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From the SEO.com blog. We already do all of these things for our WordPress clients, but it’s a very good read. The first great point:

WordPress handles canonical URLs properly, the way Google and other search engines like it, and the way most people would like it! Rather than appending ugly file names at the end of URLs like .aspx, .html, or .php, WordPress makes these URLs ‘pretty’ and makes them very simple. This is both user and search engine-friendly.

There are several options for page urls in the Permalinks page of the back end Admin section. We usually use the “Post Name” option, but in some cases (like our own website) we use the Numeric Option. Whatever produces a good page URL is what you want, and there are several options for that.

Another thing mentioned that we have had recent experience with is Redirects. After we rebuilt the enormous Vapor Clean e-commerce website, we found that Google’s cache was still populated with the old page URLs, which hurt the site visits. We used the Simple 301 Redirects plugin mentioned in the article to redirect all of the old pages to the new ones.

The WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin mentioned is the one we use. It not only adds meta tags for SEO, it also generates a sitemap, which is very important to search engines. This plugin is great for meta data because search engines have character count limits to what they will look at. WordPress SEO by Yoast counts characters as you type them, giving you an accurate count, which will save a lot of time.

There’s lots more info in the article about ALT tags for images, speeding up your site and more. fortunately a good web design company takes care of these things. Your problem is finding out if the web design company you choose is a “good” company…