Making your blog more search engine “friendly” should not be too hard.
By default WordPress includes an option to turn on permalinks with more “friendly” URLs. Although this won’t work on IIS it will work on any server using Apache with mod_rewrite enabled.
Another handy little trick is to get your page titles to display as something a bit more meaningful.
Dirkz has a handy plugin to do just that.
The problem I found is that it looks horrendous in the Kubrick theme I use. Why? Possibly because I have a subtitle to my blog or maybe because I’m fond of posts with long titles.
In either case it is quite easy to rectify.
Open rewrite-titles.php in a text editor. On line 78 you should see the following:
$content = preg_replace("/$blogname/", "$title - $blogname", $content);
Simply comment it out, so it looks like:
// $content = preg_replace("/$blogname/", "$title - $blogname", $content);
You’ll still get the page title tags replaced, but it won’t do anything odd to your page header.
What does it do?
Basically it replaces the default wording that gets chucked into your title tags with the entry title.
Search engines such as Google pay a lot more attention to page titles than some people think 🙂
Actually, I have it on good authority that you can use the ISAPI_Rewrite filter for IIS to create the same effect as mod_rewrite.
I’ve never installed it myself, but there is a commercial version of it, so that makes one assume that it must work (although it’s a dangerous assumption that everthing commerical must work 🙂 )
This guy talks about ISAPI Rewrite for WordPress and seems to be using it on his blog (although his URL’s don’t seem as pretty as wordpress/apache ones)
David
I’ve heard similar things. I know that we have recently installed some form of mod_rewrite for windows, but I think its directives and configuration are quite different to mod_rewrite although the end results ie. pretty URLs is the same.