WordPress is one of the most popular software to create a succesful website for it's user friendly GUI design and powerful plugins, more and more people even use wordpress for ecommerce solutions for enterprise business. So is wordpress good choice to promote your products? How could you optimize wordpress based websites? In this article I would like to share personal ideas for wordpress SEO.

Wordpress is absolutely right choice if you would like to reduce the time for website internal optimization because wordpress itself has very search engine friendly structure, plus many free to get seo plugins you can optimize your wordpress site easily.

How to optimize your wordpress site?

The website optimization is much the same, however wordpress has built in solutions for internal optimization. if we can make good use of the available technologies from wordpress, our website will rank high on search engine fastly. Here're the most popular methods for wordpress optimization.

Configure SEO permalinks for your wordpress site

In short words, the shorter your website address is the more seo friendly your website will be. For wordpress parmalinks configuration, please login to your wordpress admin > Settings > permalinks. Personally we recommend using "/%postname%/" through our experience. Here's screenshot about the configuration

Note, the permalinks may not working if you're under windows hosting server. please visit this wordpress permalinks configuration article for solutions.

Remove your wordpress category names

The wordpress "Category" is useless and has some negative effects to your wordpress SEO, webmasters always want to remove it from your website address. The best method to remove the "category" name is to enter a dot from the "category base" under "permalinks" section, once you saved the configuratinos the "category" will be disappeared.

Install google xml sitemap plugins to auto update your wordpress sitemap

Sitemap will help search engine to crawl your website smoothly, the wordpress "google xml sitemap" plugin will auto create the xml sitemap and update it instantly once there's new update on your website.

Configure proper 404 error page

Always configure 404 error page for your website no matter if it's wordpress or other cms based. Incase you change themes or website migration, it's possible to create some 404 errors. Instead of creating all kinds of "page not found" errors, you can design a customized 404 error page to guide the search engine and website visitors properly.

Install wordpress all in one seo pack

This is a MUST plugin for all wordpress website, you can set keywords, meta tags, description etc easily for each pages/posts. you can also let the plugin to auto generate the configurations based on your post content. screenshot as below

Another plugin called "SEO Yoast" which is highly recommended by seo professionals. It's 100% compatible with all in one seo and migration tool is available. From my personal testing, there're more configurable options like instant SERP preview, SEO analysis of your current article etc. It's highly recommended if you like to control the optimization as more as possible, especially you're doing SEO job on wordpress site.

Install wordpress related posts plugins

Related posts plugin will add your referring posts to the end of your article, it will help search engine to crawl all your pages and guide your website visitors to read more if they're interested in your posts.

Add google analytics to your wordpress site

Google analytics will help your website traffic analyzation for future improvement. Just sign up an account from google and generate the analytics code from google webmaster tool.

Set up seo images on your website

Although this is not so important comparing to other seo tips, it's always good to pay attention to small factors and optimize your site as more as you can. For example you're writing something about cooking and need to add a picture for explanation, you can name the picture as "cooking tips" etc to attract the search engine.

Always update your website regularly with fresh content

Make sure you update your website with fresh contents regularly to introduce google to crawl your website, Your website will be recognized as healthy in search engine's eyes.

Interact with your website visitors by commenting

Add questions or voting to your articles and communicate with your visitors efficiently.

Of course, there're many other options to optimize a wordpress site, feel free to share your ideas

Many business are put online nowadays and the number of websites is increasing every minute. While you're preparing the website stuff and trying to promote the service/products, are you aware many websites are causing legal issues? Have you ever considered the law part when you start business online?

Common legal issues with Web Hosting

There're many factors on website could cause legal issues especially for ecommerce website. Generally, legal issues could be classified in following categories

Copyright issue – Copyright would be one of the most popular issues for ecommerce websites. There're many pirated products with unbelievable low price to attract customers. Everyone knows piracy is illegal in all countries but there're still lots of people doing so because of the huge profit. Such website domains are always changing over and over again in order to avoid punishment.

Website content – There're two factors for website content that cause legal issues. You might have used some copyrighted materials on your website or your website content is prohibited by your government law, the tipycal example is adult website. Adult website is prohibited by many countries government. The hosting with adult support will always have to introduce into lots of efforts to deal with ddos attack and high traffic issues. It's actually challenge to both website owner and service provider.

Domain abusement – In order to get high rank in short time, many webmasters like to register some domain name which is very similar to some popular ones. For example there's a famous site called apple.com and you register a new domain called apple.net, the apple.com could sue you and take down your website for brand protection purpose. For such case, if you're going to open business and build brand online, make sure to register all related domains so other people won't be able to disturb it.

How to avoid website legal issues?

As you see, it's really not so easy to put up a website just by what you think of. You have to follow your country and state's laws. The best way is to read over your service provider's TOS, it actuall includes all aspects of their services. Most people just ignored this important section and always submit complaint to support once problem occurs. So make sure to read the hoster's TOS before your sign up, it will reduce you a lot of time for webhost research. Especially when you're in need of some special hosting services like adult website hosting you have to check over and over again to make sure the hosting will be compatible with your contents.

Some serious legal issues may catch the FBI attention and result in terrible actions. A good experience can be found on this article. Just think you would like to operate a long term business, you should always consider such issues side by side and doing correctly.