WordPress is one of the most popular blog software packages in use today yet despite all the work that has gone into writing the software, there are still some basic flaws in the package.

One of those flaws is the lack navigation breadcrumbs. These breadcrumbs have several benefits to your blog including user navigation, search engine navigation (which helps your SEO) and a general professional look.

Breadcrumbs are the navigation text you often see on some blogs. A good breadcrumb addition will show a complete navigation structure from your categories. For example, the top of the post could show Home > SEO > WordPress SEO indicating the post is in the category for SEO and subcategory WordPress SEO.

If the breadcrumb utility is well written, each component will be ‘clickable’, in other words, a link through to the previous section. There are several plugins available that place breadcrumbs on your single pages (don’t use them on your front page). One plugin that works quite well comes from Yoast and is well worth checking out. A search of WordPress’s plugins will uncover more.

A breadcrumb plugin makes life a little easier on your visitors and may even help keep your visitor a little longer as they click on category link to check other posts. This is one plugin which will not hurt your blog at all, it may actually help.

Your footer is the perfect place to put your internal links to pages that may be of value to your readers, but are not part of your blogs main direction.

These links could include privacy statements, disclosures, sitemaps and perhaps you’re about me pages. Why in the footer? Your blog has a reason for being. It may be a business blog that is promoting the products or services. It may be an information blog or could just be a personal blog detailing your day to day life. What you don’t want is to divert attention away from your blogs content.

With the exception of the ‘about me’ page, the other pages are really just polite policy pages. If people care, they will visit and read them. Generally speaking, these pages receive the lowest volumes of traffic, and that should be the way you want it. Your ‘about me’ page is a little different and may be a page that you want people to visit frequently. If so, place it higher on the page.

There are several ways to use the footer, the easiest being to use the theme editor. Rather than playing with PHP and trying to code the links from the database, use a direct link in HTML. This can be done by using the standard a href= code. To separate the links, just place the “|” symbol between each one. It looks cleaner and may just clean up some the clutter from your sidebars.

Using the footer to publish this information has been fairly standard for many years on web sites. As you tour around visiting blogs, check out where they publish the links. Many are now turning to the least used space on their blog, the footer.

Some people are quite fastidious about keywords and exactly what sort of percentages they have on their pages. Other people like to sneak keywords in wherever they can in an attempt to increase the number of keywords on a page.

Keywords are important. We suggest you include a keyword in the page title and that you spread your keywords throughout your posts. This works well for most websites and blogs. You can, however add one more keyword or set of keywords and that is through your WordPress login.

You will notice that this blog has “written by Brick Marketing” just below the post title. If you were an online business with several departments, let’s say furniture is your business and you have departments and keywords for ‘bedroom furnishings’, ‘dining room furnishings’, ‘living room furnishings’ and ‘outdoor furnishings’. Create logins for each department and you will have a post title followed by “written by bedroom furnishings” (if the post related to that department).

Of course you would need to ensure you logged in with the correct keyword every time. One additional benefit to using keywords like this as a login is that you can personalize your author. This works particularly well if you can get one person from each department to write their blog post. Your login and post author would like “written by Bob from dining room furnishings”.

This can look far more professional that just ‘written by admin’ that I often see. It is certainly more personal, it puts a name and department to a post whilst, if each department is authored separately, gives some pride and ownership to blog author.

There are times when you may need to insert a table into WordPress, either into a post or into a page. WordPress is not terribly effective when it comes to HTML and where one template will handle the code relatively easily, another template may not.

One of the strange things about WordPress is that after very carefully crafting a table you can go straight to publishing. Everything appears to look fine until you find a mistake and need to go back and edit. The moment you load that page into the editor the code goes crazy.

It seem WordPress can publish the code with little problem, the editor has a lot of problems in converting it back when you need to edit that page. There are several work arounds. The first, and most obvious, is to make sure everything is 100% right before publishing. Once published, leave it alone and don’t return to edit it again.

There are plugins that can help. One sets up a table section under the Manage menu. However it does not handle links within the table.

The third option, and in the longer the easiest, is to use MS Word. Create your table using Word and when you are ready to place into the page, use the ‘Paste from Word’ option that can be found under the ‘Advanced Toolbar’ button.

If you do need to re-edit that page and the code corrupts, make the alterations in word and simply delete everything from your WordPress page and re copy and paste. Works a dream every time with no coding and hassles.

WordPress is by far the most popular blog software in use at present. Out of the box, most WordPress themes are terrible when it comes to SEO. So bad in fact it could actually be costing you when it comes to search result placings.

Many of the SEO problems associated with WordPress can be fixed. If you have obtained an SEO friendly theme then some of these problems should have been taken care of. SEO problems include:

Sidebar code appears before the content. This is double edged sword. As most pages use the same sidebars, every page will appear the same to the search engines until they reach the content. This is not such a problem if everything is working smoothly. If, however, there is one code glitch in the sidebar, the search engines will not actually get to read the content. No content, no page indexing.

Archive and Category pages showing duplicate content. This can be taken care of with a plugin. The alternative is to simply set each of these pages to display excerpts only. You can also set them to not index the meta tags.

H2 tags used in sidebars. H2 tags generally signify content of importance. Using H1 or H2 tags in the sidebars may send conflicting messages to the search engines spiders. Good effective coding in the CSS code can avoid the overuse of H1 or H2 tags. This can be a problem when comments use H1 or H2 and you have a lot of comments.

Title tags and HTML poorly set up. WordPress, out of the box has no SEO structure when saving pages/posts. You can set the permalinks to create good SEO titles and URL’s using the page title first. There are plugins that can help to create page titles.

With a little care and a little patience you can create an extremely friendly SEO WordPress site.