It has been more than 1 week I didn’t update Crispnetworks. Life has been busy. Lots of projects at work and spending lots of time with my girlfriend.

Well, as promised in my update one my blog’s technorati and alexa ranking, lets explore some wordpress theme search engine optimization (SEO) that you can do for your wordpress theme so that your blog ranks better in Google.

Give Your Wordpress its Own Directory

Some reader asked me about how I changed my blog URL from http://www.crispnetworks.com/blog to http://www.crispnetworks.com when I blog about Crispnetworks.com updates. Now let me take you through the steps that I took to do that.

First step is to give your wordpress its own directory. I installed my wordpress in the folder “/blog/”. Here’s the steps I took:

1. Go to the Options panel. (This is in the wordpress admin dashboard)
2. In the text box for Wordpress address (URL): you have to change the address to the new location of your main Wordpress core files. I believe most of you installed it in the folder “/blog/” like I did. So your address should be http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/
3. In the text box for Blog address (URL): change address to your domain only. Example, http://www.yourdomain.com
4. Click Update Options button.
5. Copy the index.php and .htaccess files from the Wordpress directory (in the “/blog” directory) into the root directory of your site (Blog address).
6. Open your root directory’s index.php file in a web editor or text editor.
7. Change the following line and save the file.
   

   Change the line

   require(’./wp-blog-header.php’);

   to

   require(’./blog/wp-blog-header.php’);

8. Login to your wordpress admin dashboard. It should be http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/

Change Permalink Structure

Now you should change the permalink structure of your blog posts to make it more search engine friendly. Go to your Wordpress admin dashboard and go to the options menu, in the submenu go to Permalinks.
Select the custom structure, use either:

/%category%/%posname%/

or

/%posname%/

Using such permalink structure is to make sure your blog posts is keyword rich. This way, it will help to rank your blog posts higher for the keyword you are targeting. Personally, I prefer to use just /&postname%/. However, you should consider using /%category%/%postname%/ if you planned to use same post titles.

.htaccess

Secondly, lets look at how to make your blog point to your domain (www.blogDomain.com) instead of the root directory where you install your wordpress by modifying the .htaccess file. Default htaccess files looks like below:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# BEGIN WordPress
ReWriteEngine On
ReWriteBase /
ReWriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-f
ReWriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Simply add 2 lines into the .htaccess file at the end of the line before </IfModule>.

ReWriteCond %{http_host} ^BLOGDOMAIN.com [nc]
ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.BLOGDOMAIN.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Change the BLOGDOMAIN to your domain name. In my case, I change it to crispnetworks.
It looks like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# BEGIN WordPress
ReWriteEngine On
ReWriteBase /
ReWriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-f
ReWriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
ReWriteCond %{http_host} ^DOMAIN.com [nc]
ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.DOMAIN.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
</IfModule>

Now all visit to your wordpress will redirect to your domain, including robots.

That’s all for now. I’ll come out with the second part soon which will cover robot.txt, duplicate contents and the headers in wordpress theme. I hope that this first part will help you to make your wordpress theme more search engine friendly.