control of this information on each individual page. Third-party SEO plug-ins are incredibly popular on WordPress for this exact reason. It’s important to be careful with your keyword selection. The importance of keywords in webpage description has been drastically lowered thanks to SEO spam.
Internal Linking
It’s important for your site to have links to your own posts and pages. They’re a sign that you, as the webmaster, have an interest in showing visitors other relevant things on your site. Unfortunately, you might be too busy making new content and promoting your site to spend time rereading all of your posts looking for opportunities to cross-link things. Fortunately, quality plug-ins like LinkWithin can come to the rescue, automatically pointing visitors to similar content on your website.