WordPress is a powerful blogging platform that can also be used as an

English: WordPress Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

entire website.  This blogging software is powerful enough to fit the needs of most small businesses when it comes to using this platform to create an entire website.  In fact, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform out there today and in use by both large and small businesses.

One of WordPress’ major benefits is that it is very a flexible platform due to the large number of plugins available for the platform.  These plugins add functionality, therefore allowing WordPress to be able to fulfill most kinds of standard website application requirements. This is the main reason why this blogging platform is used by many website owners today.

Even with the quickly growing adoption of this blogging platform, many users still don’t know how to set up the blog so that it makes optimum use of its features to be able to improve their SEO ranking as well as automate some of the maintenance functionality that will save a lot of time and frustration in managing the website.

One of the biggest mistakes that WordPress users make is choosing the default setting in how the URL’s of the blog pages are created.  This is very important because the choosing the correct setting is an extremely easy way to improve the website’s SEO rankings.

The image below shows one of the permalink settings that should be used.  Notice something other than the default setting is picked…

The reason why this setting is important is because the name of the URL is a determining factor in the search engine results.  In this case, the term “sample-post” is really where the title of the blog goes.  This gives the website owner another opportunity to use a keyword phrase in their URL name.  As you can see, the ‘numeric’ and ‘default’ settings don’t allow you this opportunity.

So when would someone want to use the default URL?  That is a good question and I really haven’t come up with a good answer as to when it would be a preferable choice other than if the website owner purposely doesn’t want to come up  ranking high in the search engines (but does want to rank because if they didn’t want to show up there at all, it’s easy enough to get the site de-indexed.)

There are a few other ways to set up the blogging platform for better SEO performance as well as ways to automate some maintenance and marketing functions.  These topics will be covered in another post.