How to optimize a wordpress blog for search engine

[Stella]

Hello,
Im a newbie blogger first of all, and hardly know much about it. I would like to know about how to create an SEO friendly WordPress Blog. Do I need to optimize few keywords?

Is there an instant method or technique to increase the rankings in the SERP's ?

[MattBarthorp]

Not sure whether you wish to optimise your site in terms of content or are you asking about the plugins to be installed. But since you are just starting up with it, my recommendation would be to install "all in one seo pack" and "google sitemap generator" first of all. These two plugins can surely help your content to get indexed faster. Then you must change the permalink structure to
/%postname%/, this will change the URL's to .html format which would be helpful for your website content to get crawled and indexed faster.

[Catherine]

Alongwith these plugins, I would suggest you to install Smush.it plugin which is used for optimizing the images on the blog and is very helpful as if the images are optimized, the chances of blog being indexed and optimized increases.

[Macdale]

You can do it by optimizing your actual blog post titles, using relevant meta descriptions and keywords, rewriting the url's with permalinks, by creating a sitemap.xml file that lists all of your links, adding images to your posts and with proper alt-text, by providing related links that increases the relevancy, using the attribute rel=”canonical” to avoid duplication and much more you can do to optimize your wordpress blog for search engines.

[sihost]

Install

Plugin - All in one seo (easily tweak/add keywords and meta per page)

PLugin - Google XML sitemaps (will automatically generate your sitemap file)

[phoenix65]

I would suggest you not to use too many plugins unless its necessary. There have been instances where users have added multiple plugins and the wordpress happened to crash often. Few plugins are reported to be badly coded, hence resulting in the crash. Additionally, it is important to keep a watch on the resources available with the your hosting package.

[sihost]

we are a professional web development company and have never experienced any problems with the plugins we recommended above. These have been used on clients websites with no problems, they work perfectly.

[MattBarthorp]

Thats right, the plugins suggested by 'sihost ' are being widely used by webmasters across the globe. But, at the same time one should not overlook the suggestion given by 'phoenix65' , as some newbie bloggers tend to install plugins that can be exploited. Hence it is strongly suggested to check for reviews about a certain plugin before you install them.